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In May 2021, the Ogden Civic Action Network Board of Directors approved the creation of a Community Leaders Network with the first cohort beginning their training in October 2021 and finishing in June 2022. The Community Leaders Network has become the “flagship” intervention for OgdenCAN.

Purpose of the Fellows

The Community Leaders Network is a paid fellowship program established to provide educational and professional opportunities for residents of the East Central neighborhood of Ogden, Utah to develop as leaders in their community. Through this program, fellows are trained in civic engagement, community development, and engaging local government and other anchor institutions. Fellows are given the opportunity to create their own impact through a community organizing project. The vision of the Community Leaders Network is for fellows to emerge as public leaders in East Central Ogden and beyond and to maintain their impact long after their fellowship is completed. Fellows’ community organizing projects will directly nurture community assets and strengthen OgdenCAN’s five areas of focus. Civic competence and engagement in East Central Ogden as a whole will broaden and increase as volunteers from the neighborhood engage in interns’ community projects.

The curriculum created for the fellowship covers an seven-month time frame. This curriculum trains interns in Asset Based Community Development, introduces them to community resources, acts as a guide with milestones to complete their own community organizing projects, and includes principles of leadership, community organizing and mobilization, civic and democratic engagement, and public advocacy and activism.

We assert that the single and most fundamentally important element of infrastructure in the East Central neighborhood is the people who live, work, worship, learn and play in this already vibrant and vital community.  These residents are untapped reservoirs, changemakers, and leaders in their own right and represent a large missing piece of critical engagement in the larger conversations happening in our community regarding issues related to high rates of poverty, structural racism in the community at large, and poor health outcomes – among others.

We believe that active civic participation through a community leaders network model such as this will build valuable capacity in our community and empower residents to engage in self-determination. It will then contribute to better health outcomes, stronger community engagement, increased social and cultural capital, and ultimately democratic wealth building.

Cohort One

The community organizing projects for the first cohort of fellows was impressive.  The projects included the following:

• Climate Solutions Market
• Power in Parks
• Cultivating a Collective Understanding of the Renter/Landlord Social System in East Central
• Locally Written Children’s Books to Inspire Literacy
• Change in My Neighborhood: Collective Infrastructure Improvements 

Cohort Two

Cohort #2 began in October 2022 and completed their program in June 2023. From observations of our first year, as well as through a formal plus-delta conversation with our first cohort of fellows, emerged the goal of increasing the overall social capital of fellows and OgdenCAN as an organization.  We refined our curriculum to reflect this social capital goal and tightened the focus of the training on engaging with neighbors and facilitating emergence, allowing neighbors to inform interns what direction their community project should take. We also shifted instruction to be more active and experiential, so that, for example, rather than talking about the uses of a capacity inventory, the interns actually made a capacity inventory and then talked about why it was useful. 

One of the most significant updates has been the community group project, led by the Training Coordinator. By working with a real community asset and including hands-on experience, interns were given the opportunity to see the tools and methods of asset-based community development and design thinking applied to a real case study. Interns actively recruit community members to participate in the process, conduct interviews, synthesize data, plan workshops and develop community interventions.

That year's community group project was “Oasis Community Garden: Growing Community not just Plants.”  Looking at Oasis Community Garden as a community asset, the community leader fellows were given the opportunity for an applied, experiential learning project by helping to create more links between the neighbors of the local community garden and the garden's managing organization. Neighbors were engaged in one-on-one interviews to learn their perspective, invited to share new ideas for strengthening the community around the garden and then invited to try out (or validate) those new ideas. Suggestions ranged from organizing monthly potlucks/social events to changing signs in the garden to be more inviting and making the process for renting the garden easier for neighbors to host birthdays, BBQs and other neighborhood activities there.

Our 2nd cohort of fellows have implemented community organizing projects addressing:

• Effective Community Composting 
• Walkability of Taylor Avenue 
• Little Libraries and a Culture of Literacy 
• Neighborhood Art Walk

 

 

Eva Barnett - Eva was one of our first fellows. She has continued on with the work and has helped shape big changes in the East Central Neighborhood.  Eva has continued her work to make Lester Park safer and more usable by local residents by convening city planners, parks & recreation, local landscape architect Shalae Larsen and other community members.  Eva’s efforts have resulted in new soccer goals and she has made progress on a stalled plan for a park renovation. Eva has also worked with the Ogden City, Ogden/Weber Health Department and Get Healthy Utah to put together funds for a new crosswalk with flashing lights to be installed for increased safety for neighbors and children to have more access to the park. 

She has collaborated with the public library and Golden Hours Senior Center to lend out activity kits for outdoor play. Last spring while waiting for things to progress at Lester Park, she set up an outdoor play program after school at James Madison Elementary. 

Her current effort is the First Friday Art Stroll in Lester Park to get more neighbors feeling a sense of ownership in the park while showcasing the work of local artists. Eva has also been working with MJ Munger to streamline the process for community members to use the Community Education Center for their own classes.  She looks forward to the prospect of a series of simple, free education classes to be taught there. She also heads up our community breakfasts. 

 
Community Breakfasts

Join the Community Leadership Network Program