On Saturday, September 29, ONE DC led a half-day workshop titled, "Becoming the Change We Want to See: Building Shared Leadership" at the Servant Leadership School in the Adams Morgan neighborhood in DC. Facilitated by ONE DC members Abby Cartus, Ka Flewellen, Ron Harris, and Dominic Moulden, the session drew on ONE DC's experience with implementing shared leadership and decision-making across the organization.

Utilizing storytelling, role-playing, power analyses, and visioning exercises, the members described the process of building relational power across race, class, and gender lines in a city where power is typically employed to divide and conquer.  They challenged attendees to think outside traditional nonprofit structures and develop new practices rooted in collective responsibility and accountability.

The dozen participants left energized with a renewed awareness of the power of organized and conscious people to together create a more just, equitable future. Several attendees discussed the possibility of future collaborations among ONE DC, the Church of the Savior's antiracism initiative, and the Potter's House café/bookstore.

Rosemary Ndubuizu is a native Californian with ethnic roots in Nigeria. She spent four years being a cultural lover of 'the District' (aka Washington DC). Rosemary adores the persistence, tenacity, and fearlessness of DC residents. She is honored that she had the opportunity to organize with many of them for over three years. She is fascinated by the wonders of community organizing, particularly non-traditional, people of color approaches to organizing, which are often rooted in radical dreaming and collective transformation. Rosemary began her lifelong pursuit of systemic, political retributions against inequity and injustice and communal demonstrations in love while studying in college. In fall 2010, Rosemary joined Rutgers’ Graduate Community to pursue her doctoral studies in Women and Gender studies

Ka Flewellen
Organizer
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Ka Flewellen is a scholar-practitioner in the field of organization development with a special focus on non-profits and community-based organizations whose agenda is social change, diversity and inclusion, citizen engagement in public policy, and client-centered social programs, with high quality program delivery, strong governance and committed leadership.  She designs and facilitates leadership development training with a special focus on youth, strategy development and strategic planning, board development and training, and aligning organizational vision, values with organization infrastructure.
 
As a scholar, Ka Flewellen is a doctoral student at Fielding Graduate University in Human and Organization Development, faculty at American University/NTL Institute
Masters Degree in Organization Development and Marygrove College’s Social Justice Masters Degree Program.  She received a certificate in Democracy, Civic Engagement from Fielding Graduate University.
 
She served as Assistant Director of the AU/NTL Masters Degree Program at American University.  She maintained her consulting practice and provided services to union organizations, AFSCME and SEIU, providing consulting services to grantees of the Environmental Support Center, as well as community-based non-profits as well as American University programs.  She is an Emeritus member of the Board of Directors of the Peace Development Fund, a national foundation, where she also served as Interim Director for Programs and Training.  In that capacity she designed and implemented the BASE Initiative (Building Action for Sustainable Environments) that provided grants and organization capacity-building support to 17 communities (African-American, Indigenous  and Latino) who suffered contamination from the production of nuclear energy and nuclear and chemical weapons.  While Director of Strategy and Outreach for the Preamble Center, a small think tank, she facilitated the convening and incubation of the National Black Environmental and Economic Justice Network, composed of over 90 community-based organizations fighting environmental hazards in their communities.  She has over 25 years of experience in international, national and community activism.

Dominic Moulden
Resource Organizer
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Dominic Moulden has more than two decades of experience as a community leader, community organizer, and housing rights educator.  He has created several local businesses by fostering economic development aimed at helping entrepreneurs and low and moderate-income urban residents gain economic equity.  Dominic has given lectures on organizing, social policy, economics, philosophy and theology at Howard, Georgetown, and George Washington Universities. He is passionate about creating a democratic workplace and shared leadership, which focuses on expanding community organizing to the next level nationally and globally. He taught at the Freedom School, an annual community education forum focused on popular education, human and civil rights for youth and adults to promote justice and equity centered community learning. He taught at the Combahee Drylonso School, a community-organizing institute sponsored by ONE DC, which teaches transformative community organizing and social justice theory and practice.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard
ONE DC Board Chair/President
Leadership Team – Administration and Organizational Management Committee Co-Chair
 
Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Ph.D., is a political economist specializing in economic development policy, Black political economy, and popular economic literacy. Her research focuses on democratic community economics, cooperative businesses, worker ownership, and racial wealth inequality. She has taught in the African American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, and the Economics Department at Howard University.

