Several weeks ago, I spent a week in New Orleans attending the Collective Impact Forum, organized by FSG, and the Opportunity Youth Incentive Fund Convening, hosted by the Aspen Institute’s Forum for Community Solutions and Jobs for the Future. Our debates were so spirited that they prevented the several hundred attendees from defecting to the streets of New Orleans in search of food, music, and merriment. Three themes dominated our conversations. While these themes may sound like “old gumbo warmed over,” my sense from the convening is that these topics have taken on some important new dimensions – with significant implications for creating social change.
Investing in Place: Place-based investing has occupied our social change toolbox for a long time. In New Orleans, we focused on the importance of investing in the capacity of place. Following Hurricane Katrina, organizations poured in to aid the city, and left just as rapidly, leaving local organizations and agencies to manage resources and build long-term capacity for change. Consider how often we swoop into communities with our resources, agendas, and very best intentions to “help,” paying little attention to local assets and needs. In our haste, we rarely invest in the community and its local organizations, perhaps unintentionally forgetting to actually invest in the place itself. Angela Glover Blackwell makes this point eloquently, and it is the first time in many years that I have heard capacity building summoned so directly, and in the context of equity and community empowerment.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Many conversations about diversity tend to focus on demographic shifts, and are framed by the context that the U.S. has become a majority minority country. In New Orleans, we emphasized equity and inclusion, and grappled with questions such as: How are we ensuring that our change strategies meet all individuals where they are? What are we doing to elevate individuals’ unique assets and address their personal needs, as a way to help them achieve success as citizens, professionals, and parents? How are we engaging residents as co-developers of the programs they will have to implement and own, if these initiatives are to become sustained? Aligned with investing in place, and building the capacity of local organizations, we must revisit our community engagement approaches to ensure that both the issues and the solutions are locally identified and owned.
System Leadership: Addressing social issues – whether increasing economic stability, building strong education to career pipelines, creating a culture of health, or revitalizing neighborhoods – requires more than single programs or discrete interventions. It requires complex social solutions, in which a variety of cross-sector partners coalesce to shift entire systems – changing incentives, improving accountability, and refining policies, practices, and often missions. What types of leaders can drive this collaborative, systemic change? How can we support local leaders and community champions to build these necessary skills? Chances are, the skills and knowledge to exceptionally lead an agency, community-based organization, or higher education institution may differ from the acumen necessary to help partners support a shared agenda. What do we know about the differences between leaders of organizations, and leaders of systems change efforts? And what more can we learn to identify and position the right people to lead equitable and inclusive collaborative efforts?
As evaluators and consultants, we at some point will board our airplanes or trains for home. But members of the community are left with the hard work of implementing change. It is unjust for us to think that our agendas should take precedence over local ones. The added challenge comes with engaging community leaders’ perspectives authentically, inclusively, and respectfully – and doing so within the constraints of our grant timelines, budgets, and need to show impact and outcomes.
Meg Long is president of Equal Measure.