Resources:
Tools, trainings, resources, and opportunities from the COO Learning Community and other local, regional, and national groups below. Looking for Best Starts for Kids capacity building consultants? Go here.
Have an additional resource to share? Need a tool or resource not listed? Other questions?
Reach out to us at info@coopartnerships.org!
Upcoming Events
In this interactive 2.5-hour workshop we will hear from grassroots organizations who have been able to leverage public resources and affect local policy through the power of community-driven planning, and apply these insights to our own work in place.
In this 2.5 hour interactive online workshop, we will explore these questions with practitioners and reflect on opportunities to plants and cultivate the seeds of community governance within our own planning projects.
Learning COmmunity Tools & Resources
Financial coaching helpline support is 1:1 support for organizations seeking support on financially related questions. It can be a good introduction to 1:1 financial coaching or a quick way to talk through a financial question or challenge.
Reflections from the December All-Partner Convening - a day devoted to connection, learning, sharing, and restoration.
With the Commercial Affordability Summit convening, COO sought to share what we learned from the pilot project, which concluded in 2022, and provide a platform for learning about additional strategies, models and programs that are currently being designed and implemented in support of an equitable and thriving small businesses environment and greater economic justice.
COO hosted a series of two workshops to learn tools and practices around financial planning and sustainability. These workshops offered case studies on how organizations are using financial information and long-range planning to make strategic decisions about their visionary work, and offered tools and strategies to create financially sustainable and health organizations.
Communities of Opportunity (COO) and Grow America (formerly National Development Council) hosted this 3 session Asset Management Training series for community-based organizations or individuals that own real estate, are developing a space to own, or considering ownership in the future.
COO and the Seattle Foundation partnered with Bolder Advocacy to offer a training on the fundamentals of nonprofit advocacy. A PDF of the presentation may be accessed here and a recording of the training can be accessed here.
This conversation with youth leaders and staff from Young Women Empowered (Y-WE) explored how to create supportive and healthy spaces for youth leadership and development — and youth ownership of transformative organizing work.
This workshop focuses on basic fundamentals of what fiscal sponsorship is - including a particular focus on exploring how to best support youth-led groups who are interested in being fiscally sponsored and working with youth-driven projects.This panel included, youth and community leaders who have had successful experiences as a fiscal sponsor and/or as a fiscally sponsored group and what contributed to a healthy relationship.
The first two sessions from the GROUNDED 2022 Speaker Series are now available for viewing! Learn how local organizations and faith communities are responding to community needs and priorities in a time of global pandemic and displacement.
COO Learning Community strategy partnered with Communities Count to bring workshops and capacity building resources on data and evaluation to community partners.
New Toolkits & Capacity Building resources for community organizations — learn more about supports available through the COO Learning Community
To support continuous improvement and learning for equitable contracting work COO sought to document where and how COO has been successful in creating more equitable procurement processes, particularly in the area of contracting, and what gaps continue to exist. The Equitable Contracting Report here, summarized a review of King County COO Community Service Agreements and Consultant Contract processes, best practices from the field, and themes from key informant interviews with COO community partners.
Financial Oversight is an important part of leading an organization – we need good financial information and tools to make sound strategic decisions about our work. In this workshop, Amy Michael and Sarah Tran discuss how organization leaders approach financial oversight. They share some tools and practices you can use at your own organization to check in on your own financial oversight. Recorded March 8, 2022
This virtual showcase highlighted the work of five rooted community groups who worked to uplift the experiences of communities most impacted by COVID-19 and the culmination of their community-led data collection and storytelling projects conducted over 2021.
2021 Community Development Lunch & Learns series’ recordings are now viewable. These alternating deep dives on specific topics and issues of equitable community development, offered opportunities for participants to ask questions and discuss their projects with peers and community development experts.
Videos and recap from COO’s September 2021 Meeting the Moment gathering, Community Conversations on Healing, Advocacy and Building the Future We Want.
In this workshop trainers do a deep dive into capital campaign readiness and the importance of organizational capacity for effective capital campaign fundraising. Regardless of where you are on your campaign journey, if you know a capital campaign is on the horizon, taking steps now to build out your fundraising capacity is critical to your organization’s long-term success.
This workshop provides a high-level overview of capital campaign fundraising concepts and terms including campaign feasibility study, prospect research, gift pyramids, and other fundraising activities within the context of a capital campaign. Also included is a review typical capital campaign timelines and using a community-centric fundraising lens, an exploration of fundraising strategies that can leverage broader support for an organization’s vision and mission by centering on a shared vision for the future.
