What if you had the tools to not just imagine a better world, but to actually start building it right now? What if the dream you have for your community is the seed of transformation needed to foster real and lasting change?

All over the world, people are refusing to wait for governments, corporations, or fragile economies to help them meet their needs. Instead, they’re creating their own stability in the face of inflation, political turmoil, and constant disruption. How? By building community self-reliance projects that meet real needs without relying on money or the larger economy. Think: thriving urban gardens, timebanks where skills are exchanged instead of dollars, Buy-Nothing groups, and neighborhood swaps. These aren’t quick fixes, but stepping stones toward community thriving, resilience, and sustainability. That’s what Visionary Organizing Lab’s Community Self-Reliance (CSR) School is all about.

• Key Skills
  • Participants who complete the program will leave with a concrete roadmap and the skills to start and/or expand their own projects. The key skills they will learn include:
    • Asset-mapping
    • Needs assessment methods
    • Storytelling/Narrative-building
    • Community development and building (CSR) project planning and strategy
    • Systems-thinking

• Learning Objectives
  • The CSR School is rooted in the six components of Visionary Organizing, a framework that shows how small acts can scale into collective power. Classes are taught by Matt Birkhold and Angela Kim and consist of a mixture of large and small group discussion, reflections on our experiences, discussion of readings on community self-reliance case studies, and imagining new possibilities. As a result of the CSR School, participants will:
    • Write their own systems autobiography and have a better understanding of their own gifts and skills to implement their unique CSR project.
    • Develop a vision and plan for their own community self-reliance project.
    • Be able to name examples of community self-reliant projects and understand how these projects are able to meet community needs while depending less on money.
    • Be able to define and understand the importance of community self-reliance projects and how they can repair nature, communities, each other, and ourselves.
    • Have a tool to connect to their inner wisdom and understand that different outcomes are possible when we follow our inner wisdom.
    • Know the differences between different kinds of needs and see how to meet them all through cultivating interdependence.
    • Have a better understanding of how their life is influenced by the economy and larger culture.
    • Be able to understand and explain why the world currently feels so chaotic.

• Teacher-Facilitator: Matt Birkhold is a cultural worker whose facilitation and teaching practices aim to connect people to their creative capacity to understand and transform the world. He has facilitated project and organizational visioning, planning, execution, and culture building for CSR groups around the US, trained foundations how to fund CSR, is currently writing a book on CSR projects, When Things Stop Working, and has made multiple films on CSR projects. He is a sought after facilitator and groups and people he’s worked with have gone on to better understand their work, deepen it, and create dignity affirming cultures to support it. He lives in Baltimore with his partner of 14 years, loves house music, and has been involved in movements for over twenty years.

• Location:
  • Impact Hub Baltimore -- 10 E North Charles St Suite -- Baltimore, MD 21202