“Let me put on my sunglasses so I can see what I’m doing.”

— George Clinton, “Mothership Connection”

 

Some time ago, I was proudly surfing my organization’s website with my grandmother.  I was showing her this publication or that project as an update on her granddaughter’s latest antics.  When we came across our organizational tagline, “building capacity for policy change,” she stopped me cold.

“I’m not sure what that means.  I mean, where do you find this ‘capacity’ to build?” 

OK.  There I was.  No jargon to protect me.  What did I really mean?

The very idea of capacity building, though necessary and important, is a bit presumptuous.  We work with people, with communities to draw out their assets and expand upon them — if we do it well — to help them gain greater power and agency over the institutions and systems that affect their lives.  Policy is about how these relationships of power and resource distribution are codified.  It is the rulebook by which much (though not all) of the game is played.  Capacity building for policy change is supporting communities in ways that help them build more power and access to the mechanisms that make the rules.

This work requires that we clearly see the people with whom we work — their assets, their gifts, their networks, their resources as well as their needs.  Although capacity building is indeed presumptuous because we presume there is something there that needs building, even fixing, we operate on the principle that there is a “there” on which to build.

Capacity-building work in communities of color is often challenged by an inability to see the communities’ assets or understand the power dynamics at play.  Oftentimes, when we “capacity builders” talk about communities of color, the conversation immediately focuses on needs and deficits.  Funding is scaled down because there is a sense that there are no leading institutions or infrastructures that can effectively manage resources.  The assumption is that if we are not starting from scratch, there’s at least very little with which to work. 

It’s true that institutional racism and patterns of marginalization and discrimination deprive our communities of many resources, and that resources are not equitably distributed.  Even so, communities of color have led and nurtured national and international movements, catalyzed sweeping policy changes and created lasting institutions — civic associations, political parties, service centers, neighborhood watch, churches, schools — that continue to shape “mainstream” practice.  In short, these assets should not and cannot be ignored.  In fact, these institutions deserve greater funding, support and recognition for their contributions. 

Cultural competency can help us do a better job of interaction and analysis of group dynamics and even assessing community history and assets.  However, too much focus on group dynamics and culture can lead us into developing approaches centered on changing individuals or building skills — not changing structures or building power.  And a “lens” or view with culture as the priority can take us further toward defining problems in ways that place blame on the very communities we seek to strengthen. 

When we work from a narrow portrait perspective that focuses our capacity-building resources on fixing “communities with needs,” we lose the context and history that provide a landscape perspective.  A landscape analysis surfaces issues like how communities have coped, who is privileged and who is harmed by the current set of rules.  By engaging in capacity building with a racial justice lens, we develop a contextual analysis that allows us to construct the power landscape. 

 

Developing a Landscape Analysis: Some Key Questions How are resources and power managed? Who decides? Who was left out? Who has influence? Who got paid? What are the relevant policies that shape our work? Identify laws leading up to and resulting in the current policy/proposals, administrative rulemaking, regulations and other processes.  Is there more or less transparency and engagement? What is the impact of these policies and practices? Who is privileged?  Who is harmed?  What does disaggregating information by race, by class, by gender, etc. reveal?

 
As my grandmother so aptly pointed out for me, building capacity for policy change is not merely “fixing” communities or augmenting what they have “inside.”  It is moving the lens back and identifying the relations of power that shape where capacity comes from in the first place.  It requires a kind of “seeing” that is as much political and socio-economic as it is cultural and relational.  And if we do it right, it will add up to real change.

 

Makani Themba-Nixon is author of Making Policy Making Change (Jossey-Bass, 1999) and Executive Director of The Praxis Project, a nonprofit organization that works to build community power and capacity for policy change.  For more information on The Praxis Project, please visit them on the web at www.thepraxisproject.org.

 

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