Change Work is Constant and Constantly Evolving

Octavia Butler said, “All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change.” Creating the beautiful revolutionary future we dream of requires adaptation, responsiveness, and being willing to see opportunities for growth and evolution. As a change organization, we embody this wisdom, by continuing to look for ways to expand and strengthen our curriculum, which has been in a nearly constant process of evolution since its creation in 2019. In this article we will take you on a journey from the beginning seeds of inspiration to where we are today, as well as introduce you to one of our newest and most important methodologies grounding the creation of dozens of brand new tools that will be added to the Change Network curriculum throughout 2023.

Planting the Seed: The History of the Change Network

The OF/BY/FOR ALL Change Network program was born out of a failing museum. You read that right. FAILING. OF/BY/FOR ALL Founder Nina Simon found herself in what would seem like an impossible position. She was appointed the Executive Director of The Museum of Art and History (MAH) in Santa Cruz, California — a museum in financial crisis on the verge of closing its doors, and also in a crisis of relevance within a community that only knew the MAH as a former prison and not as a museum. Desperate for a solution (and without much to lose), Nina embarked on a series of experiments grounded in an intentional shift in the organization’s internal question — from “How do we get new people into the museum?” to “What are we willing to change to welcome new people?” 

Over the course of several years under Nina’s leadership, alongside our Founding Community Catalyst Lauren Benetua, the MAH’s course had completely turned around. In seven years, the MAH increased attendance by 9x, membership by 3x, and budget by 4x. Participants, staff, trustees, and supporters became dramatically more diverse, growing representative of the full age, income, and ethnic diversity of the county. The people walking through the museum’s doors--as visitors, volunteers, collaborators, and donors--started reflecting the full diversity of the community. The MAH became OF, BY, and FOR Santa Cruz County.

They gained a lot of recognition and press due to the dramatic transformation of the institution from being weeks away from closing its doors to becoming a beloved and trusted gathering place within the community. Upon reflecting on the process that led them to this outcome, a simple concept emerged: if you are representative OF a community, co-created BY that community, you become more welcoming FOR that community.

The Seedlings Sprout: The Birth of the Change Network Program

This concept soon blossomed into a global movement of organizations who have since utilized the OF/BY/FOR ALL framework to make dramatic shifts in the ways they work and relate to communities to enable more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable practices. OF/BY/FOR ALL became its own nonprofit organization in 2019, and Nina and Lauren created the first Change Network curriculum based on the tools and community organizing practices, such as our most popular tool to date, Partner Power.

Our first curriculum was just a starting point that turned al ofl the lessons learned at the MAH into a curriculum that could support organizations’ internal organizational change and coul uplift community-centered practices as their highest priority. Our 5 Stage Change Network Curriculum offered a structured process to:

1. Create Your Vision for Change

2. Select Your Community of Interest

3. Listen and Learn from your Community of Interest

4. Build Your Change Plan

5. Use Tools to Do the Work and Make Change

As we began implementing the curriculum, it was clear that members gained enormous insight through the program, and their relationships with new and existing communities were transforming. We ran three experimental pilots of the Change Network in 2018-2019 with 47 organizations in 9 countries and 10 time zones: museums, libraries, performing arts organizations, parks, community centers, health centers, and cultural centers, with budgets from under $100,000 to over $15,000,000. One third of these organizations are led by people of color or indigenous people. All of us experimented together on the path to deepening community involvement. OF/BY/FOR ALL  worked with the research team at Slover Linett Audience Research to understand what worked and what didn’t in each of these pilots. e used that research to build the full-scale version of the Change Network that exists today. Some notable feedback offered anonymously through this research include:

“Before we thought of our community more broadly; it had never been a targeted audience. We hadn’t reached out to specific groups. OF/BY/FOR ALL is more structured. It was like overlaying project management onto community engagement, and there are goals and tasks that keep you moving along.” 

“When we started it felt like this was going to confirm what we are doing and learn some good tools to do it more deeply. What became very clear was that we thought we’d been doing things that were “of” and “by” for our community but, like most non-profits, we were doing things “for” the community rather than asking our community if these were serving them in the best way.” 

Tending the Garden: Noticing Gaps and the Need for Changes

Over the years we recognized that there were still gaps. Some gaps were easy to see and some we could never predict. Under the leadership of our first Head of Program Raquel Thompson, we began to ask ourselves deeper questions around what the deeper goals and intentions of our curriculum were. What did our curriculum REALLY support our members to do? We carefully monitored our members’ progress through monthly reports; noticed where they stalled or experienced challenges; acknowledged relational rifts and conflicts that naturally arose from the work; understood that our members came from different cultural contexts, experiences, and knowledge levels with DEI. 

