First up, a window into the way I view work on human rights and climate change.
There are three threads, which spell the somewhat odd acronym “LOM”.
LOCAL: Human rights begin and end close to home, in the lived reality of people’s lives in all their messy complexity and nuance, and in the context-specific dimensions of the places where people live and work.
OPEN: And yet…realizing human rights “here” often means accountability “over there”, where political and economic decisions are made. This means tracing and exposing lines of responsibility and finance, opening up the space for genuine participation in decision-making, making sure government officials and corporations (and the blurry lines between them) are accountable, and ultimately breaking down the imbalances in power that have brought our planet to breaking point and deepened inequality along gender, racial, economic and so many other lines.
MULTIPLICITY: There’s power in numbers. Yet building power in numbers – through organizing, multi-issue coalitions and so on, does not mean erasing the agency and uniqueness of individuals. It means, mosaic style, coming together to create a whole that has more impact and influence than any one person acting alone can.
Doing this is never easy. In fact in many cases the harder it is, the more you know it is working. Just as there is power in numbers, there are power dynamics within those numbers as well (more to come in a future newsletter on ingredients for effective and lasting collaborations). But whatever the challenges, bridging boundaries and finding points of connection is fundamentally important – in itself it is a process that requires attention, continued learning, experimentation, and appreciation of the journey as well as the destination(s).
Second up, do read the latest excellent piece by Oscar Perry Abello at Next City: “Comprehensive Planning Sucks: These Oaklanders want to make it better”.
The city of Oakland in California issued an RFP (Request for Proposals) for a consulting group to lead the process of updating its General Plan: a plan that has a major influence over what gets built and where for years to come. A group of over 30 community-based organizations came together to submit “The Oakland People’s Plan” (TOPP) in response to the RFP. Their group was one of three finalists to present to the city’s planning staff in July, and the city says it will make its decision in September.
The group plans to turn the process on its head. Instead of a lead consulting firm subcontracting to community-based organizations for local input, the groups will lead the process as a collective, and subcontract to private firms as technical advisors. And rather than setting in stone what the city will do over the coming decades, they would put forward a “minimum viable plan” that still leaves open channels for residents to bring in new ideas for implementation over time. Do read the full piece, which also provides helpful history on comprehensive planning in the US more broadly and in Oakland, and ways in which, to date, it has served to deepen divisions by race and income.
Speaking of lasting collaboration, The Oakland People’s Plan includes this key point:
“The TOPP coalition formed in the space of one week, which demonstrates the power of the long-term collaborative relationships and trust built by member organizations over the past years and decades.”