Everyone deserves to live a good life: a life of wellbeing, safety, agency, and belonging. This life requires a stable home surrounded by a caring community, healthy air and water, and quality services, as well as dignified work and time with loved ones. But this is out of reach for far too many. Access to these essentials is limited by a powerful ecosystem of political actors, narratives that rationalize scarcity and suffering, and institutions that fail to solve or actively perpetuate problems. People impacted by injustice are organizing movements for change, driven by a vision of belonging for all. Step by step, they are transforming unjust systems and building alternatives that can make this vision possible. The Community Power and Policy Partnerships Program (CP3) works at the intersections of these movements to build alignment and shared power that can advance shared visions. With our community partners, CP3 is advancing belonging as a global norm by connecting and scaling local strategies ― across places, issues, organizations, and ideological silos ― to build a broader and deeper movement for belonging.
Areas of Work
Our current work focuses on three connected systems ― economy, housing, and governance ― and the meta-narratives that shape them.
Belonging Economies: How can society transition away from extractive economies that generate extreme inequality and create new economies that strengthen people’s connection to the places we call home, ensure thriving ecological systems and health, equitably distribute power and wealth, and value the dignity of all work?
Reimagining Housing Justice: How do we build public institutions and movement ecosystems that have the capacity to ensure stable, affordable, and dignified housing for all people? How do we ensure that housing policies meet residents’ diverse needs and aspirations?
Collaborative Governance: How can our governance systems be structured to ensure a responsive, effective government in which all people can meaningfully participate? How do we build deep partnerships across government and community that foster shared power and responsibility for co-creating solutions that advance belonging for all?
Meta-narratives for Belonging: How can movements shift the constructed logics that define how we as a society believe government and the economy should function, who it should serve, and the possibilities it can achieve?
Our Approach
We build trusting relationships and facilitate deep collaborations to co-design strategies rooted in shared values. We partner with organizations to define and build alignment around strategies, such as a framework for scaling community-owned housing that we co-created with two dozen community organizers and development practitioners from across California. We also facilitate capacity building through initiatives such as Radical Imagination for Racial Justice, a 3-year collaboration to support a cohort of over a dozen organizations across the US in implementing participatory action research and cultural strategy projects.
We create powerful research that transforms policy and public narratives. Our research in 2016 was instrumental in passing the first local rent stabilization policy in California since 1986, and in 2025 helped design a ground-breaking polluter-pays tax revenue initiative. In 2022 we co-facilitated the formation of the Bay Area’s first regional housing agency, and later contributed to an overhaul to California’s Equitable Community Revitalization Grant program, delivering over $100 million to equitable cleanup and redevelopment of contaminated land in environmental justice communities.
We organize convenings and communications that foster broad networks and understanding. Our Real Solutions podcast series is co-sponsored by 10 community, labor, and nonprofit media partners, and has engaged over 3,000 listeners across the US and 30 countries in conversations about building a cross-issue policy agenda for belonging. In 2024-25, our Reimagining Urban Planning for Belonging series reached 5,400 people and engaged hundreds of planning professionals in critical discussions about the future of the field through a workshop session track at the American Planning Association’s national conference.
We develop tools and resources that enhance capacity of community-based organizations and networks. Our unique strength is participatory process design, which we practice and also share out through tools and resources for community organizers and advocates to build power for transformation, such as those highlighted in our Transformative Research Toolkit. We also co-create tools for narrative change with our partners, such as the Mass Liberation and Climate Justice video and curriculum.
