Powerful Citizenry

Democracy must be continuously nurtured and protected. It thrives when people mobilize, organize, advocate, and use their collective power to make a change and ensure equity and social justice are essential for a healthy and thriving democracy.

Our Approach

We focus on developing the capacity of communities to mobilize, organize, and advocate to ensure that all their members have fair and just access to the opportunities and resources that will help them reach their full potential. We believe that community organizing is the most direct and effective strategy to build communities’ capacity to build and shift power, as history has shown. It should be built into any initiative intended to bring about equity and social justice for people who have been historically marginalized and disadvantaged. Also, when people with perceived differences—within and across different communities—mobilize and organize around their shared concerns, they have the chance to get to know one another and build relationships. We have seen this in the past and today in situations such as when young people across the country from rural, suburban, and urban communities, representing different racial groups with different sexual orientations and gender identities mobilized to demand gun control after the Parkland shooting; and when Black and Asian American leaders and community members united to fight racism, especially after the wave of hate crimes that shook the Asian American community due to the association between the COVID-19 virus and Chinese people.

How We Can Help

  • Help funders, public agencies, and nonprofit organizations, through advisement, training, and technical assistance, integrate community organizing, into a larger support system to develop and sustain equitable and just communities.
  • Determine ways in which funders, public agencies, and nonprofits can apply principles for strengthening intergroup relationships among different communities.
  • Work with a community-based organization or local government to assess the sense of community within a community and between communities and use the results to inform the design and implementation of strategies to mobilize and organize people to take collective action and also, become more civically engaged.
  • Design and implement community engagement strategies, infrastructures, and processes that are culturally- and contextually responsive to the community members’ needs and aspirations, and at the same time, help to build their power to drive the change they want to see.
  • Evaluate community power and civic engagement initiatives.
Have questions? We have answers.

Related Projects

The Walton Family Foundation’s community organizing campaign is designed to mobilize residents in 13 cities to become civically engaged and to advocate for high-quality traditional and alternative schools. Community Science was contracted to complete the developmental evaluation by examining grantees’ ...
The Racial Equity Anchor Collaborative is composed of nine national racial justice organizations: Advancement Project, Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum, Demos, Faith in Action, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National Congress of American Indians, National ...
The Barr Foundation’s Barr Fellowship is a two-year program designed to invest in exceptional civic leaders, to strengthen their organizations, and to cultivate a network of leaders committed to Greater Boston. This fellowship was conceived in 2005 and has since ...
Community Science is conducting the evaluation of The Colorado Trust’s Supporting Immigrant and Refugee Families (SIRFI) Immigrant Integration Strategy. Community Science was engaged to examine the impact of the strategy on ten Colorado communities from 2004 until 2009 (2004-2010). Unlike ...
In 2006, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched Aligning Forces for Quality, a $300 million national health care quality initiative designed to build the capacity of 14 local communities to collaborate and influence health care quality outcomes. The primary goals ...
On behalf of the Foreign-born Information and Referral Network (FIRN), Community Science conducted a demographic study of immigrant groups in Howard County, Maryland. The different phases of the project included a socio-economic review to determine the growth of the immigrant ...
Community Science wrote a comprehensive paper for the Hill-Snowdon Foundation about the history and context for resident-led civic actions in the District of Columbia and the current infrastructure for resident-led community organizing and social justice efforts. The paper included case ...
The certification program of Adventist Community Services consists of training to build participants’ 1) management and technical skills, 2) leadership skills, and 3) understanding of biblical concepts. Community Science was engaged to help Adventist Community Services build its capacity around ...
Changemakers is an organization that supports and promotes community-based philanthropy. Community Science helped develop the organization’s theory of change and processes to monitor Changemakers desired outcomes ...