THE NEXT GENERATION OF ORGANIZERS FOR JUSTICE
The Need:
There is broad recognition among people who work on issues of poverty, race and community-building that we face a massive talent shortage. Our communities have great difficulty finding staff and leaders with the full range of knowledge, skills and experience which are needed to tackle the immense challenges facing low-income neighborhoods.
The shortage of grassroots organizers and executive directors is particularly crippling for community groups. It also frustrates public and nonprofit agencies and philanthropy which want to apply what they have learned from experience -- they cannot successfully address the most serious issues our cities and rural communities face without widespread community involvement and strong local leaders and organizations.
Our Response:
The Community Learning Partnership was created in 2002 to focus solely on this crisis. It operates as a special project of Community Catalyst, a national nonprofit dedicated to helping people bring about policy changes through research, organizing, and advocacy.
The Learning Partnership concentrates most heavily on creating new educational pathways into youth and community organizing. These pathways are built around new Community College and University Degree programs in Community Change Studies. These new Degree and Certificate Programs are designed by local Partnerships for the specific purpose of developing the next generation of highly skilled, knowledgeable and strategic community organizers and change agents to staff grassroots, nonprofit and other organizations which are committed to involving poor people in tackling the central issues of poverty, race, power and opportunity.
These programs are designed to recruit and support young people of color and others who have directly experienced poverty and lack of opportunity as they represent a largely untapped pool of talent.
The Partnership is currently working with local community leaders and academic institutions in five cities while exploring expansion to five more. In Hartford, this initiative has resulted in the nation’s first two-year AA degree in Community Change Studies. Other new educational programs will start this fall in Los Angeles and New York, and additional programs are in the planning stage in Detroit and Baltimore.
Our Strategy:
There are four key components for our strategy for advancing Community Change Education so that it becomes widely available for potential change agents throughout the country:
- Developing pilot Community Change Studies programs at the community college, college and midcareer levels, growing over time so that students
eventually have access to such programs in all regions of the country
- Developing curricula and teaching materials to assist organizers, trainers and educators to establish new programs and enrich existing ones
- Developing a national network to forge close links, peer learning, and collaboration among people and institutions that share our concern about solving the pipeline crisis, including those who have pioneered the first Community Change Studies programs and others who want to create additional ones
- Changing public policies to expand support for Community Change Education, including seed and longer term funding for programs as well as scholarships, stipends and other support for young people and others who enroll in these programs
The New Partnerships and Degree Programs:
The Partnership’s work in its first five cities has resulted in a series of very productive partnerships with unusual levels of real parity, mutual respect and collaboration between academics and practitioners. Together they are launching intensive educational programs with the breadth, range and sustainability which only institutions of higher education can provide, but which engage practitioners as full partners in designing the curriculum and helping students learn. In some cases these programs have been initiated by nonprofits, in others by academics, and in others by CLP. Each is tailored to fit the local context and the particular challenges of organizing and revitalizing low-income communities, enlisting youth and community leaders fully in that effort.
On the community side, the partners range from citywide coalitions of grassroots groups, to an organization focused on training new organizers, to a collaboration among several leading grassroots groups in the city.
On the institutional side, three sites involve Community Colleges, a third starts with an Historically Black College, the fourth partners with a State College which focuses on Adult Education, and the fifth starts with a State University but may involve several institutions.
It is likely that all will eventually involve Community Colleges among their partners because those colleges have unique access to students of color and people from low and moderate income neighborhoods. Recruiting from those backgrounds, the programs offer a "double social benefit": they prepare low-income and working class students for promising careers, and their graduates in turn develop the commitment, skills and knowledge needed to organize and improve disadvantaged communities.
The programs offer students a combination of classes and field work which enable them to develop the skills, knowledge, values, vision and experience they need. This promises to boost the quality and sophistication of the next generation of organizers as well as people now in key positions -- a great step forward in increasing the scale, scope, and impact of organizing efforts.
CLP plans to expand the number and scope of these programs so they become an increasingly significant new sources of the talent which is so sorely needed by community groups as well as the private and public agencies which also depend upon community involvement for success.
The Learning Partnership plays a variety of roles – as an initial catalyst for action in different cities, as a source of technical assistance and seed money for emerging local partnersis helping local Partners as they Increasingly we will also work on the other key element in the pipeline crisis – the hemorrhaging of talent which hits grassroots groups when organizers and directors move on to other careers. We plan to work with partners to create Midcareer Programs which encourage people with 3, 5, 10 or more years of experience to continue their careers in community change by giving them opportunities to get together with peers, to reflect, learn, and gain new ideas and perspectives, to rekindle their vision and sense of vocation, and to increase their effectiveness, impact and sense of accomplishment.
CLP operates with a central staff of four, an expert consultant team, and strong local Partners. The Partnership’s staff-members are well-prepared for this work: they are nationally known for their experience with every aspect of community change work, from youth and community organizing to neighborhood development and service delivery, from school reform to job creation. They also have extensive experience in training, education, staff development and leadership development in low-income communities as well as strong track records for influencing public policies.
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