Andrea Manzo, Building Healthy Communities East Salinas

Building Healthy Communities is focused on building resident voice and power for an healthy inclusive democracy. We are grounded in a healing-informed racial equity approach to shifts systems and Facilitating Power has helped us develop our mission, and policy and systems change goals. Facilitating Power has helped us for years to develop processes to determine our vision and the steps needed to achieve our vision. She believes in a collaborative approach and the idea of thinking about the wellbeing of the whole and not just individuals.

She has helped facilitate a group of organizations to identify our points of intersection and interdependence to making the types of changes needed in our community. Her carefully thought out processes have helped us build a more inclusive environment for engaging residents leaders and focusing on their leadership development. She is a creative individual that is always trying to bring people in versus creating a divide among leaders.

Facilitating Power has been an integral part in our racial equity work, working with philanthropy, CBO's, systems and residents to build a collective vision of racial equity and tools to assess our effectiveness. The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership tool has a been a central piece to our systems change work and work to strengthen resident ownership and leadership. 

Rosa always makes people feel like they have something to offer. She draws on what people say and finds the nuggets of wisdom to tie together ideas and work. She is incredible at thinking outside of the box and holds vision and outcomes in a perfect balance. She is someone that values process but equally believes meeting outcomes is necessary to achieve the changes we'd like to see. She is always looking for ways to assess our work and improve upon it. She is a partner in this work that challenges status quo ideas in such a loving way. She is invested in the work. Once she commits to working with you, she in it. She becomes part of your team and your family. This is a partnership like no other that will advance your work exponentially.