Center for Participatory Change (CPC) - USA

CPC's central approach is helping people build small, community-led self-development organisations that take action to promote racial and economic justice and to address other development-related community needs. With support from CPC, these groups plan and implement projects that they themselves initiate, plan, own, and control. These projects fall into 4 categories: relief projects (e.g., a food pantry), support projects (e.g., an after-school programme), development projects (e.g., starting community-based businesses), and systems change projects (e.g., ensuring representation of African Americans on a Board of County Commissioners). The idea is that, as these groups plan and carry out such projects, they will develop the leadership skills needed to collaborate with other grassroots groups across the State to carry out regional development projects and influence policy- and decision-making at a regional and state level. CPC envisions these networks and coalitions as continuing to share ideas and strengthen each other, in the process developing a shared agenda for broader social change.

Specifically, CPC has four programming areas:

1. grassroots organising - mostly through one-on-one conversations
2. capacity building - training topics may include planning projects, running a meeting, managing conflict, working with the media, raising money, evaluation, and group decision making
3. building networks - between groups with common needs and interests, between groups in the same area, and among partnerships that cross racial, cultural, geographic and language boundaries
4. grantmaking.

The CPC site offers several tools related to these programming areas, including "How to Enter a Community as an Organizer" and "Skills and Techniques for Building Community Organizations". Other CPC publications focus on evaluation, which is part of a strategy to disseminate the lessons and skills learned through the practice of grassroots organising and community building.

Economic Development, Racial Justice, Political Development.

Western North Carolina has a number of grassroots groups and organisations - some so successful that they've earned national attention, others struggling every day to survive. CPC saw a need for an effective way for all those groups to share knowledge, skills and techniques. Because CPC is committed to participation and empowerment, it works to ensure that the issues, discussions, and actions of all grassroots organisations involved are controlled by the groups themselves.