Community Engagement

Every program we run starts with the same rule: we listen first. Not as a slogan — as a design constraint. You cannot route resources into a community that never asked for them, and the channel our cities currently use to ask is broken.

Here is how broken. Researchers who transcribed a decade of city council meetings across a hundred and fifteen California cities found that roughly one in a thousand registered voters speaks at a council meeting in a given year — and those who do skew older, whiter, more male, and more likely to own their home. On affordable housing specifically, the people who show up disproportionately show up to oppose. The one formal instrument we have for reading a neighborhood's will is quiet, and it is tilted. We wrote up the full argument in The Tenth of a Percent.

So this program exists to build a better instrument. Our approach is deliberately honest: instead of provoking people with imagery engineered to frighten them — a temptation we examined and rejected in public — we ask neighborhoods one true question: within a mile of where you're standing, this much edible food goes into a dumpster tonight. What should happen to it? That provokes without lying, the anger it produces points at a system rather than at a person, and the answers it collects are answers to the question we actually asked.

What that buys us is siting information you cannot get any other way: which block has a church annex with an empty kitchen, which neighborhood wants showers more than meals, which corner is dead at midnight and who owns it. When resources eventually move — that's the next program — they land where a neighborhood chose, not where an organization guessed.

Where this stands today: we are a young organization and we say so plainly. The research is published on this site as a seven-part series beginning with Nobody's Job. Our board is seated and governing through our board portal. Our coalition of volunteers and builders is forming now — the survey work described above is what they will run first, one neighborhood at a time.

If listening before building sounds like your kind of work, join the coalition or get in touch.