Platforming Representative Leadership

A critical step in equitable community engagement is leadership development.

Nothing redistributes power like a platform that provide residents the space to be the primary leaders and decision makers of the outcomes they want to see.

It is about more than understanding lived experience as a type of deep knowledge. It is about deconstructing the myth that, just because “the closer one is to the problem, the closer one is to the solution” doesn’t mean they have the resources, support, and sovereignty to do so.

We must also ask ourselves: What if that individual doesn’t know the problem? In other words, what if the problem has become a norm that puts blinders on that individual?

Without asking ourselves these questions, it becomes easy to jump back into business as usual.

Building representative leadership is a foundational element in committing to sustained community engagement. How we develop trusting relationships and participation that endures can make or break a policy or program. So, we can no longer afford to just simply “bring people to the table.”

We have to design platforms that give communities the space and resources they need to create their own tables.

Often times, organizations have a single community organizer or coordinator working on multiple projects that require meaningful community engagement. This is not only a recipe for becoming spread too thin and burning out, but also for procrastinating the search for a deep understanding of a community’s assets, aspirations, and priorities.

To ensure sustained community engagement beyond the termination of a project or program, three main strategies are required: base-building, platforming community liaisons, and creating career pathways.

Base-building is the ability to understand the geographic, demographic, and cultural make-up of the communities we’re working with so we can accurately uplift their assets and address their needs. More so, it ensures a long and intentional onboarding ramp; one that allows room to develop trusting and genuine relationships with residents and other valuable partners.

This also enables us time to seek out resident leaders best fit to organize around the issue(s) we’re trying to address.

Community liaisons are embedded community leaders from a diverse background, be it ethnic or based on identity. They bring deep expertise about their communities' assets and concerns, and the trusting relationships needed to build bridges between City government or organizations and community interests.

Some of the best leaders are the ones that are not at every town hall or neighborhood meeting.

In fact, they’re often the residents that think they don’t have a place in the process or decision-making. Yet, they are usually the ones most impacted by the inequities at hand. Therefore, it’s not enough to simply reach out to these individuals with a request to extract information about their lives; we have to give them the economic means to participate and the autonomy to direct what needs to be done to improve their livelihoods.

There is also the importance of developing pathways for a resident’s career to grow. In this sense, creating career pathways aims at accomplishing a few main things:

1) Provide sustainable economic security for the individual.

2) Provide an opportunity to build tangible and translatable skills from an individual’s lived experiences.

3) Provide that individual a career path by making sure there’s already a job opportunity lined up for them before they begin a project, and that that job will allow them to continue to maintain and implement the work you all started.

And you will find that equipping community liaisons to lead and implement place-based solutions is one of the most upstream, highest impact actions an organization or city can take.

That is the work that LivZero is committed to.

And we can help you commit to it, too.