[link removed] [[link removed]]
Dear John,
I'm Jahmese Myres, the Leadership Development Director at PowerSwitch Action. I’m writing to you from the San Damiano Retreat Center in Danville, CA, where we're in the middle of our network’s 9th Transformational Leadership Retreat! During this period of connection, reflection, and fortification, I am reminded of why it’s so important to take the time and space to connect to our authentic leadership together.
This email is a bit longer than usual, but I wanted to share with you the story of how and why we're growing a culture of transformational leadership .
[[link removed]]
Our movement requires bold leaders at all levels who can face big challenges with love, care, and compassion. Equipping people — especially people of color, young people, queer folks, and women — with the skills and support to step into their leadership has been a core pillar of our approach for over two decades. Our network supports leaders through a continuous practice of relationship building throughout the year, while also holding spaces to step back, reflect, sharpen technique, and deepen relationships.
This year, our network drew on this experience to launch new leadership programs and expand proven models. Together, our programs nurture people at multiple points on their leadership journey: from renters and workers stepping up for the first time, to community champions preparing to hold elected or appointed office, to staff at our affiliates and national team.
Training folks taking their first steps into leadership
Our network is supporting a new generation of working-class folks, women, and people of color as they step up to demand better for their families, neighbors, and coworkers. In 2023, PowerSwitch affiliates created and revamped 11 new leadership development programs, like OCCORD and Missouri Workers Center’s new academies that teach community members and workplace leaders some of the core skills of organizing. Such programs are already having immediate impacts, such as when participants in LAANE’s Adelante Spanish-language leadership training advocated for and won $1.5 million in the Long Beach city budget to provide legal support for vulnerable renters.
Preparing community champions to step into co-governance roles
When people from marginalized communities take on positions of power, they face myriad obstacles to making change in systems designed to thwart them. To enable community champions to govern effectively, our network has developed programs that equip leaders in elected office, government commissions, and institutions like major nonprofits with the knowledge and networks to lead with their values.
In 2023, our affiliates built up these programs, such as CAUSE and Puget Sound Sage, which both expanded their trainings for public officials and civic leaders. Graduates of these programs are applying this values-based approach to governing for their communities. 83% of Sage’s fellows are currently drawing on their training in their roles on boards and commissions across the Puget Sound region. And two participants from Stand Up Nashville’s Boards and Commissions Leadership Institute are applying what they’ve learned as they join Nashville’s city council. “To be with a group where you can really show up with your authentic self and that is met with warmth and compassion, it gives you confidence to bring that outside of that space into spaces of dominant culture. It fills your bucket in a way that says, ‘I can do this.’”
-- Siobhan McEwan, a 2023 fellow of Sage’s and co-founder of their newest fellowship chapter
Equipping staff to lead the way with head, hands, and heart
We know that our network is stronger when we have a deep bench of leaders on our team. We start with internship programs that provide college students and young activists with a running start, like CPI’s Students for Economic Justice internship that graduated its 18th class this year.
"Through the connections we built and the collective knowledge we shared with each other, I’ve become more rooted and clear in a vision of leadership where impact and change can be contributed without dependence on corrosive uses of titles, authority, or resource inequalities.” We continue with programs that build the hard and soft skills of our staff, such as through Power Up, a six-month bilingual project where we dove in deep with our affiliates to hone our campaigns challenging corporate power. And we hold space for the current and future leadership of our network to reflect and connect, like our weeklong Transformational Leadership Retreat (now in its ninth year).
-- Carlos Fernandez, Executive Director of Grassroots Collaborative, on his experience at the 2022 Transformational Leadership Retreat Through initiatives like this we fortify network leaders with the practices, resilience, and relationships so necessary to sustain this work in challenging times.
Across the network, 10 different emerging leaders stepped into senior leadership positions in 2023, building up our vision and capacity from the national team to our affiliate organizations. By intentionally supporting network and community leaders as they forge paths toward a multiracial feminist democracy, we bolster the civic institutions and people power needed to engage in authentic democracy for the long term.
Lauren Jacobs [[link removed]] In solidarity,
Jahmese Myres
Leadership Development Director
P.S. - Want to learn more about how we’re building power together at PowerSwitch? Look out for this and other stories like it in our 2023 Year in Review , coming to you next week!
PowerSwitch Action
1305 Franklin St.
Suite 501
Oakland, CA 94612
United States
[link removed] [[link removed]] [link removed] [[link removed]] [link removed] [[link removed]]
DONATE [[link removed]]
If you believe you received this message in error or wish to no longer receive email from us, please unsubscribe: [link removed] .