Building Inclusive Virtual Organizing: Focusing on the Process
by Brenda Aguilera, Carlos M. Arceo, Sam Joo, Fay Walker, and Mychal Cohen
A publication of the Local Data for Equitable Recovery Resource Hub
The pandemic forced many local organizations to figure out how to connect virtually with their communities and to continue, or expand, their work. For us at Para Los Niños (PLN), a nonprofit organization that provides education and wraparound support to more than 6,000 of Los Angeles’s underserved children, youth, and families every year, we faced this challenge because of gaps in LA’s health and human services infrastructure, gaps the pandemic widened. This was particularly devastating for historically neglected neighborhoods, many of which are in our service areas.
At PLN we foster pathways to success by striving for excellence in education, family support, and comprehensive social-emotional, community-based services and a comprehensive systems-change agenda. We first established the Best Start Metro Los Angeles (BSMLA) Partnership in collaboration with First 5 LA in 2009. The BSMLA Partnership sought to strategically address community priorities through transformative power sharing among community residents, community-based organizations, philanthropy, and governmental agencies with upwards of 500 residents.
Over time, we leveraged the trust we have built with community residents through the BSMLA Partnership to engage robust data collection efforts to both respond to immediate needs that partners identified, and to continue moving our systems-change agenda forward, despite severe hardship and an unfamiliar virtual environment. We believe our journey along with that of our partners, demonstrates how authentic partnership between community-based organizations, private and public entities, and community residents is necessary to meet communities’ needs.
We drive systems-change efforts by collaboratively designing and implementing strategies grounded in community members’ lived experience, complemented by subject matter expertise. We believe insights from their experiences are valuable for other local groups as they move toward hybrid virtual and in-person partnership and community organizing.
Building the groundwork to respond to pandemic conditions
The historic failures of LA’s health and human services infrastructure were exacerbated by the onset of the pandemic. This was particularly devastating for historically neglected communities, many of which fall within Best Start Region 1’s service areas in Los Angeles County. Best Start Region 1 is comprised of 900 members throughout four communities: Best Start East LA, Best Start Metro LA, Best Start South El Monte/El Monte and Best Start Southeast LA. In collaboration with our partners, All People’s Community Center, AltaMed Health Services, American Heart Association, API Forward Movement, Child 360, City of Maywood, Homies Unidos, Karsh Center, Korean American Family Services, LIFT LA, Los Angeles Metro Transportation, Pathways LA, Pensieve Foods, Via Transportation, Worksite Wellness LA, Wellnest, With Love Market and Café, and Southeast Rio Vista YMCA, we launched the Best Start Region 1 Community Impact Survey in August 2020 with the hopes of collecting data that reflected community members’ lived experience. Of the Best Start Region 1 community members surveyed, 55 percent are essential workers, and 44 percent lost at least half of their income during the pandemic. As a result, 59 percent of respondents reported at least one missed mortgage or rent payment. Food insecurity almost doubled, from 36 percent to 62 percent.
At PLN our values and practices demand that the people most affected by systemic dynamics should be at the forefront of proposing and developing solutions with other key stakeholders, leveraging collective will and assets of each group to collectively create systemic change. However, we recognized that if basic needs were not being met, communities could not lead systems-change efforts. This compelled us and our partners to coordinate and connect community residents to accessible essential-item distribution hubs and a home delivery service for resources such as food, diapers, formula, toys, educational materials, and cleaning supplies that would ensure their safety and well-being during uncertain times.
Our success has relied on long-term partnership, putting collective community values put into practice, and demonstrating accountability to community residents. Our methodology is rooted in this process — creating spaces where systemic shortcomings are acknowledged as shared, thereby reducing the sense of guilt and isolation that can come from confusing systemic failures with our own personal shortcomings.
This practice of deep community connection and open, principled communication has been a 12-year-long process that has involved building cultural fluency and community trust and has led to a community-created bill of human rights. Additionally, we and our partners identify assets and challenges that might not otherwise surface. As partners, we co-design, implement, promote, and evaluate strategies informed and led by community members that yield equitable solutions, using regularly updated, and comprehensive data collection and sharing efforts.
Adapting physical community partnership to a virtual world
Our shift from an in-person partnership model to a hybrid model was challenging; the communities hardest hit by the pandemic are the same communities facing the worst impacts of the digital divide. We surveyed and found that 37 percent of respondents relied primarily on smartphones for internet access, and many others were unable to connect for reasons ranging from lack of technology access to lack of experience.
To respond to these challenges, we adapted and modified our practices to meet the current crisis. Before the pandemic, local, daily neighborhood community meetings, composed of between 25 and 70 (depending on the specific partnership) community residents, community-based organizations, and private and public entities, met to mobilize resources and design, implement, communicate, and evaluate their systems-change efforts. Unable to continue this practice because of health and safety protocols, we replaced our in-person meetings with regular, one-on-one check-ins conducted by Best Start Region 1 Community Transformation Promotoras and through in-person contactless engagement at resource distribution activities.
