Description: Community-driven planning is the antidote to top-down public planning. In fact, community-driven planning can happen and does happen completely absent of local government, which can be vital to building culturally-rooted, liberatory models for building the future. And yet, local government has a critical role to play in ensuring communities have the resources and capacity to implement our solutions. Inevitably building community power involves our capacity to affect local politics, practices, and public resources. If our communities are going to be authentically involved in and directly influence public planning and policy, then we must be organized around a shared vision, priorities, solutions, and approaches to building community power. What role can community-driven planning play in building sufficient power to affect local politics? How can we avoid the traps that working with local government presupposes? In this interactive 2.5-hour workshop we will hear from grassroots organizations who have been able to leverage public resources and affect local policy through the power of community-driven planning, and apply these insights to our own work in place.
Our Guest Speakers:
Chris Selig, Advisory Board Member and Independent Consultant, PODER
Tere Almaguer, Environmental Justice Organizer, PODER
Dawn Curtis, Consulting Director, Grassroots Impact
