Community catalyst
Regional to Statewide
Location: Western Massachusetts
Dates: 2025 - 2026 (phase 1)
Partners: Woven Roots Farm, StarLuna Consulting, Branch Methods, TogetherWorks, Collaborate Climate
Funding: Barr Foundation
Role: Project Management Team
Creating a vessel for community-based organizations to uplift their work, connecting to resources, power, and each other.
For many regions, community organizations provide a safety net in emergencies, resources ranging from healthcare to housing, places that bring joy, and spaces to feel a sense of community and belonging. In other words, community organizations nourish and sustain community resilience -- even when they don't think of "building resilience" as part of the work they do.
In 2025, the Community Catalyst Project brought together and funded a set of social justice-oriented organizations from across rural Western Massachusetts who were willing to imagine, grapple with, and design a new model for funding and resourcing community resilience. Together, these organizations built an understanding of their work as part of a network of regional resilience, and co-developed a framework for designing and implementing projects that would be accountable to a shared set of community-rooted, justice-oriented aims.
Year one of this project involved:
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Strengthening relationships and a community of practice;
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Acknowledging and uplifting each other's work;
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Defining goals and a shared purpose for this work together;
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Learning from each other through capacity building sessions and group discussions;
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Co-developing a set of criteria for resilience projects that reflects a locally-defined, justice-oriented approach to building resilience;
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Co-creating a process for peer-to-peer mutual support in project development.
This project will continue for two more years, whereby the community organizations will design and develop projects with each other's support.