Though a resident of Washington, DC, Gordon Nembhard currently teaches at John Jay College, City University of New York. She is a member of the board of directors of ONE DC and a co-founder of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network; the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy; and the Democracy Collaborative.

In addition, she is a charter member of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives; and a member of: Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO) Newsletter editorial collective, the Association of Cooperative Educators, The Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, the Canadian Association for the Study of Co-operatives, and the National Economic Association. She was appointed to the Black Enterprise Board of Economists in October 1999.

Jessica has been an active member of ONE DC’s Right to Land and Housing campaigns, and the precursor Equitable Development for Shaw campaign with Manna CDC (ONE DC’s former name). She was one of the team that negotiated ONE DC’s Community Benefits Agreement with Broadcast One Partners for Parcels 33 and 42.

Allison Basile
Secretary, Shared Leadership Team
 
Allison has been a member of ONE since 2009 and a Shared Leadership Team member since 2010. She is drawn to ONE DC out of her desire for transformational, not transactional, social change.

Allison is from Columbia, Maryland and studied Economics, Swahili and International Development at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the Metrics Officer at Grassroots Business Fund and a founder of Hub DC and the DC Time Bank. She is also working to build a cooperative movement in DC.

Patricia Penny
ONE DC Board Member
Co-Coordinator Organizing and Coalition Building
 
Born and raised in Washington, DC area, I was educated in DC Public Schools.  After high school I attended Washington Business School and currently work as an Executive Assistant to the Director of Information Management IT for the Department of Defense.  I have worked for over 20 years at the Department of Defense and I am the mother of three wonderful daughters.

I grew up in and around the U Street and Shaw neighborhood.   I was displaced from the Shaw area because of poor property management and the increased rent at the apartment complex I was living in.  After writing countless letters and meeting with management, there was still no improvement at the complex so I moved out of the neighborhood.  I still visit my family and friends in Shaw regularly.

My life experiences were the basis for me becoming an organizer for the Right to Housing and Land campaigns. I have witnessed first hand, how poor property management and gentrification push people out of their neighborhoods and homes.

My volunteer work began in 1999 with Manna CDC (currently ONE DC) and SEA (Shaw Educate for Action).  We began researching the vacant property in the Shaw area that could have been used for low-cost-housing for low-income residents. I was part of a group of concerned community members who created Manna CDC’s SEA Program.  We were the first grassroots community group to develop a comprehensive list of vacant and abandoned properties in Shaw.

I am an active member of the Right to Housing campaign. Our organizing is focused around ensuring that housing built on two publicly owned parcels of land  are truly affordable with households paying no more than 30% percent of their income on rent without the use of a Section 8 voucher. The Right to Housing campaign also includes educating tenants on their rights when owners of subsidized developments decided to ‘opt-out’ of project-based Section 8 affordability programs.

I have a passion for organizing to make sure safe, decent affordable housing is recognized as a human right in the Shaw community and DC, particularly for homeless and low income families.

Abby
 
Originally from Pittsburgh, Abby has lived in DC since 2010 and began volunteering with ONE DC in the fall of 2011.  Abby works primarily on membership development and the Right to Live and Work in DC campaign and occasionally contributes to the newsletter.

Thomas Neumark
Housing organizer and website
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Thomas has been a member of ONE DC since October 2011. He was born in London, England and has worked organizing tenants in low income housing in England. He has also developed new techniques around community organizing involving showing people the power that their friends and neighbors give them.

Thomas was an elected official in London for two years. In this role he was responsible for negotiating with housing developers and secured over 140 new units of affordable housing.

Thomas studied housing and regeneration at the London School of Economics. At ONE DC he helps maintain the website and helps with the Right to Housing campaign.

In the Nation’s Capitol, there is an alternative voice and vision around community organizing emerging. And its roots derive from Ella Baker’s approach to organizing. She understood that for far too long, those who were directly affected by the issues (poverty, homelessness, racism, displacement) were rarely integrated into their own liberation struggle.

In her praxis as an organizer, she perfected the concept of participatory democracy. This concept meant that people within movements for social change, those directly affected by the issues make the decisions related to the campaign or movement; minimize hierarchy within their organization to maximize shared power and equity of voice; and utilize direct action as an effective means to compel decision-makers to implement decisions made by the community.

Even though, the heyday of the civil rights movement may be behind us, community organizations like Organizing Neighborhood Equity DC (ONE DC) is infusing this concept of organizing and leadership development within our community organizing model.