They communicated information on resources and organizing opportunities through mailers, social media, and texting. Staff were also able to lend an empathetic ear, nurturing a familiar, stabilizing dynamic in an otherwise unstable time. It also required real efforts to address the digital divide by providing access to broadband and devices, technological literacy, and individual supports that weren’t provided by institutions like schools, local government, and businesses. With these efforts, they deepened and strengthened the partnerships and trust cultivated before the pandemic.
We have continued our commitment to these established partnerships and structures. Along with the individual support for community resident partners, we also developed the Best Start Network Distribution Committee (BNDC), comprised of community residents, community-based organizations, and public and private entities. In alignment with Best Start Region 1 values, organization representatives secured their participation by partnering with one of the community residents they serve to ensure their lived experiences informed our outcomes. This input guided the development of what would eventually become the Best Start Region 1 Driving Equity and Justice Community Bill of Human Rights, a long-term advocacy and policy agenda available in English and Spanish, which focuses on 10 domains, including digital inclusion, housing, education, and transportation.
Over several months, BNDC members were reintroduced to the values and guiding principles for our partnership work. Guided by those principles, we engaged our typical process after re-grounding ourselves in our values. We surfaced primary data from residents to best understand their experience, complemented those data with significant secondary data that told a more complete story about LA County’s societal conditions, and engaged in three months of data sense-making. From that sense-making, we surfaced key themes and priority areas that demanded urgent response.
Recommendations were made by BNDC members, then those recommendations were used to develop multiple drafts of the Community Bill of Human Rights. These drafts were then presented back to the entire Best Start Region 1 partners, which, again, were reviewed, modified, and eventually ratified by all BNDC and Best Start Region 1 partners. Though the situation was not ideal because of safety-informed limitations, we made all efforts to implement existing partnership practices.
The BNDC grounded itself in two fundamental truths: that community residents, collectively and individually, are not responsible for the conditions their communities have been subjected to historically and that the BNDC’s responsibility was to advocate not just for those represented in the committee or local partnerships, but also those within all of our communities and in the margins of the margins of our communities, recognizing our interdependence.
The BNDC started by analyzing data surfaced in the 400-plus community impact surveys, complemented by secondary data from sense-making sessions, where data were shared with community iteratively to hear responses and collect community perspective. Together, these data formed a narrative that affirmed the lived experience of community resident partners, attached hard data to that experience, surfaced themes and commonalities across all communities, and recognized that preexisting conditions were only exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the course its trajectory, the BNDC faced its own challenges. Among them was a lack of awareness related to communities not represented within the group. Though its values and data called for the BNDC to respond to the needs of many communities not represented in its membership, not fully understanding the reality of those communities, understandably, left gaps.
Through principled conflict and dialogue, skillfully facilitated by Best Start Region 1 staff, Latinx BNDC members challenged each other to better understand and represent the interests of Black and African American communities. Questions about names and naming (Black/Negra/o versus Morena/o) and representation, were answered with guidance from members of the Black community, as well as from the data itself. Additionally, commitments were made to further educate the BNDC and its associated partnerships about less represented, less understood, and silenced communities within our partnerships, to better engage in solidarity work and to continue to grow healthy interdependence beyond the work of the BNDC and toward continued systems-change efforts.
Collectively creating an organizing agenda virtually
Best Start Region 1 Community Partnerships shared their Community Bill of Human Rights, which focuses on 10 domains, including digital inclusion, housing, education, and transportation, in a community-led town hall, where we were joined by more than 500 community residents, community-based organizations, elected officials, and philanthropic leaders.
The town hall mobilized community residents in partnership with the institutions responsible for creating the current systemic conditions and paved the way for avenues of communication between communities, advocacy campaigns, and policymakers, organizing with a roadmap toward shared goals.
Though the inability to meet in person with partners prevented Best Start Region 1 from fully co-designing the event, as would normally occur, proposal drafts were developed and presented to BNDC members to amend, modify, and eventually ratify. Residents assigned themselves to specific technical support and speaking roles, encouraging and supporting as much resident participation as possible. The event was successful, though not just because of the town hall’s turnout, but rather because of the collaborative nature of our work, including capacity building and strengthening of all stakeholders involved; the accountability to community residents; the transparency with community; the ability to engage with organizations with aligned values, principles, and practices; the cultural fluency and respect; the ability to address community challenges and acknowledge community wins along the way; and a clear roadmap for shared goals.
Moving forward, Best Start Region 1 will continue our steadfast commitment to partner authentically with community-based organizations, private and public entities, and especially, those most affected by societal conditions, who, more often than not, are ignored and/or blamed: community residents.
We thank Para Los Niños for their contributions to this blog post. They are grantees of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Using Data to Inform Local Decisions on COVID-19 Response & Recovery program.
