In addition to the transcribed discussion here, you can download or listen to the audio here. For more on ROn's thinking and work, see the list on his author page.
Maggie Rogers: |
We're pleased today to be joined by Ron Dwyer-Voss. Ron has been involved in community organizing work for more than 35 years and is on the faculty of the ABCD Institute. His work focuses on helping communities discover the power within them and mobilize their assets before looking for outside resources. |
John: |
Welcome everybody and Ron, so pleased that you could be with us. I notice that we've sort of advertised you as talking about the relationship between neighborhoods and local governments and we'll look forward to that, but I'd be interested first to know how you got to where you are in terms of the work you're presently doing in this sphere. |
Ron: |
Thanks it's really great to be here. I was really fortunate in that at a fairly young age I fell into the field of community development, and in particular the community engagement and organizing side of it. Came to Chicago right out of college, having done a bunch of issue-based organizing, in part to see what Harold Washington was doing with local government. It seemed like a new, progressive way to do urban government. And then within six months two things happened. One, Harold Washington passed away and the local city government got taken back over by less progressive elements, and I was introduced to Jody Kretzmann. Both those things really set my path. |
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I did a lot of organizing in Chicago. Trained out of the sort of traditional Alinsky model, but with Jody in my ear the whole time, realizing that there was a whole bunch of untapped local power in that model. Came out back to the west coast because I'm from the west coast and I missed it. Did rural work for a number of years. Did some local, multi-family affordable housing developments for a few years, where we stabilized people's homes and then by giving them a safe and affordable place to live, but then engage them and identifying their gifts and talents and what they could do to make their surrounding community stronger now that they were stable. |
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And then for the last 12 years, been just mostly engaged in a number of endeavors around ABCD training and practice and some organizational stuff. And then I do a fair amount of what's broadly categorized as evaluation work, but basically helping folks in communities and their organizational partners to find their own stories and measure their own impact and be able to lead that engagement rather than being told by foundations or vendors what they should be counting or measuring. So I really enjoy that work as well. |