Earlier this summer, Archstone Foundation gathered more than 80 grantee partners for a second annual convening, From Connection to Collective Action: Working Together to Defend and Transform Our Communities.
Just last year, when our grantee partners came together for the first time, there was a palpable sense of foreboding. H.R.1 had just passed in Washington, amidst a slew of damaging rhetoric and anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts from the Trump administration. The meeting was purposely private—a specialized gathering designed to overcome confusion and provide needed space to think through a connected counterstrategy.
This year’s meeting built on this foundation, but was decidedly different and more public-facing, serving as a marker of our partner community’s continued growth and boldness. We are excited to share a few takeaways from a packed day together in Los Angeles.
Preceding an information-rich conversation about our current policy environment (for a deeper dive, check out our blog here), we spent our morning on “slow” speed networking. Facilitated by Adelante Partners, this had us moving around to different sections of the room gathering in small groups around “legal & rights,” “direct service & caregiving,” “policy & advocacy,” among other topics. We got to ask each other: “What are you building right now?” “Where are you stuck?” “What do you need?”
Two things became clear. Everyone in the room could identify at least one area they were stuck, and at the same time, there was someone else in the room that was ready for building deeper partnerships, for addressing our challenges together.
The conversation that followed featured our own Jasmine Lacsamana, Cathy Senderling-McDonald, CEO of Catbird Strategies, and Diego Cartagena, President & CEO of Bet Tzedek, to help bring those connections into the context of our policy landscape and enable us to see where partnerships could support larger advocacy efforts.
Rounding out this broader discussion was a narrower breakout session with Alliance for Justice, which dug into the legal and technical details of lobbying and advocacy and gave us a grounded understanding of how our roles fit into the larger effort to move policy in California.
We need to tell our stories differently.
The aging field is full of powerful, emotional stories about older adults, caregiving, families, and the way the system fails them. We heard a need from our partners about improving how we share those stories.
We were excited to bring the Someone I Love campaign to the day as an example of building collective voice to oppose health care funding cuts in California. This campaign engages not only the aging field, but childhood health, community organizing groups, and LGBT rights groups, and many more,
Our partners also participated in an interactive workshop with grantee partner Solutions Journalism Network to begin reimagining the ways we frame problems—and solutions—for our stakeholders and policymakers. The workshop challenged all of us, including our team at the Foundation, to rethink language and descriptions we have used for years to advocate for older adults.
Coalitions start with self-love.
We had the pleasure of having Shiree Teng, a community organizer and storyteller, join us for a workshop on coalition building that helped us look inward for the way forward as a field.
As aging professionals, we are no strangers to coalitions. During the workshop, Shiree helped us identify some candid truths, that coalitions can be misguided, unproductive, and/or lose their way over time. Most importantly, she noted that prioritizing radical self-love can help build the genuine foundation for coalitions to thrive, and by extension, helping the movements they support to succeed. We all walked away energized and full of disruptive ideas about how we come together with a sense of compassion and care, which we will be taking into our work in the coming year.
Our most critical work as a field lies ahead. Archstone Foundation Board Member Jean Accius led us in a reflection on the day, highlighting that trust is the infrastructure that cannot be bought. Our hope is that by continuing to gather in this way, we will build deeper relationships with our partners and greater trust, along with the collective will and power to change the systems of care for older adults.
Jean closed our day with a quote from U.S. Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis: “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year – it is the struggle of a lifetime.”
As a staff and board at Archstone Foundation, we are committed to the struggle with you.
