Virtual Portfolio
My Impact So Far.
Throughout my career, I've been privileged to collaborate with incredibly skilled and dedicated colleagues, community partners, funders, and leaders. In my experience, effective programs and services that address identity-based disparate impact within the social determinants of health require more than just technical expertise. They also depend on strong leadership, cohesive teams, meaningful partnerships, and flexible resources.
PROGRAM DESIGN, MANAGEMENT, & CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
Love Your Block Grant
Between 2016 - 2023, I co-led the distribution of over $1.5M in grants to 18 cities around the U.S.
For the most recent cohort, using past grantee data and with the support of leadership, I introduced a new full-time local fellowship position, increased grant amounts per city, and enhanced our technical assistance curriculum to support cities with their commitments to equitable resource distribution.
Love Your Block is a multi-year grant program that leverages mini-grants and impact volunteering to help city staff address local challenges in partnership with impacted community members.
Engaged Cities Award
In 2018 and 2019, I co-led the launch, winner selection with external reviewers, site visits, and award distribution of over $300,000 to six winners and fourteen finalist cities around the world.
This award elevates city-led strategies that most successfully engage community members to help create and implement solutions to pressing local problems.
City Life
For three years I connected over 150 residents with 17 department directors and increased the civic participation of local community members through this bi-annual six-week academy.
The program was designed using initial community member and city staff input and continuously improved during each session.
The program featured experiential workshops, a free catered meal from local businesses, free childcare, free transportation, and free interpretation.
The program is still in operation.
"House Concerts"
I co-led the curation of cultural gatherings featuring music, art, food, and dialogue all done in partnership with community members from the culture being featured.
I had the privilege of working with over 50 community members to bring three cultural gatherings together which had anywhere between 50-150 participants.
COACHING & TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE
Over the years I've had the privilege of providing coaching and technical assistance to individuals and groups around the following topics:
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Establishing city-wide guides to plan and evaluate community engagement practices;
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Centering input and action of most impacted community members;
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Reducing and preventing code violations and 311 complaints;
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Revamping advisory boards;
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Asset-based refugee visibility.
The individuals and groups I supported ended up:
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Helping over 200 community members expand their mental models and shift perspective around different lived experiences;
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Engaging over 600 community members in seven city-sponsored projects and governance points;
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Saving residents with low incomes a little over $102,000 in code violations and associated costs to fix these issues on their own;
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Engaging over 1,000 demographically reflective local volunteers.
Here are just a few stories from cities I coached and provided technical assistance:
PEER BASED LEARNING
Yearly In-Person Grantee Convenings
I co-led the development, management, and implementation of three two-day grantee convenings with over 300 participants. The goals of each convening were to provide structured reflection, to turn the reflection into actionable lessons, and through a set of tools translate the lessons into practical steps for the next year's work plans.
All convenings were informed by grantee data and the daily agendas were driven by grantee needs and real-time opportunities.
Rapid Response
In the middle months of COVID-19, I proposed a series of webinars and publications to help cities learn from one another and inspire their recovery planning.
By working with city staff and partners, I was able to put together a virtual panel of six experts to discuss local approaches to serving vulnerable populations and another virtual panel of four experts to discuss responses to food insecurity. Just these two webinars reached over 750 participants.
In addition, I interviewed staff in Seattle to understand how they were updating their community-centered processes in response to the crisis. All these lessons and best practices were shared with the Cities of Service coalition which was made up of more than 200 cities.
Bi-monthly Grantee Webinars
Just in 2022, I led the development, management, and continuous improvement of seven grantee-informed webinars.
Webinar content was shaped by the bi-weekly coaching calls and technical assistance curriculum.
Topics included:
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Local government structure and problem framing.
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Grant goals, community deliberation, and stakeholder mapping.
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Equity in volunteerism, partnership planning, mini-grant best practices.
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Metrics tracking and impact narrative.
GUIDES
Virtual Engagement
COVID-19 sped up the shift to having virtual programs and governance options. In partnership with AARP and a research consultant, I led the creation of "A Practical Guide to Engaging Volunteers Aged 50+ Online". The guide served as training content for more than 50 engagement practitioners and has been downloaded over 100 times.
Local Infrastructure Community Engagement
I led the content development for this guide with the goal of making it easy for cities to identify where to engage impacted community members, for what purpose, and in what methods in order to get the most full and representative participation.
This guide content continues to be used to train city staff by the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University and the National League of Cities. In fact, this guide has been used to train over 250 cities to date.
12 Engagement Techniques
Over the course of six months, I interviewed over eight city staff and partnered with colleagues to develop "how-to" guides for 12 popular community engagement techniques. In order to set up technique users for success, I also created a "Before You Begin" checklist.
Each technique features a real-world use case by city staff and is specifically written with city staff in mind. To help city staff become even more familiar with the techniques, I worked with colleagues on a workshop session to help city staff apply these techniques in real-world case scenarios.
City Wide Engagement Planning & Management
After interviewing over 20 community members and reviewing over 30 best practices I worked with leadership to assemble an internal working group in order to start operationalizing community engagement across all city departments. I convened this group on a monthly basis and together we worked with department directors and frontline staff to establish six guiding principles for community engagement and conducted an assessment of staff community engagement capacity.
Within two years we established a ten-step planning, management, and evaluation process along with tailored tools and clear roles and responsibilities.
This new process was piloted using five projects which engaged over 670 residents of which 43% provided feedback on their experience which was consistently ranked with 90% satisfaction.