Scheming and Dreaming: Building Local Decision-Making Power for People with Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses

I’ve been thinking a lot more about disability movements and policies lately, and about how we can use our resources and knowledge at Cities & People to support and advance those movements and policies. It’s not new territory for me, personally or professionally. But I’ve come across some new works that have redirected my thinking, and I’d like to share them with you.

Advancing Strategies, Stimulating AdvocacyLaurie Jones NeighborsAugust 17, 2022disability, capitalism, boards and commissions, public sector, intersectionality, racial justice, transformation, governance, program development, health equity, policymaking, root causes, systems change, social movements

Program Evaluation in the Appreciative Context

In every community I've worked in for capacity building, some kind of important community organizing (formal or informal) could be identified prior to my entrance. This work is foundational not only to the when we come to develop programs, but in terms of the information we need to conduct an authentic evaluation of what we think of as "our intervention." What's more, this work is likely to keep happening at some pace and to some scale, whether we are investing from the outside or not.

Advancing Strategies, Stimulating Advocacy, Strengthening Orgs, Promoting InnovationLaurie Jones NeighborsSeptember 22, 2021consulting, evaluation, program development, systems change, transformation, ways of knowing, evaluation theory

Generous Connections

And this brings us to here, to me, 54 years later, in the time of COVID and a dying planet, in the time of a bellowing monster of white supremacy who has taken a few arrows but isn't going down easy. In the time of festering patriarchy and unchecked capitalism, and surrounded on all sides by two dozen California wildfires, and to this attempt to lay it bare.

Advancing Strategies, Stimulating Advocacy, Strengthening Orgs, Promoting InnovationLaurie Jones NeighborsAugust 21, 2020adrienne maree brown, capitalism, consulting, mutual accountability, patriarchy, racial justice, social movements, transformation, white supremacy

1,100 Silver Brooches and a Tool for Thinking About Transformative Change

Admittedly, I've tried 1,100 ways of talking with people about transformative change through policymaking, with varied responses. I've been most successful with college students, but then again I have had them for as much as 16 weeks of lead up to the big ah-ha moment. More often, I have sixty minutes, and in this particular case I had forty-five. So, here's what I did in the whirlwind.

Advancing StrategiesLaurie Jones NeighborsJune 19, 2019colonialism, evaluation theory, governance, inside-outside strategy, patriarchy, reading, systems change, transformation, transformative justice, policymaking

What I'm Reading: Systems Change and Transformation

We can fly with the swallows and bees or we can stay lost in the plastic maze of human-made systems of oppression. But reading Emergent Strategy over and over has convinced me that the swallows and bees are coming back, and so I choose the murmuration. And I hope that others who read brown's book will also, even if it takes them some time to let their inner control freak go so they can get through it.

Strengthening Orgs, Advancing StrategiesLaurie Jones NeighborsJanuary 22, 2019systems change, transformative justice, transformation, reading, emergent strategy, adrienne maree brown, murmuration

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