Facilitating Power is partnering with the National Association of Climate Resilience Planners to amplify the principles & practices of Community-Driven Planning through the workshop series VISION | POWER | SOLUTIONS. We are now entering our third cycle of the workshop series:

• The first cycle included 12 workshops and ran April 2021 - March 2022
• The second cycle included four quarterly workshops from Fall 2022 - Summer 2023
• This next cycle of quarterly workshops will run from November 2023 - August 2024 and features grassroots leaders and thinkers helping to transform the culture of planning and decision-making from top-down to community-driven. 

What is Community-Driven Planning?

Community-driven planning is about self-determination for Black, Brown, Indigenous, and API communities. More capacity in our communities to develop our own solutions and plans is what’s needed to replace the exclusionary practices of top-down planning. The engine of community-driven planning includes three interconnected practices: 

VISIONING: Community vision is about defining for ourselves what it is we want to build together as a community, as opposed to accepting the vision that is set for us by profit motives. Facilitative leaders create space for communities to expand our understanding of what’s possible, and orient ourselves towards what’s needed for the next seven generations.

SOLUTIONS DEVELOPMENT: Community-driven solutions development starts with communities coming together to assess community threats and assets. Based on this analysis, facilitative leaders support groups to develop, or identify, solutions that match their community’s own unique experiences and get at the root causes of the crises we face.

POWER BUILDING: No community-derived solutions or plans can move into action without community power. It takes political, economic, and cultural power to assert community priorities and ensure they are resourced and implemented. Many of the same power-building strategies and tactics that are used to stop harmful practices can be drawn on to advance transformative solutions.

	When Black, Brown, Indigenous, and API communities reclaim the power of planning, we restore culturally-rooted values, practices, and ways of knowing and being back into how visioning and decision-making happen. In this 2.5-hour interactive online workshop, you will hear from innovators of community-driven planning and workshop culturally grounded approaches to planning as critical to our capacity to survive and thrive through the devastating impacts of racial capitalism.
	What does community-driven planning actually look like in action? What does it take to build consensus across a diverse community around a clear vision and set of priorities as well as solutions that community members are ready to take action on? What is included in a community plan? Can we see examples?? What does having a plan allow a community to do? These are some of the questions we will explore during this interactive 2.5-hour online workshop.
	Community-driven planning is the antidote to top-down public planning. In fact, community-driven planning can happen and does happen completely absent of local government, which can be vital to building culturally-rooted, liberatory models for building the future. And yet, local government has a critical role to play in ensuring communities have the resources and capacity to implement our solutions. Inevitably building community power involves our capacity to affect local politics, practices, and public resources. If our communities are going to be authentically involved in and directly influence public planning and policy, then we must be organized around a shared vision, priorities, solutions, and approaches to building community power. What role can community-driven planning play in building sufficient power to affect local politics? How can we avoid the traps that working with local government presupposes? In this interactive 2.5-hour workshop we will hear from grassroots organizations who have been able to leverage public resources and affect local policy through the power of community-driven planning, and apply these insights to our own work in place.
	The vision behind community-driven planning is to re-member and re-activate our capacity as communities to build the world and to collectively govern what we need to live and thrive. The practices of community-driven planning are the building blocks to community governance: Shared vision, consensus-building, priority-setting, deep participation, making decisions for the common good. What can we learn from communities that have been able to do just that? What are some of the different models of community governance in practice within our network? How do we start the process of remembering and reactivating collective governance as a community capacity? In this 2.5 hour interactive online workshop, we will explore these questions with practitioners and reflect on opportunities to plants and cultivate the seeds of community governance within our own planning projects.

The VISION | POWER | SOLUTIONS workshop series stems out of the Framework for Community-Driven Climate Resilience Planning developed by Rosa González and Taj James at the Movement Strategy Center in collaboration with climate justice leaders across the US who are building grassroots power to advance community-driven solutions rooted in a vision and strategy for a Just Transition.