Recapping the Cultivating Community Transformation discussion and reflections on the journey of COO — the difficulties of shifting systems and institutions to enter into more relational and authentic conversations with community, the early intentions of COO coalesce around shared values, listen to the leadership within communities, and the work to invest in and strengthen community partnerships that can inform and bring momentum to the policy and systems changes needed for a more equitable King County.
Join COO's "Cultivating Community" 6 part series, designed to amplify and learn from the efforts of our community driven partnerships.
In this first session, participants explore community-based strategies to build an equitable and regenerative economy, using the Just Transition framework.
In this second workshop, the focus is on the need to create and build new economic structures rooted in the experiences of our community.
Workshop description: Illuminate what to consider when your communication starts local and then is shared more broadly. How does the strategy and tools change? What are the major thresholds, advantages, and challenges for different scales of audiences? Workshop focuses on scales of neighborhood, city, and county. Watch the recording here.
Learn more about crafting effective messages and getting audiences with local government to meet your goals. Build relationships and reputations that facilitate generative partnerships and ways to influence public leadership and represent your community.
COVID-19 has redefined nearly every process and task. This workshop will look at the digital tools for communicating at various levels (team members, clients, community members, funders) that can keep us socially connected while physically distant. These tools can be power campaigns even without pandemic restrictions.
Explore steps that align storytelling and policy change. We follow a process from idea to advancing community-centered solutions through formal policy change. How to translate culturally specific perspectives for white audiences, while staying authentic to our own communities and cultures.
Hear about what goes into envisioning, planning, and carrying out a communication plan for fundraising and capital campaigns. Explore what networks are important and how to find and build relationships with crucial partners while keeping your community centered and connected through the process.
Explore making appropriate and generative connections with media members. Ensuring your story is expressed in ways that promotes your mission and affirm your community. Exposing pitfalls and traps to avoid. Recording, press kit template and presentation slides available.
Building intercommunity coalitions. How to be in solidarity with those communities under most threat, even when not your own. Starting and maintaining alliances during COVID-19. Workshop featuring guest speaker Colleen Echohawk-Hayashi.
From an analysis of healthcare related administrative records, the data visualization below shows how patterns of residential movement (moving from one place to another) change over time, location, and by type of insurance coverage
Resources from COO partners and wider network:
ULMS Community Support program was created to make sure that young people who end up in the juvenile system are provided with the stability they need to lead safe, healthy, and productive lives
Using campaign messaging that acknowledges how race plays a role in our politics, we are working to create a better future for every one of us regardless of the color of our skin, our genders, or how we pray. We Make the Future Action (WMTFA) serves as an implementation home for the Race Class Narrative (RCN) and other empirically backed messaging.
Economics for Emancipation (E4E) is a seven-module introductory curriculum with interactive and participatory workshops. It offers a deep critical dive into the current political economic system, exploration of alternative economic systems, and dynamic tools to dream and build the economy that centers care, relationship, and liberation.
Through dynamic storytelling and real meeting examples, this training introduces two of AORTA’s facilitation pedagogy principles: remove barriers to full participation and the practice of principled disagreement. Attending the Fundamentals training also gives you access to our Skill Up! Intensive.
Justice Funders is proud to launch a new series of trainings that will cover the fundamentals of philanthropic transformation using various movement principles and tools.
This community of practice is an opportunity for mid-level program staff, senior staff, and board members working within philanthropic institutions, in roles where they have influence to shape organizational culture and practices, to explore a new model for thinking about governance, leadership, and power. Through six bi-monthly three-hour virtual sessions and 1-1 coaching between May 2024 – March 2025, participants will be invited to reflect on their relationship with power and how they use it in their organization.
A Leadership Program & Community of Practice for Grantmakers to Advance a Thriving & Just World. Apply by May 3, 2024 to hear back by June 28, 2024.
Application has reopened for the Nest Guaranteed Income! Are you Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Alaska Native, or Indigenous to Turtle Island? Do you live in King County, Pierce County, or on the Tulalip Reservation? You may be eligible to receive $1250 a month throughout your pregnancy until your child's third birthday!
The Arc of King County is excited to announce TEEN SCENE, a brand new monthly meet-up group for teens age 13-17 with intellectual and developmental disabilities
DPN has released three new policy kits on empowering tenants through increasing housing supply and enshrining tenant protections in state and local law. DPN has also released a Deliberative Democracy Processes policy kit, an open resource for legislators, advocates, journalists, and citizens to learn how states can utilize citizen deliberation models to break gridlock, reduce special-interest capture, and build consensus
Starting a cooperatively-owned business requires planning, analysis, financing and capital investment, and marketing. This 10-week program will provide participants basic knowledge and skills to create Governing Documents, a decision-making matrix, a business plan, a marketing plan, the beginnings of a policy manual, and an overall strategy for membership and capitalization campaigns.
