We design and facilitate cohort capacity-building programs, including tailored training and coaching aligned with the community members’ individual and collective needs and objectives. Our programs simultaneously support cohort members in their individual paths of growth and influence and strengthen their organizations and networks so they and their organizations will have increased power and influence. Our cohort programs can include application review, webinars and office hours, design, co-creation, individual and organizational plan development, in-person retreats, and more. Our programs result in increased grantee buy-in, local and national economy uplift, and increased leverage for grantees to diversify their grant portfolios.
“We engaged Cities & People in the winter of 2023 to support us in facilitating a yearlong planning process to provide a ‘sacred space’ to our community partners. The goals were to both help the teams process their experiences of working through COVID and to share their goals to ensure the families, children and providers in their respective neighborhoods had access to critical services and resources. It was to be an opportunity to review and redefine their visions for the next four years. Another desired outcome was to our agency reflect upon our role and impact as a partner, convener, collaborator and funder.
What we learned about our partners and ourselves isn’t new or revolutionary. It was, however, confirmation that inviting and truly listening to community voices to inform our processes and plans is essential in developing and implementing responsive, culturally concordant resources, and strong and sustained partnerships.
I appreciate the care in which Cities & People curated a process to build upon the existing work, while allowing space to discover and share what else was needed to do the work about which we all care so deeply. While it was challenging and imperfect (as most organic and intentional processes are!), the final products were thoughtful and authentic. The Cities & People team was adept in holding both the needs of our community partners and that of the agency. We continue to be a work in progress but are much better for having spent this time together.”
Since the project’s launch in early 2024, Cities & People has project managed Liberty Hill Foundation’s Environmental Leadership Institute (ELI), facilitating the growth of a network of fellows of diverse backgrounds from across California. We maintain a nurturing collective space for the ELI fellows to be curious and to tackle serious environmental justice work, while also dreaming of and building a better future. In addition to direct work with the cohort, we lead the design and facilitation of convening agendas, which take place twice a year, and we create the program’s evaluation tools to assess the project’s effectiveness in achieving its outcomes.
Cities & People partnered with First 5 Alameda County from Feb. 2023-Feb. 2024 to guide their four Neighborhoods Ready for School Initiative grantees through a comprehensive four-year, cohort-based work planning process for their place-based kindergarten readiness objectives. We supported the four grantees in prioritizing the needs of home childcare workers, who are primarily women of color, as a strategy to support the local economy, provide more childcare to communities in high need of childcare slots, to uplift BIPOC people through entrepreneurship and wealth-building, and to increase kindergarten readiness of children in Alameda County, an important milestone to achieve for long-term academic success. Here you will find links to each grantee’s work plan, released in January 2024. These work plans are being used as a tool to leverage more funding for each organization’s place-based vision for their neighborhoods with both governmental and philanthropic funders. They were all presented to the First 5 Alameda County Commission in February 2024.
From 2021-2023, College Futures Foundation contracted us to advise them and their statewide network grantee cohort with a developmental evaluation. The foundation sought to increase engagement, connection, and purpose among the grantees and to coach the two facilitating organizations on their facilitation, project management, and roles in the cohort. Our work resulted in the network of grantees reporting a tremendous increase in buy-in for the network. The outcomes included grantees co-designing a new governing and participation structure for the network, co-creating a new purpose for their work together, and sharing a newfound excitement and engagement level with the foundation as a partner. In May 2024, we completed a second, large-scale impact and strategic learning evaluation project with College Futures Foundation to assess the impact of their grantmaking strategy on their policy and advocacy grantees, offering them feedback throughout the project timeline. This project culminated in a published article on their grantmaking strategy, a compendium of bright spots of collaboration among their grantees, and an internal impact evaluation and recommendations report for the foundation.
