What made you decide to complete a practicum with the Regional Response Team?
My entry points to the Regional Response Team (RRT) were during previous work within the housing sector and coursework with the Brown School at Washington University. I first started by helping with a project with one of their community partners, Gateway Housing First, and was drawn to the RRT’s emphasis on community collaboration and systems thinking.
I wanted a more community-centered approach to systems work, and they are uniquely positioned to work with a bunch of community partners in the region. The RRT’s team has a lot of connections with people, which is cool to see because it shows the more collaborative side of nonprofits that asks, “how can we work together to do it?”
What did your work focus on this summer?
Originally, my practicum was going to focus more on community engagement around eviction prevention, which was a project that started in class during the spring in partnership with Action STL and Arch City Defenders (shout out to my group mates Nyx Campbell and Hilary Thibodeau!). The goal was to better understand the role of critical mass — or the number of people needed to make a desired change — in regional collaboration.
Then the May 16 tornado happened. I learned in real time what it was like to have a plan and then realize, for one reason or another, whether it’s funding or a change in leadership or a natural disaster, that I had to pivot quickly. My project shifted to exploring how people in different sectors conceptualize base building and leadership development.
I interviewed people in housing and immigration advocacy to learn how they emphasized community building and developed a simulation model using System Dynamics (learn more here!) to describe how a base changes over time and how it might self-sustain to achieve its desired action, whether it’s community education or formal policy action. Then, I led a discussion with RRT staff about the model.
What did you and the RRT team learn from this project?
The process of developing the model brought up a few key things that impact critical mass: style of base building, nature of desired action, and consequences experienced by members.
- Different Styles of Base Building: Some organizing spaces build their engaged base through leadership, through one-on-ones between potential members and leaders. Others lean on their base to bring more community members in, and some groups combine both. The style a group uses impacts how many people they will need to advance a shared goal.
- Organizing for Desired Action: Goals like policy change, community education, or community building can all be accomplished by organizing. The greater the number of people engaged, the faster the change, but the harder it can be to sustain engagement.
- Effect of Consequences: Participation in grassroots organizing can lead to negative consequences for individuals. For instance, tenants may face retaliation from landlords when organizing around tenant rights. However, those who face retaliation are often those who are most visible in the movement: the leaders. Finding ways to support lead organizers as they face these risks can help advance the work.
How did the practicum inform your personal practice?
In academic settings, it’s very research-heavy, so we don’t talk about the formal practice of community organizing. We often don’t prepare students to go out and actually do this kind of work. I liked having the real-world application and getting to talk to people who do it. Using system dynamics helped me translate and understand organizing so that I can do those things in the future.
What’s next for you?
This fall, I’m doing a practicum with a policy place I’ve worked with in Kentucky, where I’m from, to do community organizing around a policy that we’ve been working on for a couple of years. This background has been really helpful because they don’t focus on organizing, and I can use the model and the connections I made with the RRT team to help build that.
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