by Cheryl Lohrmann, Leaven Board Co-Chair
This past May, I attended the weeklong Community Organizing training with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) on behalf of Leaven with Jane Keating in Washington state. This was my second 5-day community organizing training in ten years. I left both of these training sessions with a renewed sense of awareness around my power, and with the question, “What have I been waiting for in being the change I wish to see in the world? Well, no more!” I felt levity after the first, a sense of a shift in paradigm in that I was going about change-making through guesswork and individualism rather than through relationships.
The recent experience this past Spring was all of the above, but more refined and more dimensional, and with one key learning that I don’t think I ever truly grasped: Broad-based organizing!
Broad-based organizing is a structure for making the work of community organizing more directly responsible to and representative of its member institutions and members. This is key and inspiring, because it is bigger than me and bigger than any one organization.
I came away from the IAF organizing training with this takeaway: Leaven needs to refocus its DNA on broad-based organizing so that there is a wider base for whom we can help to educate around it. We have been strong on teaching the organizing cycle/spiral, and we have gone deep with these practices inside our community. Now it is time to go wide so that we begin to see and value the interconnectedness of all issues and problems.
Since Leaven wants to reconnect to its organizing roots as part of our strategic plan, we can partner with other organizations through our local IAF affiliate, the Metropolitan Alliance for Common Good (MACG) for training, listening, and collaboration. Leaven is also offering our own community organizing training to Leaven members and the wider public. And of course, our relationship with other communities engaged in Sacred Organizing remain strong through our work in the Leaven Community Land and Housing Coalition.
Leaven could also innovate on ways to provide a weekly rhythm for the broad based community to engage in skill building, art making, artist nurturing, cooking and meal-sharing, all surrounded by kid centered activities. We can be building the community resilience hub through our various programs, building engagement through various channels, to support Alliance Assemblies once an issue is cut and the powers that be are aligned for a win. In this way, Leaven and others can continue our work. Leaven’s work of normalizing rest, shared meals, shared childcare and eldercare, to name a few, can go wider alongside our commitment to broaden our own organizing base, and to the people of the other MACG institutions and Leaven partner organizations as needed.
Moving forward, I will be serving on the MACG Transformation Team to discern their next steps, and will be doing lots of one to ones in the community as a result! I would like to become a broad based organizing salesperson and reach out to my contacts in different issue-based non-profits to consider becoming a part of MACG so we can eventually cut those far reaching issues, work together for change, and win.