Posts About Peer to Peer Advocacy

Every year, Vital Village Network community members nominate an Unsung Hero—an individual who extends themselves beyond expectations in their community or organization as a leader in maximizing child health and well-being. We assemble a committee, we review each nomination, and we celebrate the recipient with the network!

“[My] spirit, body, and mind have been enlightened.” This quote captures the essence of Community Advocacy: From Knowledge to Action, a course that Vital Village Network piloted at Urban College of Boston in fall 2016. Over two years ago, the network began reflecting on a widespread inequity that exists in our community: community residents devoting hours of their free time to community transformation efforts but receiving no tangible benefits. Though service is an enriching experience, we wanted to identify more meaningful ways to contribute to their long-term personal and professional development. 

What does it mean to listen? Too often, we catch the words but not the story, not the underlying meaning. This October, twenty residents came together for the third annual Social Justice Mediation Institute, a 40-hour training led by Leah Wing and Deepika Marya, to learn a new way to listen. 

In December 2015, the Vital Village Network hosted a 2-day Leadership Summit. Day 1 was an intensive 1/2 day Dynamic Leadership workshop focused on developing leadership skills and building community capacity, and the Day 2 was a full day of presentations, workshops, panel discussions, and breakout sessions led by our community partners (and featuring a keynote address by Chief Resilience Officer for the City of Boston, Dr. Atiya Martin). 

Last October, Vital Village Network, in collaboration with Medical-Legal Partnership Boston, and the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), hosted the second annual Social Justic Mediation Institute (SJMI). Learn more about what distinguishes SJMI from other training models, the strength of our participant class of 2015, and how we collected data to measure program outcomes.

There’s something to be said about the complexity of community exchange. It is often said that it takes a village, but what it is about the village that incites the kind of positive growth and transformations that empower and change lives?

The First Teacher Team, with Dinah Shepherd, founder of First Teacher, Maritza Ortiz Bennett and Nikole Huertas, Parent Leaders at First Teacher, certainly took on this challenge head first. Their progress over the 90-Day Challenge exemplifies how tools from the Leadership Summit can be used to jumpstart and propel the great work our partners are already doing! Read more to learn about how Dinah, Maritza and Nikole engaged parent voices and used Plan-Do-Study-Act Cycles and tracking improvement strategies from the Leadership Summit in their work at First Teacher. The Leadership Summit may have been months ago, but the tools and lessons learned can carry on to the present within the work of our Network!

We are working to leverage existing data systems to establish benchmarks for assessing the well-being of children and indicators of risk and protective factors.  Our goal is to improve the quality of data and tools that allow community residents and community institutions to promote family and community safety. We hope these benchmarks and shared data system will be a catalyst for community engagement and accountability.

Many partners entered the 90 Day Challenge at unique starting points.  Not only did they have unique aims, but many had plans that were specific to different organizational structures. Guided by critical feedback from our network meetings to improve transparency and opportunity within the network we created a BigTent online communication platform dedicated to supporting partners to utilize the network throughout the 90-Day Challenge. We all wondered: would anyone use it?

Mirlande Joseph is a Community Organizer for the Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition (MFFC). In this role, Mirlande worked with MFFC to engage residents in planning and opening the Woolson St. Community Garden this past fall.  Following the leadership summit, Mirlande set her 90-day challenge aim on building a neighborhood association in the Woolson Street neighborhood.  AmeriCorps VISTA member, Meghna Nandi, reflects on her work around community mobilization and her process of learning what community engagement looks like in real life – in “real time”:  Through Mirlande’s emphasis on building strong relationships and listening to stories, she realized that community engagement is not about having a set “one-size fits all” roadmap, but about constructing the circumstances that empower residents to draw their own roadmap.