Eligible nonprofits and small business are provided with a free 1 hour virtual meeting with an attorney to help address their commercial lease related legal matters. The appointments are available at various times during the days of Monday December 4th to Friday December 15th.
A recording of the recent Public Health Communication Collaborative webinar, Structural Racism and Public Health: How to Talk to Policymakers and Community Members, is now available. Presenters shared key research findings on framing policy and public-oriented communications about structural racism—an unjust system of laws, procedures, and beliefs that sustain racial and ethnic inequality—and public health
Through this program, New Growth Innovation Network (NGIN), and its partners will deliver meticulously crafted capacity building courses and tailored hands-on technical assistance to fortify partnerships. These offerings are rooted in the understanding that creating enduring partnerships between economic development organizations and community-based organizations are essential to achieving lasting, equitable, and inclusive economic development strategies and funding coalitions.
Using narrative change strategies to address care as a systemic, societal, and communal responsibility will pave the way for seismic cultural, political, and economic shifts in the United States.
The Social Change Ecosystem Map is a framework that can help individuals, networks, and organizations align with social change values, individual roles, and the broader ecosystem. It has two components: shared values embodied in the yellow circle in the middle; ten roles that people and organizations often show up in when they are participating in social change efforts.
Individuals in community-building and social movement work can experience experience difficult interpersonal conflict with comrades or colleagues, too. This workbook offers exercises for self and group exploration to build collective self-awareness and conflict resilience. These tools will help resolve interpersonal tensions and increase the capacity to work together to dismantle oppressive systems and create regenerative ones.
Take free classes with the Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI) at UC Berkeley. OBI helps changemakers build more vibrant, just and inclusive communities and structures. At OBI University, participants will learn about structural marginalization, the processes of othering, and the building blocks of belonging, so we can co-create a world where all are included in our circle of care and concern.
Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle’s (ULMS) Construction Trades Program supports individuals looking to get into the trade and start a new career. ULMS partners with instructors and companies to prepare you for your first job. ULMS offers assistance for tools, books, transportation, and job preparedness, skills certifications courses, and career placement assistance in construction and other fields.
The Assembling an Assembly Guide is a resource for any institution, organisation, city administration, or policy maker interested in running a Citizens’ Assembly. It is also a useful tool for citizens and activists wishing to learn more about what a Citizens’ Assembly is and how it works, in order to strengthen their advocacy efforts.
For those with a criminal conviction in King County that is inhibiting your employment or housing opportunities, the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle may be able to help you.
In Y-WE Tech, young women, trans, non-binary, and gender expansive youth ages 13–19 explore ways to use technology tools for learning, career success, self-expression, social change and the history of women and femmes in technology. Program Applications now open!
The Business Community Ownership (BCO) Fund is a new investment model that addresses the rising cost of commercial rent in Seattle, which often affects neighborhoods and businesses owned by people of color, immigrants, women, and LGBTQ+ people. These communities continue to have less access to capital due to systemic inequities, racism, and related barriers.
Improve your home’s heating and cooling system and save money on your energy bills with a heat pump! King County’s Energize! program is offering heat pump installations in Skyway & White Center with up to 100% cost-coverage for income-qualified households.
The Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI) is proud to launch the Zoning Reform Tracker and share information on municipal zoning reform efforts across the United States. The Zoning Reform Tracker is meant to serve as a hub for documenting zoning reform efforts in the country. It is OBI’s belief that anti-density zoning ordinances play a powerful role not only in propagating race- and class-based exclusion, but in shaping life outcomes for children in communities, and therefore in furthering patterns of negative intergenerational stratification. Restrictive zoning is a powerful mechanism for hoarding resources, with great implications for racial residential segregation, and the former will not fundamentally change without reforming or overriding zoning regulation.
The distinct belonging framework developed by the Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI) includes a set of principles and practices that can root out structural inequality and exclusion of all kinds while helping us turn toward, rather than against, each other. Beyond a call for inclusion into pre-existing structures built to serve only some of us, belonging asks each of us to commit to co-creating new structures built for everyone.
What is the Rethinking Econ101 course? It's a 10-session long online course starting in September, which will:
Guide you through the intellectual foundations of mainstream economics
Expose the myths that mainstream economics espouses
Introduce new approaches to understanding the economy
Equip you with the tools to take action at your school and join the campaign to rethink economics
Did you know that there is a centralized access point for many of the human service organizations serving the Snoqualmie Valley? If you or someone you know needs support with food, transitional housing, employment, financial assistance, or services for youth or seniors, give them a call: 425-470-5921