Abigail Reyes, UC Irvine Community Resilience Projects

Engaging Facilitating Power means stepping into another level of professionalism and creativity in your work. Facilitating Power can unlock your team's access to their deepest sources of power, namely the ability to navigate the world together in a way that embodies the values underlying the vision of the world that your team is working to create.

Our projects foster community-academic partnerships that honor and build community and climate resilience. We first invited Rosa to serve as a Visiting Community Scholar with the UC Irvine Community Resilience Projects in 2020. We invited her back for 2021 because the design, facilitation, and training work she does with our faculty, staff, students, and community collaborators has become central to our evolution as a team of teams working for social transformation.

Our community-academic partnerships range from supporting youth-led investigation into the levels of lead in the soil to nurturing the worker-cooperative and urban farming ecosystems locally here in Orange County, California. Facilitating Power provides us frameworks for collective inquiry and processes for democratic and creative collective action, helping us find our own ways to leap into the bigger visions we've been cultivating. When the pandemic hit, Facilitating Power stepped up to join our rapid mobilization to build a local health equity-focused COVID-19 response. FP's popular education curriculum design and intensive training for both our university faculty and our team of resident-leader community facilitators shaped our university's ability to meet the immediate need for widespread health equity contact tracing training. In both of these settings, what I have appreciated most about Facilitating Power is that FP's materials, training, and facilitation offers and elicits out of us the language we need to describe the shifts we seek to create. The common language then lets us work together in a "short hand" which allows us to tackle complexity with a levity and swiftness that is rare in community power building contexts.