Cities & People Advisors (C&P) is finalizing its 4-year work planning process with First 5 Alameda County’s Neighborhoods Ready For School (NRFS) Grantees; creating a cohort-based learning community in which we guided and supported the four grantees in creating four year work plans for their work to uplift families with children ages 0-5. We also had the honor of co-creating a data profile with each grantee to showcase their impact on and with families in their respective neighborhoods. Here, C&P Advisor Helen Chin (they/she), shares lessons learned and thoughts as we move forward to support another funder supported cohort, the Environmental Leadership Institute Fellows, a program of the Liberty Hill Foundation.

Stimulating AdvocacyMaya PaleyApril 15, 2024

Scheming and Dreaming: Building Local Decision-Making Power for People with Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses

I’ve been thinking a lot more about disability movements and policies lately, and about how we can use our resources and knowledge at Cities & People to support and advance those movements and policies. It’s not new territory for me, personally or professionally. But I’ve come across some new works that have redirected my thinking, and I’d like to share them with you.

Program Evaluation in the Appreciative Context

In every community I've worked in for capacity building, some kind of important community organizing (formal or informal) could be identified prior to my entrance. This work is foundational not only to the when we come to develop programs, but in terms of the information we need to conduct an authentic evaluation of what we think of as "our intervention." What's more, this work is likely to keep happening at some pace and to some scale, whether we are investing from the outside or not.

Generous Connections

And this brings us to here, to me, 54 years later, in the time of COVID and a dying planet, in the time of a bellowing monster of white supremacy who has taken a few arrows but isn't going down easy. In the time of festering patriarchy and unchecked capitalism, and surrounded on all sides by two dozen California wildfires, and to this attempt to lay it bare.

Nonprofit Program Design and Individual, Organizational, and Ecological Equity

By designing programs that required tens and perhaps even hundreds of people to fly, I was racking up metric tons without even flying the miles myself. I was designing learning communities, for instance, that were dispersing 185 metric tons or more of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere of our vulnerable planet! I want to take my work to scale, but not like this.

Take Up Space for Race and Class

Blogging from the American Evaluation Association's Evaluation 2017 conference in Washington, DC.

Protecting Our Dreamers

Our president has strongly insinuated that he is about to act on DACA in some way. Trump's recent pardoning of Joe Arpaio could be a foreboding sign of how he will act on DACA. Now is time for us to protect our friends and community members who are most at risk.

Stimulating AdvocacyLaurie Jones NeighborsAugust 31, 2017DACA, governance, dreamers, democracy, inequality, social issues

Failed Relationships, Sweat-Soaked Spreadsheets, and Uncomfortable Patronage Promises: A Look at the Public Office Pathway

I remember being asked to attend a small meeting years ago at a radical Bay Area grassroots organization. There were five other folks at the table, and I was surprised (and delighted) to see that one of them was a member of the Board of Supervisors. Later, I mentioned to the meeting organizer that I was impressed her org could just call up this big-city supervisor and get him to attend attend. She laughed and told me I had it all wrong – the supervisor had actually called the meeting; she'd just taken care of the logistics.

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