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By Martha Cecilia Ovadia, Senior Program Associate, Equity and Communications
2019 Community Change Learning Exchange
December 4-6, 2019 | Montgomery, Alabama
What is the Community Change Learning Exchange?
The Community Change Learning Exchange (CCLE) aims to unlock and share knowledge and to create a safe space for funders to discuss past and current challenges in their community change work. The CCLE is intended to serve as a safe space for dialogue among funders that will allow them to discuss — openly — opportunities, challenges and perspectives in community change work. Ultimately, we aim to share some of these perspectives with the field of place-based philanthropy.
Our #CCLE 2019 theme this year is We Shall Overcome: The Enduring Fight for Freedom and Justice.
About CCLE 2019
CCLE Schedule
We will begin on the 4th with lunch, an afternoon tour of the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice, understanding our history of oppression and a discussion on the implications of systemic racism, and injustice. We will learn about work being done to address these issues. This experience will be FREE for CCLE participants.
We will reconvene on the 5th with an opportunity to learn from people and place. In addition to peer to peer exchange, we will talk with local foundations, residents and community leaders about ways they are working to address issues impacting low income communities and/or communities of colors. We will discuss current challenges, opportunities and innovative solutions influenced by authentic community engagement. The day will conclude with a networking dinner with local funders and community leaders.
On the 6th, we will be led in a facilitated discussion to talk about funder practice and approaches, how we are complicit in upholding systems of oppression and offer advice to one another and the field on ways to advance our practice. We will conclude by 1 p.m.
Dress Code: Dress is casual; there will be some walking.
What are the desired outcomes of The Exchange?
• We hope that the occasional learning, sharing and challenging of one another through authentic conversations in a safe space will enable us to capture, cull and disseminate best practices to the field of place-based community change;
• glean learning opportunities from others to inform our own place-based community change work; and
• advance funder thinking and action on the importance and value of community change work in your own places.
Join us in Montgomery
Alabama is the site of many key events in the American Civil Rights Movement. Our host city of Montgomery offers an ideal setting to explore issues of race, equity and justice. This includes the Montgomery bus boycott, the violence against the Freedom Riders and the marches from Selma to Montgomery.
This city, the capital of Alabama, also represents an important place in the fight for voting rights. As we prepare for the upcoming elections and Census 2020, understanding this history and the complexity of this movement will enrich your experience and broaden your perspective.
Reserve Your Room for CCLE 2019
We invite you to reserve your hotel room now at the SpringHill Suites Montgomery Downtown for a reduced TFN rate of $159 per night. Reserve here.
About Community Change Learning Exchange (CCLE)
The Annie E. Casey Foundationconvened the first CCLE meeting in Baltimore in 2014 and has served as the CCLE convener and executive secretariat, but CCLE is not a Casey initiative. The foundations that hosted the CCLE meetings have been involved in place-based work, including implementing long-term community change initiatives (CCIs). The meeting explored lessons related to community engagement, race equity and inclusion, transparency, mitigating the effects of gentrification and displacement and other essential elements of effective place-based work. Community representatives also participated in CCLE site visits and discussions, allowing foundation representatives to engage with them at a depth that is unusual in many funder-grantee relationships.
CCLE is a vital forum for capturing and sharing knowledge, as well as a community of support for representatives of foundations engaged in placed-based community change. It offers a safe space for discussion and reflection that is hard to achieve when one is immersed in actually doing the work. CCLE augments the work of philanthropic affinity groups concerned with place-based work (all of which participated in CCLE) and provides a platform to inform the field about how to do this important work better. To date, approximately 100 foundation staff and other stakeholders participated in the four CCLE sessions.