Kitchen Table Consulting

on-line Courses

Make yourself obsolete:

Shifting power from non-profit leadership to community leadership

Community empowerment happens when non-profits and funders step back and community-based projects thrive. This workshop will highlight examples from low-income, racially diverse, and multi-generational communities where programs were designed to build enduring capacity for leadership and self-management within each community.

With racial, economic, and gender equity as the foundations for community empowerment and sustainable food systems, examples will highlight:  Community garden programs that paid low-income and immigrant gardeners to attend multi-lingual leadership trainings and successfully manage and advocate for their gardens; Farm to School programs that used grant funding to build knowledge, value, and capacity by purchasing processing equipment for schools and paying low income school food service workers to attend professional skills trainings for self-management; and a Food Hub designed and advised by small-scale, limited resource farmers to form a cooperative structure.  By design, the role and control of non-profits and funders diminished as the community role and control increased.

Outcomes for participants

Participants will leave with a program model based in social justice - where program design, development, implementation, and management are shifted to the communities with which they work.  Moreover, participants will have developed the strategies they need to build community leadership and empowerment, while planning their own obsolescence as non-profit leaders.

Included:

• A 4-part framework to shift power

• Real world examples from food systems work

• A dynamic worksheet for your program design

• 15 minutes of private coaching on your community-based program

• An invitation to join a community of practice

This 1-hour course is only $55.