Strengthening capacity for community power building and organizing

by Lisa Fujie Parks

Investing in Community Power Building

As a public health practitioner with roots in women of color-led movements for intersectional racial and gender justice, where analyses of systems of power are integral, I have been overjoyed at the (re)emergence of a robust and explicit focus on power and community power building within the public health field. This includes public health efforts to honor historical and contemporary racial justice movements and reclaim our field’s social justice origins, as well as focused attention on cultivating community power building ecosystems.

In A Primer on Community Power, Place, and Structural Change (2020), Manuel Pastor of the USC Equity Research Institute and his colleagues call upon health equity advocates to center community power building as an essential strategy to achieve structural changes in systems, policies, and institutional practices that perpetuate health inequities. Community power building is necessary because “there are interests that benefit from current arrangements that need to be disrupted,” and disruption requires community power.

Through Prevention Institute’s (PI) SHINE (Safety and Healing in Networks of Equity) initiative, culturally-rooted collaboratives in California, PI, and partners work to build equitable community conditions for safety and healing. In 2024, the SHINE Learning Community focused on strengthening our collective understanding of and capacities for community power building, including community leadership development, racial justice in practice, power mapping, inside/outside strategy, community power ecosystem approaches to policy change, and more. We returned frequently to this definition of community power building by the Lead Local Initiative:

“Community power building is the set of strategies used by communities most impacted by structural inequity to develop, sustain, and grow an organized base of people who act together through democratic structures to set agendas, shift public discourse, influence who makes decisions, and cultivate ongoing relationships of mutual accountability with decision-makers that change systems and advance health equity.”? — Lead Local Initiative

A Growing Interest in Community Organizing Training

Community organizing is a foundational aspect of community power building. Many SHINE leaders are already engaged in community organizing, i.e., cultivating community leaders to envision and act on solutions to problems through relational organizing and coalition building. Expanding on this foundation, SHINE collaboratives are increasingly explicitly focusing on community power building, while retaining their unique approaches rooted in cultural and community strengths. The Prevention Institute SHINE team is simultaneously adapting our role as an intermediary to become more community-centered and community-led. Our shared SHINE framework stands on a commitment to power sharing and “power with” (not “power over”), recognizing the many ways people can organize within a larger social change ecosystem, and cultivating healing and transformation at all levels: personal, interpersonal, organizational, community, and structural.

More and more SHINE Learning Community members are expressing interest in robust training on community organizing as they deepen their community power building work. We are certainly not alone in this interest, as more community leaders and organizations lean into the resurging community power building conversations. In their primer, What is Needed to Build Community Power?, Change Elemental captured the wisdom of community power building organizations and affirmed that community organizing is among the most important capacities in community power building. In California, a community organizing revival is burgeoning, prompted by the leadership and creativity of long-time movement organizers. This revitalization is evidenced by growing investments in community power building and organizing among philanthropies, including The California Endowment's largest-ever investment of $85 million in the Movement Innovation Collaborative and its core strategies to deepen the power, coordination, and impact of the statewide power building ecosystem.

Expanding Training Opportunities?

In recent years, SHINE Learning Community members have participated in trainings led by groups such as Spadework, Midwest Academy, AORTA, and the National Association of Climate Resilience Planners, while others have developed and implemented homegrown curricula pulling from multiple accessible resources at the intersection of community leadership development, advocacy, and organizing.

A recent Learning Community meeting discussion explored the diverse landscape of community organizing training approaches, including those that:

• Situate community organizing within community power building ecosystems
• Include pragmatic and transformative strategies that combine actionable campaigns with deep-rooted change.
• Address trauma and resilience and emphasize “power with.”
• Incorporate somatic healing for the well-being and sustainability of organizers and movements.
• Incorporate community-specific strengths and needs, such as Indigenous sovereignty and rural context, culture and faith, youth-led and multigenerational formations, and language justice.

Emergent Priorities for 2025

As we enter 2025, SHINE is committed to deepening our capacity to build community power through community organizing, including robust training. Key priorities in the shifting state and national landscape, marked by growing systemic power inequities, include:

• Adapting to community needs, ensuring our work is responsive to changing conditions and urgent issues.
• Building stronger local campaigns in deeper partnerships with allies and collaborators.
• Amplifying affirmative narratives that build unity, interdependence, and a bigger “we.”
• Keeping our eyes and strategy on a longer horizon of change, far longer than a grant cycle, as we also attend to and resource what is urgent and immediate.?
• Cultivating healing-centered leadership and organizing that protects the wellbeing of leaders, communities, and ecosystems, and builds the organizations and systems we need and deserve.
• Strengthening local-to-state and state-to-local connectivity, ensuring that grassroots efforts influence policy and governance at all levels.

Let’s connect

What are your priorities for building community power in 2025 and beyond? How will you invest in capacity for community organizing, including ensuring access to comprehensive training? What training opportunities do you recommend? The SHINE Learning Community invites partners in and outside of California to join this conversation. We are eager to strengthen our organizing skills (and more) and build community power together. Please reach out to Lisa Fujie Parks at [email protected].

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