Transforming an organization from “professional-led” advocacy to community-led advocacy and organizing is not easy or quick work. Since its inception, the Fair Budget Coalition (FBC) has experimented with various models for grounding their budget advocacy in the lived experience of impacted community members. Early on, FBC’s theory was that its member organizations (mostly service provision groups) would engage their clients as leaders in the coalition. Over time, however, FBC realized that most of its organizational members are not structured to hold the needed base building and community engagement to support this model. As a result, professional staff have historically interpreted client experience, analyzed the policy landscape, and developed both FBC’s budget platform and the strategy for winning it. Over the last several years, Movement Matters has partnered with FBC to shift their infrastructure and practice to change this approach. The coalition has incorporated a racial and economic justice lens to their budget platform development. They have begun moving beyond reactive annual budget fights and started focusing on longer term solutions that change the outcomes of the budget and the actual budget process itself. They have built out their staff capacity to not only engage their organizational members, but to work outside of these organizations to build their own constituency of impacted community members. For the last year, Movement Matters has helped FBC create a more focused curriculum and the initial implementation of a Constituent Leadership Program (CLP). The curriculum moves beyond some of the pitfalls of previous leadership development programs, avoiding the dynamics of anointing a group of impacted individuals as tokenistic representatives, but leaving them unable to actually build the power necessary to have their voices heard. Instead, we are grounding the CLP in organizing theory and practice, helping Fair Budget develop a group of leaders who have the skills and experience to actually engage their communities. To use their role as constituent leaders to be more than the mouthpiece for the organization, and instead be a conduit for connecting FBC to impacted communities as leaders in both the development of budget demands and a strategy for building power. We are seeing CLP members respond strongly to these components, naming dynamics in the advocacy process that have felt lacking to them and identifying ways to more deeply engage their community in change efforts. They have explored community-based research as a tool for examining the root causes and interconnectedness of community issues and to build a base of community members committed to building power for their solutions. They are visiting local communities to understand how issues play out across neighborhoods segregated by race and income. They are connecting themselves and others with FBC’s existing infrastructure for shaping its budget platform and engaging with decision-makers. Simultaneously, we are helping FBC staff and existing leadership understand and envision how their work needs to shift if they are, in fact, going to fully integrate this process of constituency building. Through this lens, we are reexamining existing FBC infrastructure for developing a budget platform, for making decisions about campaign strategy, and for allocating organizational resources. The willingness of Fair Budget’s organizational leadership to envision and work towards this transformation is creating dynamic new developments in their work. As always, transformation requires constant attention, adjustment, and sustainment. Even as we implement the CLP curriculum, we are planning for an improved version, one that ties workshop topics to active bodies of work within FBC’s systems. We want to make sure that “a-ha” moments don’t get lost in the shuffle, but are immediately connected to new ways of doing things within the coalition. As we do this work with the community, we are working with staff and leadership to understand the exciting new possibilities available to the Coalition with this type of principled constituent membership. Connect with us for more information on our Technical Assistance and Action Coalitions work. Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally and with national partners. Comments are closed.
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