www.maketheroad.org www.sojustlead.org Make the Road by Walking is a community-based group that promotes economic justice and opportunity in New York City. Based in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, it began in 1997 by organizing immigrant welfare recipients, but soon expanded its focus to combat the systemic economic and political marginalization of residents throughout the city. "Our vision is to build leadership from the grassroots," says Oona Chatterjee, the group’s co-director. "We think this is the way to bring about changes that benefit low-income New Yorkers." In the last year or so, Make the Road has made significant refinements in the way it provides legal services, emergency food, English classes, youth programs, and academic assistance – enabling it to serve a larger population more effectively than ever before. The group owes some of its recent success to Social Justice Leadership (SJL), which conducts six-month training programs for social change agents in New York City. "We’re working to build a new generation of grassroots leaders with the individual and organizational skills, analysis, and competency to lead a renewed social justice movement,"says its director, Ng’ethe Maina. To that end, SJL provides training, organizational development, and assistance in developing alliances to community-based groups throughout the metropolitan area. Make the Road was in need of some help. In less than a decade, it has grown from an all-volunteer organization to one with a full-time staff of 27 plus a membership base of some 2,100 community residents. Through a series of SJL courses in leadership, Chatterjee, fellow co-director Andrew Friedman, and two of their colleagues upgraded their skills in the areas of management and transformative leadership. They say their ability to communicate with and manage their staff has greatly improved. Moreover, their coworkers have learned to value authenticity and presence when communicating with one another. "For a long time the organization was small enough that personal relationships and individual drive made it grow and held it together," Chatterjee recalls. "But when you get to a certain size, you need systems and structures to make that possible. The lessons we learned at SJL provided the systems and structures to retain the feeling of dynamism and humanity while working on a much larger scale." With a critical mass attuned to the value of personal awareness and contemplative practices, Make the Road has seen its institutional culture mature considerably. Senior managers are using what they learned to reshape the way the organization works. They recently adopted several models for planning, staff management, and staff development introduced during the SJL programs. A new method for identifying key results and building programs around them has been particularly useful in clarifying staff responsibilities and priorities. "Setting those goals has pushed us to a new level of performance," Chatterjee says. "When we articulated that stuff, we were able to sort it out by who was here to do the work and assign the work to people in a systematic way. It also allows people to evaluate their work according to these stated goals, and it makes it possible for our board to evaluate our work effectively instead of anecdotally." She and her colleagues aim to continue their work with SJL, whose lessons have helped them work more effectively for social change. "The opportunity to reflect and be challenged is crucial, but it doesn’t happen very often," says Chatterjee. "The world we’re working in indicates that we need pretty ambitious and transformative solutions, and they need to be developed. If people aren’t stopping to think, then people aren’t going to be able to innovate."