DMCI Breakout Sessions for Climb Higher Colorado

Feb 21

Community Voice Program Manager, Ana Gadson, and Community Action Program Manager, Darcie Ezell were asked to lead two breakout sessions for Climb Higher Colorado who is part of the Keystone Policy Center. The sessions were titled Authentic and Meaningful Community Engagement and were presented to 25 fellows taking part in Systems Impact Institute (SII).

What is Systems Impact Institute?

Started in 2018 as an opportunity to build personal leadership, communication skills and relationships through an exploration of power, policy and politics and organizational planning. SII runs from September through May and is a cohort model fellowship that brings together a mix of Colorado based non-profits, which this year span ECE-Higher Ed. This cohort represents 25 Fellows across 11 participating organizations. They are at the stage in the fellowship where they are identifying the areas of systems change they will focus on for the rest of our sessions (SII runs from September through May) and that systems change effort can address either internal or external systems.

The Breakout Sessions

Ana and Darcie presented about the mission and vision of DMCI and how community voice is the cornerstone of the three pillars of Voice, Action, and Leadership. We talked in-depth about the DMCI Voice Process and our unique method of community engagement starting with Dialogue Circles and how these conversations become our qualitative data points by transcribing and coding and then creating a final product in the form of a report to the community. Much of the focus turned to the importance of data and how critical it is for accountability to the community as well as funders. We also talked about our personal approaches to community engagement in past organizations and how that helped to create the path to our current positions at DMCI. These sessions were very interactive and engaging. The audience seemed genuinely interested and asked a lot of questions.