Our Approach

Systems-Based Organizing: Defined

Systems-Based Organizing (SBO) is a participatory values-based approach to advancing large-scale systems and policy change by strengthening, connecting, and aligning the leaders and organizations within a specific system, sector, or geographic region. In practice, SBO integrates community organizing with leadership development, organizational development, and network development.

Over time, SBO results in an effective, interconnected, and strategically aligned set of leaders, organizations, and networks with the trust, capacity, power, and resiliency to advance large-scale systems and policy change. The diagram above outlines the Systems-based Organizing model, defining the daily work, short-term outcomes, and long-term impact of the approach.

Popular education—the mindset and underlying way of working—is a participatory approach to adult education that is based on helping groups of people learn from their experiences. Sometimes when outside consultants come into a community, they come in as experts, as the people who have the answers. This is the opposite of popular education, and the opposite of how we work. We always begin our work with the assumption that the people living in local communities know best what their community needs and how to provide it. As facilitators or network coordinators, we are not passive or empty. We have knowledge, expertise, experiences, and concrete ideas to offer. But we always start with the people we are working with. We always assume that the folks sitting in the room with us know more about how to make their communities livable than we do. Collectively, they have the wisdom to bring about significant change. They might not have tapped into that wisdom yet, but it’s there. It is our job to help them surface their collective wisdom and build concrete plans for taking their work to the next level.

In our daily work, we use an approach called the spiral model for popular education, detailed in a post, here. We have adapted the spiral model from a book called Educating for a Change (by Rick Arnold and colleagues, 1999).

Participatory development is an approach we use, along with the spiral model for popular education, when we are facilitating a meeting with a group of people.

Participatory development centers upon the planning and implementation of discrete projects that improve a community’s well-being. Unlike some US approaches to community development, however, participatory development starts from the basic belief that everyday people in low-wealth communities are not the target for community development projects; rather, they are the people who determine, drive, and control the entire development process. Participatory development starts from the assumption that marginalized and low-income people best understand the problems they face and how to fix them. Participatory development is notable for three innovations:

1. Its emphasis on participatory group methods, especially Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) methods such as community mapping, wealth and well-being ranking, and preference ranking;
2. Its equal emphasis on the attitudes and behaviors necessary for implementing these methods in a way that is fundamentally participatory; and
3. Its emphasis on building the capacity of groups and organizations to thrive on their own over the long haul.

In our daily work with groups and networks, we have adapted many methods and approaches from the practice of community organizing. Community organizing refers to the process of bringing people together for two main purposes: (1) to get work done that makes communities more livable, and (2) to develop the knowledge, skills, and collective power needed for improving communities.

Some community organizing approaches focus on organizing individuals. Others focus on organizing through institutions such as churches, school parent-teacher associations, or grassroots groups. We organize through anchor organizations and collective impact networks. As mentioned above, anchor organizations are high-capacity organizations that are working on a sustainable economic development strategy across a multi-county region. Collective impact networks are webs of organizations and individuals that are collaborating strategically to move forward a coordinated body of work.

We call our work systems based organizing, which we describe in more detail above. Our vision is to build an infrastructure of leaders, anchor organizations and collective impact networks that work in a coordinated, strategic way across a geographic region (e.g., Central Appalachia). We bring together organizations and networks that have a high potential for broad and deep impacts. We bring together organizations and networks that have the potential to expand the reach of their work by collaborating with others. We bring together organizations and networks that aim to influence systems and policies and shape broader fields of work.

The idea behind wealth creation as a framework is that the resources and assets of rural communities – their natural resources, agricultural produce, labor force, and young people – have for too long flowed out of rural areas, along with income and wealth. In practice, networks and organizations that work from a wealth creation framework use a place-based systems approach to rural development that can restore, create, and maintain wealth that stays in low-wealth areas by simultaneously improving economies, the environment, and social conditions.

Wealth creation is more than a conceptual framework, more than a way of thinking about or understanding rural development efforts. Based on the wealth creation framework, we have developed a set of tools, measures, and systems that anchor organizations and collective impact networks use to develop a shared analysis of the challenges they face in their work; collectively plan and carry out a coordinated, aligned, and strategic body of work; and track, measure, and report their outcomes across a broad geographic region (e.g., Central Appalachia, the Deep South). In addition to providing a useful conceptual framework, wealth creation also provides a set of practical tools that help groups of organizations or networks develop shared analyses, shared plans for action, coordinated and strategic bodies of work, and shared systems for measuring the outcomes resulting from that work.