The world was also continuing to change, bringing new lessons and urgent needs to the forefront, requiring us all to reflect, adapt, and change as well. The murder of George Floyd and the COVID pandemic were among the two world changing events that greatly impacted how we began to think about the unique ways that the Change Network curriculum could be responsive and evolving to better meet the needs of our diverse community of member organizations and help them reach their goals. We also began to redefine what “success” in the program even looked like, encouraging our members to measure their success in more nuanced ways, such as through the strength of their relationships with their communities, versus solely things like increased attendance numbers.

We tried new experiments with curiosity and a willingness to be wrong. We played with our cadence of All Network Calls, where we gathered the full network of members to learn together, be in dialogue, support and celebrate each other. We made changes to our coaching structure and style to emphasize accountability and our organizational values through a power/privilege/ anti-oppression lens.  Our program team at the time, which then included Lauren, Nina, Raquel, and former Community Catalyst Mateo Mossey, created new tools to support members through new challenges that surfaced as the world changed:

An Exercise in Unlearning - To radically imagine something different, the first step is often NOT to dive into building something new. It might be more important to start by unlearning something that blocks us from seeing all the possibilities. 

A Framework for Action - A tool to help teams map out thoughtful and concrete action in moments of crises: immediate vs. longer-term actions, externally with their communities and internally with their team.

10 Equity & Inclusion Concepts - To offer shared language and way of thinking about and applying equity and inclusion into our nuanced work.

Harvesting the Fruit & Preparing New Ground: The Next Phase of our Change Network Curriculum

In 2021, we welcomed our new CEO Courtney Harge, whose leadership ushered in an expanded vision for the organization, embodying care and justice based values. As our team shifted and grew, we welcomed new insights, strategies, and pedagogies to further develop not only our curriculum, but also our lens for facilitating learning, accountability, and camaraderie among our members. A notable new development was the creation of care protocols which were emergently crafted in 2021 and are communicated, modeled and embodied in all of our member-facing gatherings. Creating space for care can have true lasting and positive impact on the way we operate interpersonally and can serve as a foundation for creating more just, humane, and equitable organizational practices and operational processes. Our Associate Director of Curriculum Jana Lynne Umipig led much of the crafting of our care protocols, highlighting that they are “not rules; they are guides and understandings of how to take care of those you live, work, and create with. To build protocols that are strong enough to encompass the greater needs of a community and be agile enough to shift and change with responsive and relational need, is essential work in changemaking.” 

In our integration of care into our curriculum, we began to understand through our own relationships with our members that change work requires practice and embodiment alongside frameworks. With the emphasis on care as a central pillar of our program, it is our intention that when our members meet, without us present, that they develop the capacity to hold space for care as a team—as a community. This work helped us begin to hone in on what our program really does at its core: teaching institutions how to engage in relationship centered organizing. With this concept as the foundation, new methodologies began to emerge, which are now transforming our curriculum in exciting ways.

Jana Lynne explains, “Relation centered organizing encourages us to think about how our work can be done in service of communities. It is the relationships of depth and value built within institutions, between individuals, and individuals with communities that create the foundation for ongoing opportunities to grow and move together with intention.”

In thinking about how organizations create relationships with communities, we understand that articulating how those relationships were formed can be challenging. It’s important to be able to identify the HOW of relationship building so that the powerful work can be replicated again and again with any new community and within any context. This takes deep listening and learning, and asks us to intentionally shift away from transactional and exploitative relationships and toward relationships centered in care, reciprocity, and equity. The methodology of “The  4 P’s of Relational Organizing” - Protocols, Practice/ Praxis, Process and Pedagogy” created by Associate Director of Curricula Jana Lynne Umipig offers a structured, replicable framework to support organizations to:

• Center and prioritize relationship building with care using protocols

• Embody equity-based practices internally, interpersonally, and in our roles as civic and cultural workers

• Apply our embodied practice into the articulation of processes and operationalize ways of working in service of our visions for equity

• Use our processes to develop organizational pedagogies to codify equity into our permanent organizational structures and further articulate that work externally

Below is an overview of the 4 P’s as a window into the nuanced concepts driving the evolution of the Change Network curriculum.

1. Protocols

Protocols can be understood as reflective and responsive guidelines that clearly communicate the collective needs of a group of people in order to be in an honorable relationship with one another. When working within a care and equity lens, it is crucial to develop protocols at the start of any relationship building so that all members can be considered, their voices can be heard, and their needs can be identified. Protocols can also be used as a tool to be revisited in moments of conflict, in the face of a challenge, and when harm has been done, even if it was unintentional.

In our month-long onboarding with new members, we offer our own relational protocols, which include Community Agreements and our Care Protocols, as examples of the ways we aim to build relationships in ways that develop trust, support vulnerable sharing, and encourage curiosity and accountability. As members move into Stage 1, the curriculum guides members to reflect on their own personal and collective needs, and to create their own relational protocols to ground and guide their team through the rest of the changemaking process.

