Development of the Los Angeles Center for Community Organizing
For 28 years, Community Coalition has organized in the Black and Latino community—pioneering large-scale campaigns on land use, education, child welfare, and criminal justice reform. These campaigns have both served to improve the material conditions of South Los Angeles residents, and develop grassroots, indigenous Black and Latino leadership. Community Coalition’s Organizing Fellowship is an extension of our commitment to the social justice movement to build the next generation of organizers to advance equity and opportunity for Black and Latino people.
Community Coalition wants to build on its success of organizing Black and Latino communities in South LA for nearly thirty years. We have deep roots in South LA, the expertise in authentic, high-touch community organizing, and have built one of the most advanced civic engagement apparatuses for voter turnout in the country.
The project’s conception was centered around initiating planning to:
Develop of national organizing school on cross racial organizing led by people of color,
Develop a physical community center capable of involving thousands of South LA Residents in campaigns to improve material conditions of people of color, and
Serve as a convener and be a think/act tank on moving inside outside strategies for racial justice to end anti-Black racism.
PROBLEM ANALYSIS
United States is projected to be majority people of color by 2040, yet leadership development, community organizing schools, and the nonprofit social justice sector is not keeping pace.
Transforming social and economic conditions require building multiracial coalitions with the power to transform policy, narrative, and resource distribution.
Without centering movement work in the hands of people of color we run the risk of short-changing communities most impacted by inequality.
There was a strong need to reinvest in local community organizing and developing organizing schools led by people of color, as a vast majority of them were founded by white people. The organizations that did exist, and were more robust, had lost some of their capacity to provide the kind of organizing training that we had seen in the past. We wanted to step in and contribute, by being rooted in our neighborhood, and in our community—offering our science and art of organizing, and to do it in collaboration with other stakeholders.
Impact
The greatest successes of the program were our ability to generate excitement for the center amongst our stakeholders, raise planning and implementation dollars, and begin experimentation of program elements.
Completed scan of 24 key stakeholders (allies, competitors, funders, elected officials). The results gave us a clear signal that our organizational partners agreed with the direction of the organization and its capacity to meet the need in the ecosystem for community organizing.
Raised planning resources from key foundations to support planning and implementation of key elements of the training center. With these resources Community Coalition will host a national convening with 25 leaders from across the country to discuss vision, solicit feedback, and generate excitement. The convening will be co-hosted with Community Change and Building Movement Project.
Experimentation has begun. In 2018, we launched the inaugural organizing fellowship with 9 fellows. The team finalized a curriculum for the fellowship. Of the fellows, 8 were from South Los Angeles, 5 were returning citizens, and all were Black and Latino. The new resources will also fund two 8 week organizing fellowships (youth organizing and adult organizing) that will train 20-30 new organizers in the field. Since 2018, we've done 10 fellowships—3 local in Los Angeles.
