Join Cities and People on November 28, 2023 at 11:00am for a deep dive into our new report produced with SoCal CAN: Represent All, an investigation of the diversity of student government at California's postsecondary institutions.
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If all my data were laid out on the floor around me in some fashion, I could never escape its breadth, not even peripherally while honing in on some specific code or case. But when it is tightly nested away from me in folders, I am more likely to pay attention to what is on top, so I have to make sure I'm digging into the backs of those drawers regularly if I'm going to keep my data at the front of my brain.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In some situations, for some people, typical versions of community agreements are more than merely bogus (or even benign): they can be a tool of oppression and a means by which to protect abusers.
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We can fly with the swallows and bees or we can stay lost in the plastic maze of human-made systems of oppression. But reading Emergent Strategy over and over has convinced me that the swallows and bees are coming back, and so I choose the murmuration. And I hope that others who read brown's book will also, even if it takes them some time to let their inner control freak go so they can get through it.
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Like all good pilots, we'd learned and corrected course as we went along, and while those course-corrections were documented, recommendations for what to do with specific objections were absent. WWMQPD? He'd roll up his sleeves and analyze each objective in turn, deriving useful recommendations as he went along. That made sense. I figured I'd just throw the nine objectives in to a table and write a few sentences about each one. No big deal, right?
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I know that the folks I'm talking with in this session will generally be more amenable to charging for a fundraising event or even engaging in fee-for-service with some of their training materials than this one simple thing, which just happens to be the thing that we talk about all the time when we talk about economic inequality: Wealthy people have the money. We need it. How do we get it?
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On the night of the panel, we had a good turnout, with the crowd including resident-advocates, nonprofit professionals, and several grassroots leaders from our own Commissions Training Program cohort. The panel discussion was going well and picking up steam when an older African American man in the back raised his hand and was given the microphone. "I have a question," he started. "Why are there no men on this panel?"
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I raised an eyebrow and commented off-handedly to a friend that I hoped that the new organization was making sure that long-time advocacy groups were at the planning table, since they were the ones who most understood not just the local terrain but also the root causes. My friend shot back with a surprising level passion, assuring me that the process would be authentic, that root causes would be central to all strategy, and that the money would be well spent.
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