Women We Admire’s Post

At Leadership Howard County, in our quest to nurture effective community leadership, we recognize the significance of trust at scale. As highlighted in this thought-provoking article, metrics alone cannot cultivate trust. Instead, fostering a deeper understanding of community dynamics and complex systems through active participation at the local level is key. We aim to empower participants to engage meaningfully with their communities, fostering a sense of efficacy and trust that transcends numbers. A lot to chew on in this article: "There's something about local community engagement that really matters for the health of a democracy, and something is really getting lost there. This leads me to the question that I'm trying to figure out now: “When we institutionalize all these abstract and quantified forms of knowing and engaging in civil society, does that cause our civic or democratic muscles to atrophy?” The follow up question is: “How? And how do we get back from that?”" Can we reshape the landscape of leadership by prioritizing local involvement and empowering individuals to influence their communities positively? I surely hope so: "Prioritizing more hands-on, engaged forms of participation and accountability are essential for a vibrant civic life" #LeadershipDevelopment #TrustBuilding #CommunityEngagement #LocalInvolvement #LeadershipHowardCounty https://lnkd.in/e2rhixum

What makes grassroots organizations unique to the social impact sector? Their ability to connect to community in ways that not only centers their experience but represents their interest in tackling large scale issues. Check out this article I wrote about the impact and community engagement efficacy, in prioritizing the leadership of grassroots organizations. Read the article here: https://lnkd.in/gjrDT-v3 To learn more about how to support grassroots organizations impacting 24 Chicago neighborhoods on the west and south sides, please connect with me! #Grassroots #ChicagoFund #Equity #Wherephilanthropyandcommunitymeets

There is a need for greater national investment into rural regions, where community groups often operate with limited resources. The Trust for Civic Life exists to address that by investing $50 million over the next five years in a new wave of people, places, and programs that increase trust, agency, and belonging in American communities. There is no single root cause for declining civic engagement, which is why a one-size-fits-all approach does not work and we need community-driven strategies. Today they are unveiling $8M in initial grants supporting Americans coming together to solve problems and take action to create the future they want to see. We are excited to be Learning Members, engaging with grantees to identify successful civic programs that can be replicated in other communities. We invite you to join us through funding or nominating a locally-led organization.

Appreciative Community Building is essential to uncovering each neighborhood’s strengths, and laying the foundation for working with residents to develop a plan to advance their area. It starts with individual and focus-group interviews and community meetings with a wide range of people in a neighborhood: long-term residents, new arrivals, elected officials, religious leaders, business owners, and school educators. This research ascertains what issues a neighborhood prioritizes and what relationship networks, skills, and leaders already exist. BakerRipley uses this approach to improve the quality of life in and around #Houston. It publishes a “Community Voices Report” with the findings and presents them in a public meeting. This effort helps reframe the way people inside and outside the #neighborhood perceive it, raising expectations and changing norms in the process. It then asks leading members of the neighborhood to come together to forge a common vision and create action teams that, with the help of staff, plan how that vision can be fulfilled. BakerRipley trains the leaders who emerge from this process and gives them important roles, such as providing input into projects as they are planned and implemented. It emphasizes #leadership development to bolster the neighborhood’s capacity to work together internally and to reach out to other parts of the city to advance its goals. In East Aldine, for example, BakerRipley discovered a cohesive neighborhood with a clear identity, but one that had been marginalized. Residents were self-reliant and cooperative—neighbors helped each other, businesses lent to each other, volunteers were plentiful, and those who prospered invested in the area and supported communal activities. Residents possessed a lot of resourcefulness and entrepreneurism and exhibited pride in the products and services that local businesses created. These findings led BakerRipley to help neighborhood businesses with training and connections to additional resources. It helped establish a fabrication laboratory to enable #entrepreneurs to use better tools, learn from each other, and connect with professionals from elsewhere in the region. A new development will house economic opportunity expansion programs, including adult education, small-business development, STEM classes for youth, and workforce training. Angela Blanchard, who grew the organization multifold over 20 years as its leader, writes,"You can’t build on broken. In the past, many communities were demoralized by formulas that forced them to show up on the bread lines of government assistance, proving first that they were sufficiently broken to require help. It did not work. It will not work. We have to capture instead the deep longing of people to better themselves, to nurture their children, to learn and to contribute—that is what fuels a sustainable approach to #community development." Placemaking Education Shawn Duncan Stanford Social Innovation Review

Young people are changing the landscape of community service according to a new report by the Center for Expanding Leadership & Opportunity (CELO) and The Allstate Foundation. Results showed that Gen Z is moving beyond traditional volunteerism and is prioritizing inclusivity, awareness, and social justice. With 70% of respondents engaging in service monthly, young people are committed to redefining what it means to serve their communities. The results also emphasize the importance of centering youth voices in creating programs, highlighting the power of youth-led initiatives in creating lasting impacts. Learn more in this article by Kyoko Uchida https://bit.ly/3UvDx0a #RaisingOurCity #CommunityService #Report

“Evaluation also has the effect of forcing organizations to play by a new set of rules. Evaluation is a form of regulation. For example, by holding organizations to the overhead metric, it has forced organizations to change how they allocate funds. It forces them to not be able to invest in their staff or invest in developing their programs. Simply holding organizations to various criteria forces them to play along with what those criteria are demanding of them, and that has pernicious organizational effects. Taking that further, when you subject organizations to a narrower set of evaluative criteria, all the stuff that's not on the list gets deemphasized. It's similar to the problem of teaching to the test in school. If it's not on the test, you just don't teach it. And what are the things that are hard to measure? Civic engagement, community development, relationships. Because those things are pretty hard to measure, they often get deemphasized. These evaluative demands treat civic organizations as vendors of social services or as production functions, where you're trying to maximize the amount of throughput or impact they have on some stated mission.” How our emphasis on measurement shapes civil society and weakens social trust