It can be true that personal protocols may not always fully align with organizational protocols; however the goal is to negotiate, seek places for interconnectivity, and be guided by them in your working relationships. Protocols help to collectivize power and allow us to be centered in relation, as opposed to ungrounded reactions which often intensify unhealthy conflict and exacerbate oppressive conditions.

Here are some questions we encourage our members to ask themselves to see if protocols are present or absent in their work:

• Does everyone feel safe, seen, heard, understood?

• Where are we unable to see/hear/understand one another?

• What ways can we be more transparent in communicating our experience, perspectives, understandings, and needs?

2. Practice / Praxis

Practice and Praxis are both things we encourage our members to think about, both within their organizations as well as their individual lives. They help us articulate how we embody and translate our collective work into our ways of life.

Uplifting the idea of practice in change work gives us the space to not feel required to be experts in the work of building relationships in order for us to engage with each other with integrity in meaningful ways. To be willing to practice this work with a spirit of curiosity and humility honors our humanness, and accepts that this work will undoubtedly come with mistakes and moments of challenge and vulnerability, no matter how much or how little knowledge or experience we have individually or collectively. It is by continuing the practice, allowing for self-humility and agility, that we become better at doing relational work.

Praxis (from Ancient Greek: πρᾶξις, romanized: praxis) is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, or realized. It is about turning knowledge and competencies into action. It is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, or realized. Paulo Freire defines Praxis as “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.” He argued that it was not enough for people to study the world, they also had a responsibility to act to create a more just one. 

Praxis allows us to expand our practice with consistent awareness and reflection, and to take that practice from thought into action.

• How have you made a mistake, and what have you learned from it?

• How will you shift or change your actions, behaviors and ways of relating to one another in order to grow from the mistakes you have made?

3. Process

Process is an articulation of the full picture of the necessary steps we need to take in order to build, sustain, grow and evolve our relationships. When the process is articulated clearly we can identify structures, containers and vehicles that support our relational work, and allow us to replicate that work over and over again. Having processes also allows relational equity work to remain sustainable regardless of who is doing the work, and amidst the constantly changing dynamics of staffing, funding, politics, and other factors that commonly impact civic and cultural organizations.

Just as OF/BY/FOR ALL has developed processes that support our members through their change journeys, it’s important that organizations develop their own processes unique to their histories, contexts, communities, and goals. We ask our members to consider what their current processes look like and how those processes can be shifted and re-imagined as they assess these different aspects of organizational relationships:

• • • Communication
    • Visioning/Imagining
    • Collaboration/ Co-creation
    • Closure and Continuity
      

• • • HOW did you do it? 

    • What are the steps, stages, what is the road map that is necessary to be taken in doing the work of relational building?

    • Can you replicate the process with similar results?

    • How different roles in the process differ in experience? Consider:

      • Power dynamics

      • Capacity

      • Culture

      • Identity

4. Pedagogy

Pedagogy refers to the methods a facilitator uses to help us communicate our protocols, process, practice and praxis both internally and externally. It allows us to continue to replicate the work sustainably, to be embodied by others with clarity and authenticity, and to be translated to those with whom we work or will work with in the future. As members move through the later stages of the Change Network curriculum and begin making change in their organizations alongside their community, we continue to ask them to be in constant reflection and dialogue and to continuously deepen trust with their community to receive authentic feedback. Ultimately, members are challenged to take those lessons to think through how the embodiment of the protocols, practices, and processes that emerged throughout the year can be used to create a pedagogy that can be taken forward long into the future.

As Change Network members develop an organizational pedagogy, some questions we ask them include:

• What ways can you find continuity and repetition in your relational work? 

• What are the overarching lessons that you wish for your community to experience and take away with them from what you have created in your relational organizing efforts/work?

• How does your pedagogy show up in all parts of your organization?

Who is your relational organizing currently serving? Who else can it serve?

A Garden Requires Sunlight, Water, and Time: Change as an Iterative and Slow Process

Something we have begun to reinforce to our members over and over again is that—more often than not—meaningful change is not fast. Or, at least, not as fast as we might like it to be. Just as relationships require time and consistent tending, so does change. We encourage our members to embrace adrienne maree brown’s concept of “moving at the speed of trust.” This includes taking the time that is required to build trust with all stakeholders, as well as trusting your skills, your intentions, and your ability to know what is needed when you become present, curious, and open to the possibilities that emerge through the reciprocal relationships you’ve built. 

Just as we encourage our members to be present and tend in this slow and iterative way, so too are we moving methodically through each stage of our program to further develop and expand its scope, rigor, and efficacy. In our upcoming articles, we will share more of the emerging methodologies that ground our curriculum, including a summary of some new tools in Stage 1 where members create their vision for change. Throughout the next month, we’ll be offering these inside glimpses into the curriculum, and we invite you to imagine how our structured processes, robust frameworks, and actionable tools might also support your organization to make radical changes toward greater equity and inclusion.

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