Every few years, nonprofits and corporations alike take stock of their progress and challenges to put together a plan they hope will guide their work in the years ahead. Usually, the plan is written by board members or consultants who meet behind closed doors to decide among themselves what’s best for the organization, with limited input from those it serves.

But when Solid Ground CEO Shalimar Gonzales began to dream about the future of our work, she decided to take a path less travelled and try something “radically different.”

What if, she thought, instead of asking agency staff or board members to determine how we can best serve the Solid Ground community, we ask our community to drive the process themselves, as researchers, to lay out the shared path ahead of us?

“It felt to me like a way of centering community that would allow us to live and breathe our values – particularly our belief that people are experts in their own lives and experiences,” Shalimar says. “But to be honest, I didn’t think it was that far out of the box. We wanted to center different perspectives, and as an anti-poverty organization, it makes perfect sense to center those living in poverty. Of course now when I talk about it, people are like, ‘You did what? How? Can you show us?’”

The result of that process – which took place through 17 community listening sessions with more than 70 stakeholders over the last year – is a strategic plan we’re calling “Vision 2030.” Combining data gathered from across our region through our Community Needs Assessment (CNA) with the real-world wisdom of our community, it lays out the priorities and approach that will guide Solid Ground over the next six years as we pursue our work to solve poverty.

We’ll unveil Vision 2030 at Solid Ground’s 50th Anniversary Gala on Wednesday, May 8, as we celebrate a half-century of changing lives while looking forward to the work and challenges that lie ahead.

“Our focus is on creating community. That has always been the work Solid Ground has done, and that’s the work we’ll continue to do,” Shalimar says. “Vision 2030 is all about making sure we’re very clear and committed to that work and how we communicate that out to our community.”

Empowering community to shape our work 

While Solid Ground’s latest approach to strategic planning may be uncommon, the idea of listening deeply to what communities really want and need in order to solve complex problems is far from new. It’s the basis of community organizing, as long practiced by the Fremont Public Association (Solid Ground’s forebear) and many others. But now there’s a body of theory and research behind the practice: Human-Centered Design.

“It’s basically about engaging community members and turning them into researchers.”

~Solid Ground CEO Shalimar Gonzales

Shalimar first encountered the concept early in her career while developing programs at the YMCA for people with chronic diseases. “One of the things I learned was the importance of observing folks and how they interact – and how they live their lives,” she says, “and also talking to people. And when you’re talking to people, you have to take off the hat you wear as an executive and just ask open-ended questions, and fully listen to the answers you get. It’s an approach I ended up using throughout my career.”

But Human-Centered Design is generally used to develop products and programs, not strategic plans. At the 2022 Facing Race conference, Shalimar heard about an organization using Community Based Participatory Action Research, which upends the idea that researchers or nonprofit staff know best because of the academic degrees they hold and the positions of power they occupy.

“It’s basically about engaging community members and turning them into researchers,” says Shalimar. “I thought, ‘This is really cool.’ And I began to wonder if we could combine the two different approaches into a community-led process for developing our community plan.”

The strategy Shalimar eventually developed was based on four key beliefs:

• Community members are experts.
• Community members with lived experience should be positioned as researchers rather than the objects of research and inquiry.
• Communities with lived experience already have the capacity to conduct critical and systemic inquiry into their own lived experiences.
• Knowledge and expertise among people with lived experience can counter dominant cultural narratives that center deficit models rather than strengths-based models.

Many nonprofit boards would be reluctant to give up their authority to set an organization’s strategic plan. But Solid Ground’s board was curious when Shalimar presented this approach and eventually embraced it.

“When Shalimar started introducing the idea of a more community-based approach to planning, the board was eager to learn more about what that process would look like,” says Board Chair Mary Ruffin. “As a board, we agreed that community voices should be the driver of any strategic plan that directly impacts the community. It takes a lot of effort and trust-building internally and externally to do that equitably, but it felt like the right thing to do, and more importantly, it seemed like Solid Ground was up to the task.”

Communities know best how to use resources 

To guide the process, Shalimar turned to Solid Ground’s Community Accountability Council (CAC), a group of people who hold the agency to its values and ensure that its work is informed by real-life experiences. The CAC agreed to take on the work and spent three sessions last summer learning about Human-Centered Design and Community Based Participatory Action Research.

Using data from Solid Ground’s latest CNA as a starting point, Shalimar developed several open-ended questions for the CAC to consider in a free-flowing, anything-goes ideas session last July:

• What happens when people have enough money?
• What emotions do you associate with safe and affordable housing?
• When you imagine it, what does it look like?
• What do people do to get enough money?
• How do people get affordable housing?

“I wanted them to think about how we can get folks housing and resources in a way that recognizes their humanity and allows them the agency to make their own decisions about what they’re doing with those resources,” Shalimar says. “Too often folks in positions of power think they know best about how somebody should use a resource allocated to them. And the CAC was there to check those assumptions.”

The ideas and themes from that meeting later informed the 17 listening sessions co-facilitated by Shalimar and community members in rapid succession over three months. It was at one of the CAC meetings that a member turned to Shalimar and asked what she’d done to get input from young people – because, the member said, today’s young people may be among the adults who require Solid Ground’s support in five years.

“I had to be like, ‘To be honest, we didn’t,’” Shalimar says. “We didn’t seek it out, we didn’t look for it.”

“Too often folks in positions of power think they know best about how somebody should use a resource allocated to them. And the CAC was there to check those assumptions.”

~Shalimar Gonzales

So Shalimar put together a listening session with young people in partnership with Youth in Focus, a Seattle nonprofit that uses photography as a tool for self-expression and personal development. She ended up spending an afternoon taking pictures with them, asking them to focus on capturing pictures of the assets they valued in their communities and their lives.

“They were not afraid to challenge,” Shalimar says. “There were times when they’d ask me questions and I’d give them a nuanced, dance-around-something answer, and they’d be like, ‘Yeah, but why? Why wouldn’t you do it that way?”

Apply to the CAC Now!

Throughout the whole process, the CAC was there to help Shalimar interpret the data that Solid Ground had gathered and question some of the assumptions she’d made about it.

“It was so incredibly helpful to have the CAC bring not only their own lens, but also help me to understand the data that was coming back in,” Shalimar says. “We would not have gotten the same strategic plan without the CAC. It’s incredibly important that those of us in spaces focused on serving community keep our feet grounded in community.”

Solid Ground is thrilled to share Vision 2030 with the rest of our community at our 50th Anniversary Gala on May 8.