Last week, the Praxis team took some time out of the office to connect with each other in the beautiful space at The Land on the traditional land of the Pomo Indians in Sanel Valley. Our co-created agenda helped us re-center ourselves and engage in deep conversations about our work and the needs of the Communities of Praxis in order to move towards our collective vision for the future. Highlights for staff were the immersive and healing sound bath from our Somatic workshop and the opportunity to connect with our teams to create team charters. Read the People and Infrastructure team charter below:
The mission of the People and Infrastructure team is serving Praxis' employees equitably and with care, while promoting an environment to help Praxis become an employer of choice and leader in best practices for the FSP community. We advance our mission by providing HR expertise, empathy to the Praxis community, and transparency in our processes and practices.
Our team's mission supports the mission of Praxis by offering clear HR policies that contribute to social justice and racial equity practices within the workplace while adhering to labor, compliance, and HR regulations. We are striving and evolving to provide support through a Black feminist framework approach that counters traditional systems of white supremacist (dominant) culture. Our individual expertise also furthers our work.
We serve Praxis' employees internally. Externally we are accountable to the governing bodies such as the Board, of Directors, and various government entities. The scope of our team's work includes being a one-stop shop for all employee matters. To do our best work we need emotional intelligence, HR subject matter expertise, open communication, and integrity.
Our team leads are Angel Nash and Tonya Taylor. The team(s) we collaborate with the most often are Finance, FSP, and other Praxis departments based on their hiring needs. Our north star goal for the next year is staff retention and staff satisfaction.
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From Food Justice to Liberation: Building Community Power through Community Gardens & Urban Farms
We are thrilled to share a brief highlighting the lessons learned from our Community Gardens and Urban Farms Learning Circle from Spring of 2022: From Food Justice to Liberation: Building Community Power through Community Gardens & Urban Farms. We are excited to host a webinar on November 15th, during which we will hear from participants of the Community Gardens and Urban Farms Learning Circle.
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The Praxis programs team continues to work to center community in policy and power-building efforts:
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Annual Communities of Praxis Survey: This summer Praxis conducted our annual survey of basebuilding organizers in our Communities of Praxis network. The purpose of our annual survey is to understand the priorities among Communities of Praxis organizers, keep community interests centered in Praxis’ work with philanthropy and institutional advocates, and cultivate spaces where partners can share their expertise to build stronger collective movements. We look forward to sharing out the results broadly in the coming months, and are so thankful to the incredible work being led by our partners.
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Policies for Action Learning Circle: On October 4, we hosted the first session of our Learning Circle which brought together individuals from government agencies, community basebuilding organizations, and academic institutions across the country. Through the Learning Circle, participants were able to learn more about declarations that have named racism as a public crisis and the work that others are doing to advance racial justice more broadly. Our next session will be centered on strategic planning.
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Rural Community Power Building Learning Circle: We are looking forward to hosting our second Learning Circle taking place on November 3 and 4. During our first Learning Circle in August, we held space for relationship building and reflecting on the definitions of rural, power building, and inclusivity among BIPOC rural organizers. Our next session will center capacity building and digital organizing in rural spaces.
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Call to Action! If you are seeking Student Loan Debt Relief, STOP and click here to fill out your application. The Biden-Harris Administration is providing up to $20,000 in relief for eligible borrowers. It literally will take only 5 minutes with no login or documents required. Do this for yourself, your bank account, and your peace of mind!
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Call to Action! Reminder, to be considered for the limited Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) waiver, you have until 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on October 31, 2022 to submit. This is completely different from the Student Loan Debt relief mentioned above. For more info click here.
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Our team is looking forward to expanding in the coming weeks and months.
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On the not so distant horizon we will be welcoming a new Director of Development, a Senior Director of Programs, and a Digital Media Manager to support our work and mission.
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Additionally, please be on the look out for the Praxis 2023 Health Justice Summer Internship application. Please expect the application to go live by mid-November 2022!
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Movement Building Fiscal Sponsorship...
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Praxis is presenting at the National Network of Fiscal Sponsors (NNFS) conference later this month. We will be presenting on our framework of fiscal sponsorship, and hope to establish an ongoing learning and accountability community navigating questions such as: How can we reimagine the fiscal sponsorship relationship to be one that is deeply interdependent, grounded in trust, and adaptive to ongoing learning and expertise sharing? How can we recognize the inherent tension in working within oppressive systems, while building power in communities to reimagine and transform those same systems?
Since we’ll be at the NNFS conference at the end of the month and the holidays are approaching, we’ll be taking a pause with Fiscal Sponsorship Office Hours for the remainder of 2022, and will resume them in 2023! If you're someone who has general questions about fiscal sponsorship, or specific questions about our program, feel free to email Blair at blair@thepraxisproject.org.
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Praxis's Research and Training team has had the honor of collaborating with partners to create shared spaces for learning an action.
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Resilient Placer: From May-August, Praxis facilitated a process to understand the social determinants of health with a youth-centered collaborative focused on working towards health equity in Placer County, CA. In August, we completed our three-part series with Resilient Placer with a convening of key stakeholders, during which we shared out youth priorities and participants identified key actions steps to advance health equity.
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Invest Health: Praxis presented on power building at Invest Health’s “Operationalizing Equity-Promoting Policies to Improve the Social Determinants of Health” convening in September.
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Blue Zones Project: Praxis is collaborating with Blue Zones Project staff to facilitate a series of workshops on deepening community partnerships, building and sharing community power, and a train-the-trainer session this fall. Participants are bringing the tools and resources shared to their own local work to support authentic community relationships.
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CareQuest Institute: Praxis is offering a series of workshops for the grantees of CareQuest Institute this fall. We are facilitating discussions on community engagement, policies to operationalize racial justice, and action planning to make a tangible impact in community-partnered work for health, equity and racial justice. We are also offering integrative sessions: informal, co-created spaces that highlight the connection between racial justice and healing—a space that stresses the importance of rest, play and pleasure in our work towards liberation.
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Columbus Health Equity Summit: Praxis presented on Language Justice at the Columbus Health Equity Summit in October. Led in collaboration with Tomás Aguilar from United for a Fair Economy, this workshop focused on valuing language justice by recognizing the social and political dimensions of language and language access, while working to dismantle language barriers, equalize power dynamics, and build strong communities for social and racial justice.
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