Building Community from the Inside Out: A Series of 5% Shifts

This report, the first in a series about organizational "5% shifts", includes two case studies of community building efforts by nonprofit organizations in Detroit and New York City. St. Matthew’s & St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church’s hot breakfast program in Detroit offers a model of a small shift in engagement with community members seeking healthy meals in the midst of an urban food desert. Their decision to shift from using a soup line mode of serving individuals to serving groups with shared ‘family-style’ meals leveraged the power of ritual around meals, which are both nostalgic and deeply affirming, to transform dynamics between clients and volunteers. But more importantly the shared meal time became a way to model the kind of community the church envisions for Detroit—one of mutual aid, sharing and abundance. The other case—Queens Community House—provides an example of community building among staff. The organization took on the challenge of fostering relationships among staff; not to boost morale and retention, but to live its values and principles in all parts of the organization.

Reports from the Field: The Next Stage: Leaving Long-Term Leadership

This Report from the Field, written by Frances Kunreuther and Tim Wolfred, presents how some long-term leaders in the large Baby Boom cohort – both those who have exited and those who are planning their departures – describe the process of leaving and figuring out what is next. The findings – based on two in-depth focus groups – draws from the research and experience of its authors who have been collecting information through the lens of succession planning and from surveys/interviews on defining this new stage of life and work.

Call for Submissions: Uniting Detroiters People’s Atlas Project

The Uniting Detroiters Project is seeking submissions from current and former Detroit residents, activists, students, scholars, visual artists, poets, and cartographers for Detroit: A People’s Atlas. They are interested in critical essays, oral histories, timelines, neighborhood maps, poetry, photographs, and other forms of artwork that speak to social justice in Detroit, particularly in relationship to land, governance, education, food justice, housing, and transit.

All news >>