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.
In this 10-week program, you’ll join a cohort of changemakers to learn:

• What CSR actually is and its impact.

• The nuts and bolts of starting and sustaining your own CSR project.

• Strategies to grow or expand what you’ve already built.

• Ways to connect your project to others and build networks that shift entire communities and systems.

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:

• Systems-thinking

• Community development and building

• (CSR) project planning and strategy

• Storytelling/Narrative-building

• Needs assessment methods

• Asset-mapping

The CSR School is rooted in the six components of Visionary Organizing, a framework that shows how small acts can scale into collective power. Together, we’ll practice how the smallest projects can grow into networks of care, resilient movements, and thriving communities.

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.