Nonprofit

The Relational Center

Funded by The Annenberg Foundation, The Relational Center launched a pilot anti-bullying campaign in select LAUSD campuses last year in partnership with LifeWorks, a Project of the LA Gay and Lesbian Center. This campaign, called Get Empathy, focuses on spreading a culture of compassion in schools in our city, leveraging the same Community Action Network (CAN) model we are proposing for our LA2050 campaign…Camp reLAte.

We were also recently awarded a grant from The JIB Fund to provide training and community capacity support to groups and organizations in LA working toward social justice and nonviolence for Angelenos who identify as transgender.

Since 2007, The Relational Center has reached over 3,000 residents of Greater Los Angeles with a broad-based social health strategy that includes mental health care, workforce development for service providers and community organizers, social action campaigns, public dialogue facilitation and capacity building support.

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1 Submitted Idea

  • 2013 Grants Challenge

    Camp reLAte: A Community Organizing Approach to Cultivating Connectedness

    In the last 60 years, Americans have experienced weakening social bonds and deteriorating communities, leading to profound isolation for people from every walk of life. During the same period, we have seen alarming increases in the kinds of human suffering that accompany social isolation. Low levels of educational and economic achievement, a high incidence of violence and crime, shorter life expectancies, and skyrocketing disease rates characterize cities where people are most disengaged from community. In its vast sprawl, Los Angeles has lost a core sense of connectedness, leaving its residents too vulnerable to the alarming indicators correlated with isolation: the erosion of social capital for those who most need it, the loss of social and interpersonal skills particularly among youth, the crumbling of a reliable ground for public dialogue on issues critical to our city, and the associated impact on our ability to make important decisions together.

    We want a healthy, thriving, connected and diverse LA in 2050. So, we MUST come together to change the social landscape. And to do this successfully, we need to accomplish three essential goals: (1) stimulate our hunger to reconnect; (2) build our skills for healthy relating; and (3) create many new connection-sustaining structures. We need Camp reLAte!

    In the tradition of Camp Obama and Camp Courage and adapted from the Public Narrative tradition, Camp reLAte relies on relational community organizing strategies to help Angelenos build capacity for more connection. Camp reLAte will recruit and train 50 Angelenos as “Social Connectedness Leaders” who will serve as catalysts for a social connectedness movement across our city. The campaign will assemble a diverse range of stakeholders representing the different communities, work forces and social movements that comprise Los Angeles. Over two intensive 2-day workshops, this leadership group will learn a relational, momentum-driven community organizing strategy that spreads and maintains the values, skills and practices needed to usher in a new era of deep social engagement, increased volunteerism, active civic participation, and sustained relationship networks.

    Camp reLAte targets four dimensions of social connectedness: emotional intelligence, inclusion of diversity, democratic process, and relational leadership. Building skills in these areas will empower participants to lead their communities in building trust, identifying shared needs and values, and coordinating meaningful change. Camp reLAte will teach leaders to construct a community story about a shared vision for a more connected LA in 2050, a story that unites and inspires our city. Upon completing the training, each Social Connectedness Leader will recruit 10 new participants to a day-long summit with a minimum of 500 in attendance. These stakeholders will be introduced to the relational movement model and learn how to build and sustain a culture of social connectedness by launching Community Action Networks (CAN's) throughout greater Los Angeles. A CAN is a versatile small group designed to incubate a culture of deep mutual support, interdependency, and leadership, to build a thriving social infrastructure that ignites civic engagement, democratic participation and social action. With the emergence of multiple CANs we will activate a viral process that leads to a living culture of connection and creates many localized and accessible structures Angelenos can join to practice connection continuously, develop leadership capacities and spread relational values.

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