The Center for Collaborative Change
Our vision is that Newark will be a thriving community full of safety, health and opportunity.
A thriving city abounds in safety, health and opportunity. Nonprofits, governments, foundations, businesses and individuals work to meet the needs of our community every day. We lack not the ideas, resources or good will we need to make positive change… but ways to connect the dots!
For Newark’s existing institutions – along with new efforts – to fuel a cycle of safety, health and opportunity, we need to focus our collective efforts on high impact initiatives that meet the city’s most critical needs. To do this, we need to understand what issues are most critical to the people of the city and to breaking the current cycle of poverty, violence and disinvestment, build solutions informed by best practices and innovative ideas, and connect and integrate our efforts across sectors.
This is the work of the Center for Collaborative Change.
The mission of the Center for Collaborative Change is to connect people, ideas and resources to make Newark thrive.
Our goal is to improve people’s lives in measurable ways while ensuring that the change process includes and responds to the priorities of its community members.
Our Approach
A negative cycle of poverty, leading to violence, leading to disinvestment, keeps our community from thriving. We can turn that cycle around so that opportunity leads to safety and health and inspires continued investment that leads to more opportunity… The Center for Collaborative Change provides the missing WHAT, HOW and WITH WHOM to create this change by building collaborative solutions that reinforce community assets and are informed by people and research.
- WHAT: Through community engagement, data analysis, and needs assessments, we identify community needs and assets, prioritizing issues with high-impact potential.
- HOW: Through national best practice research and collaborative strategic planning, we design program and policy solutions to meet needs as defined by Newark community members.
- WITH WHOM: With knowledge of the local landscape, we identify partners from all sectors whose leadership or participation will ensure success.
With these essential building blocks, we then collaborate to implement sustainable solutions to critical issues that reinforce community assets and capacity.
Why now? And why us?
The power of collaborative change comes from bringing local intelligence and outside resources together for a common purpose, and placing decision-makers and the people they serve on the same team.
Many of the systems designed to serve and empower communities in poor cities like Newark are broken, resulting in inefficient processes, a distrustful community and needs that go un-addressed. Piecemeal efforts and disjointed funding streams fail to break the cycle of poverty engulfing cities. We need collaborative solutions to fix broken systems. This uncommon moment of national attention and resources in a city with common urban problems makes Newark the place to start.
Newark has dynamic leadership, committed businesses and universities, devoted nonprofits, and citizen change-makers. But in order for all these factors to convert into actual change, we need to establish norms of consultation and restore trust between Newark’s decision-makers and residents.
The Center’s role in Newark is distinctive. By working closely with decision-makers but not being responsible for day-to-day service-delivery, the Center is uniquely situated to identify efforts within the community, government, and other institutions that can be synergized with one another for greater impact.
Our Core Values
In everything that we do, we are guided by the following core values:
- Value Added: We are responsive to the priorities of our community and strive to achieve significant and verifiable results.
- Ownership: We take individual and collective responsibility for our efforts, presentation, and our results.
- Inclusiveness: We value the expertise of all community stakeholders and affirmatively create opportunities for everyone to participate meaningfully.
- Collaboration: We believe that bridging community wisdom and existing resources will create effective, respectful, and sustainable solutions.
- Empowerment: We approach all aspects of our work with the intention that what we do and how we do it strengthens individuals and communities.
