Transforming California Begins and Ends with People Power
“The California Endowment Social Bond investment is really a beautiful opportunity for organizing to be anchored and resourced in a way that is vitally necessary for the movement.”
All across California, community organizers are reimagining what an equitable and just future can look like for all. They are engaging people in the political process, organizing and assisting residents and youth to testify at legislative hearings and meetings at all levels of government state, county, city, schools, and leading movements to change California to help improve the health outcomes of all.
Joseph Tomás McKellar, executive director of PICO California, who became an organizer over twenty years ago said “Organizers and grassroots leaders every day in California are meeting in community. They're listening to the needs of their neighbors. They're discerning the kind of policy structural changes that are needed to address those pressures that poor and oppressed people experience every day in California.” He explains that “the greatest revolution is the revolution of the human heart” and how organizers are the catalyst for “inviting people to embrace a different story about themselves and about why the world is the way it is around them.”
People are the engine for bold and effective campaigns and are changing hearts, minds and systems throughout the state. As part of this, community organizers are loud and clear about how critical it is to have the capacity and resources to train and mobilize their communities, foster deep connections, and build an infrastructure that can thread the critical work of organizers and movements - because the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Tracy La, Executive Director of VietRISE, an organization that builds leadership among Orange County’s working-class Vietnamese and immigrant communities, echoes the importance of investments that create a runway for organizers to innovate and collaborate.
“The system adapts to make it harder for us to fight for the change that we need,” she says. “We’ve always been able to come up with creative ways to fight for the changes necessary, but we’re in a moment now where we need the resources, the investment, and connections between communities across the state to develop models that are really going to be effective to respond to these current conditions.” La reflects on growing up in a family where she didn’t know anything about social change or organizing, and that “There were never any nonprofits or community groups where I lived that were invested in supporting working class women or young women like me who were seeing the impact of workplace exploitation on their parents and families.”
For California to have a healthy multiracial democracy, philanthropy must follow the lead of community organizers — because the people closest to systemic problems have the best understanding of the solutions.
The California Endowment (TCE) supports leaders and groups building power based on learnings gleaned over the last decade through our Building Healthy Communities initiative, described by CEO and President Dr. Robert K. Ross in his article A CEO, Transformed. One of the most important learnings is that it begins and ends with people power. This is what compelled TCE to create a $300 million Social Bond, an infusion of resources beyond conventional grantmaking to invest in innovative, long term solutions throughout California, and to center organizing as the pathway to transformative systems change.
Felicia Jones, former Deputy Director of Congregations for Prophetic Engagement (COPE), a Black-led faith and grassroots group in California’s Inland Empire building power and changing systems for educational equity, criminal justice reform, and community wellness, said “Grassroots organizers feel and know and experience the holes in our systems. They feel the racial inequity. And our ability to make sure that their voices are included is reason enough to say we've got to sustain an infrastructure that has this pipeline where community is a part of the solution.”
Community leaders alongside other partners and funders, including TCE, are undergoing a participatory design process to establish physical and digital centers across California that will support current and future changemakers. The centers will create space for movement leaders and grassroots organizers to strengthen connections, develop intergenerational leaders, and facilitate healing and restorative practices to shape California’s organizing culture for generations to come.
Terry Supahan, Executive Director of True North Organizing Network in the Redwood region of Northwestern California hopes that the TCE Social Bond investment will help people who might not have seen themselves as leaders before, become changemakers for themselves, their families, their neighborhoods, and their communities. He states “My hopes for California and the world in power building and community organizing is not only that we see one another, but we all understand that there's a host of problems and issues that are going to impact California and the world.”
Camila Chavez, the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, an organization on a mission to build volunteer organizations to pursue social justice, describes the importance of a powerbuilding infrastructure. “It’s often said that we work in silos, right? So whether they’re movement silos or cultural silos, it’s really breaking those down and being able to come together, and just have this bold new vision for empowering our communities as we move forward to create the state that we want and that all Californians deserve,” she says.
McKellar concludes “Philanthropy could really make a big difference funding campaigns that are helping us end mass incarceration; welcome, protect, and promote our immigrant and refugee relatives; campaigns that are helping us create housing and health for all people; helping us care for our common home and disrupt the climate emergency affecting all of us.”
For philanthropy, the charge is clear. Follow the lead of community organizers in developing intergenerational leadership, raising the voices of those closest to systemic problems, and promoting civic engagement and activism. From the northernmost regions in California to the Bay Area, Central Valley, Southern California and the Inland Empire, these changemakers are paving the way for organizers to foster community and sustain their work for the long term. Supporting their leadership is key to transforming oppressive systems and achieving racial justice and health equity in the state.
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This content was paid for by The California Endowment. The editorial staff at The Chronicle had no role in its preparation. Find out more about paid content.
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