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With time passed after this election, I am ready to stand up, wipe the tears, dust the dirt off my knees and build again. With newly elected officials both nationally and locally, many nonprofit executive directors like me are trying to wrap our brains around where we are headed and wondering if we may need a new strategy to support our theories of change.
Organizations like the one I lead aim to change the social and political rules by ensuring that those most impacted by community challenges are leading the solutions. Research strongly supports the idea that people most directly affected by a policy should be actively involved in developing solutions. Yet those most impacted by oppressive policies often have urgent and compelling needs in front of them, and I fear these needs will grow exponentially in the coming months and years.
I spent my first years in the nonprofit world acting as the community organizer. In fact, I even went to “organizing school,” and yes, that’s a thing. It profoundly impacted me.
As a community organizer my job was to meet parents where they were, share our current policy initiatives and invite them to a meeting. The problem was, most caregivers had immediate concerns limiting their ability to visualize an impact on a long-term policy.
How was I to get parents to think about teacher turnover in a high-poverty school when they were frustrated because their child’s bus hadn’t shown up in three days? How could I build access to a school and educators if they were too exhausted to attend a virtual meeting after a long teaching day? The answer showed itself to me in the form of an ask from a principal.
“Our staff lounge is so bleak. I wish I had a space where my teachers and support staff could really rest during their breaks.”