IT CONCERNS YOU! Yes! The structures, the institutions and the processes through which DECISIONS THAT CONCERNS YOU ARE MADE, RESOURCES ARE MANAGED, and SERVICES needed at your local or community area are DELIVERED - Local Governance. It involves YOUR PARTICIPATION and that of a range of actors, including ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES, government agencies, and community leaders who COLLABORATE to address local priorities and challenges. The main reason why we need the Local Government Chairman, the Councillors, and other elected representatives is for the proper execution of OUR COLLECTIVE DECISIONS, management of the COMMUNITY'S RESOURCES and for efficient delivery of the SERVICES THAT ARE NEEDED. Local Governance is not about government only. It is about the decisions of the people at the local level, about their wishes and aspirations, it's about the community, not about the leaders! When you know that you have a STAKE in your locality, in your local government, and you begin to take your stand, you begin to ask questions, you begin to share your opinion, you begin to contribute your knowledge and skills, it isthen you are beginning to a part of the decision making process. But if you keep quiet, you just go about your own daily living, you put everything in the care of your representatives, they won't know what you don't communicate, they won't provide what you don't ask for. This brings me to 'TAKING OWNERSHIP'. Taking ownership is a key principle of the Healthy Community Model of community development. The healthy community model involves each community deciding for itself,what kind of community they want in the present and in the future, and collectively developing strategies and processes that will take them in that direction. As a resident of a Local Government Area, your LGA will thrive when citizens participate and come together to OWN THEIR PROBLEMS. When you accept it is your problem, you will work together, develop a solution, look inwards to develop your ASSETS (Individual and Community), then notify your LG representatives who will contribute their leadership skills in order to effectively harness the community resources and ultimately get a positive result. What are the benefits of Individual Participation? 🫂Involvement promotes inclusiveness, 🎖️It brings about efficiency, 📝It leads to transparency and will give you the courage to demand accountability from your representatives, and many more. This and more is LOCAL GOVERNANCE and again, it concerns you. Grassroots Catalysts is committed to bridging the gap between the theory and practice of effective local governance through Sustainable Civic Education such as this, and Community Empowerment and Engagements in subsequent times. I trust that you got value today. Kindly follow my page and turn on notifications for more contents as we delve into the subject of Sustainable Local Governance tomorrow. I am Debukola D'Catalyst, your Sustainable Local Governance Educator.

Blessed to be in the movement of solidarity economy in Boston, East Cleveland, and NYC. This article is specific to our work in Boston but higlights how collective work and responsibility as well as community wealth building efforts are a cause and not a brand. Leaning into our collective experiences and competencies has birthed something special that honors legacy residents, our leaders past and present while thoughtfully engaging in system change work that aims to build more aligned institutions that are for us by us. "Black Bostonian communities citywide have more than just something to say for themselves: their economies are building institutions that prioritize asset-based community development and are creating the foundations for a local solidarity economy. In so doing, they draw on histories and energies that have grown and percolated from past and present efforts toward sustainable, people-based planning." thanks Nia K. Evans of Boston Ujima Project for your support and leadership and @NPQ for your much needed platform to share transformative efforts. #Boston #systemchange #narrativechange #grassroots #solidarity #transformative https://lnkd.in/gYeaK8yP

Learn the the foundational approaches of building relationships; identifying problems and stakeholders; analyzing root causes including racial, class and other systemic injustice; and nurturing community leadership and solidarity. We will explore these methods through small and large group discussion, interactive exercises, and case studies. This training is intended for staff members and community leaders who have little to no experience in community engagement and organizing.

“If we cannot have inquiry without attributing ill will to the person asking the question or the person making a comment that may be ill-informed, it is hard to have a public square” If you are unfamiliar with Stand Together, I highly recommend checking out their work. - Stand Together is a philanthropic community helping the boldest changemakers tackle the root causes of some of the biggest social problems. Their content is exceptional and their video shorts are fantastic. Here are a couple of my favourite videos: * Irshad Manji | Overcome Division in 8 minutes - https://lnkd.in/gSTDj9U2 * Eboo Patel | The role of faith in America today in 5 minutes - https://lnkd.in/gHJZPYTg Excerpts from the article and video I have shared below on pluralism: 📌 - “… [when] the people who are asking questions leave the public square because the risk of engaging is too high... we leave the public square to the toxifiers, because the toxifiers want to own the square. If they can own the square and push us out, then they decide our future. And I think that’s happening in our society.” 🎯 - Pluralism defined; “[A]t the most basic level, [pluralism is] a set of principles and practices that enable diverse people to live well together… We can recognize a core set of principles, principles like dignity, the notion that every person — no matter who they are, where they come from, what they look like, what their parents did — has inherent dignity. And that dignity requires respect. When we organize societies around principles like that, we get a pluralistic society.” 💡- Pluralism has not always been present in human society. “[W]e do tend to take that idea for granted, that diverse people can live well together,” noted Hooks. For most of human history, the way that societies dealt with those who were different from them or who they disagreed with was to conquer them or to be conquered by them.” #pluralism #standtogether #sgp23 #diversityandinclusion #viewpointdiversity https://lnkd.in/gajUr8Fq