The Community Learning Partnership is working with grassroots groups, trainers and educators to create entirely new educational pathways into community change careers in:

• youth and community organizing, and
• resident-driven efforts to strengthen local neighborhoods, schools, services, housing and employment by developing needed programs and pressing for greater social justice and essential policy reforms.

Community change work is immensely challenging, requiring highly skilled, knowledgeable and strategic staff and leaders. There is a crippling shortage of such people, especially in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color where the needs are greatest.

The Partnership's sole focus is on addressing the pipeline crisis as it affects these communities. We do so by bringing community leaders, organizers, trainers and academics together to create partnerships and new forms of practitioner education which draw strength from both the world of practice and the academic world.

In a growing number of cities, this is resulting in new Community College AA Degree and Certificate Programs in Community Change Studies as well as High School, Bachelors Degree and Midcareer Programs. We anticipate that it will also result in growing recognition of the value of these programs as well as the policy changes and increased funding which these programs need in order to expand and flourish.

These programs offer students great opportunities to develop the broad knowledge, practical and intellectual skills, values and vision they need to organize people, build power and influence, and bring about real change.

Furthermore, these educational pathways address the greatest crisis in the pipeline: they focus on recruiting and preparing people of color and people from low-income and working class neighborhoods for these careers because — being from those communities and having directly experienced poverty and exclusion — they are particularly well-equipped to lead and organize efforts to change these conditions.

Community Learning Partnership PowerPoint presentation (568 KB)

Community Learning Partnership PDF-based slide presentation (319 KB)