Problem Solving for the Future - The Role of Rivera Consulting Inc. in the Emerging World
Planning is a critical component of creating social or political change - and it’s a challenge for many organizations to make the time. In the current public health and political crisis, responding to tasks and putting out day-to-day fires is more urgent. But this is the time when planning can make or break an organization. In this time of unprecedented and exacerbated inequity, Rivera Consulting Inc. has been supporting our clients to reimagine their plans for the year, accelerating work strategically, while holding space for their humanity, grief and trust building.
The threats of the pandemic are real to all of us. We cannot escape it and we have to be willing to take this emerging new reality to heal and transform for a just transition. For our clients this means making the time to reimagine, problem solve, and operationalize organizational, development and programmatic solutions. In particular it means that social justice organizations have to prioritize planning, operations, infrastructure & training, and communication to prepare for the road ahead.
One example of this is Rivera Consulting’s work with Unite For Reproductive and Gender Equity (URGE), a youth led Reproductive Justice organization. We began our work with them as strategic planning consultants, and now we are their voter engagement coaches. Coaching URGE in this context means taking a membership driven and multi-state in person voter engagement program in Texas, Ohio, Alabama, Kansas, Georgia, and California. We are supporting them in the shift to an integrated relational, digital, and multi-state voter engagement plan.
Communities of color, queer people, and youth - URGE’s core constituency - are going to be some of the most affected by this pandemic. They will lose their jobs, access to health care, and their homes. At URGE, they understand it is critical for them to be leading the fight for equity, because if they aren’t their community will be left out of the conversation. It is not to say that the issues at hand weren’t previously urgent, but the world as we know it is shifting in an unprecedented way. The status quo hopes to wait out this moment and come out on the other side with their world unchanged. For our clients and the communities they serve, there is no going back. That means the work must begin now.
The challenges of member based organizations like URGE is that while their communities are under siege, they also have to internally restrategize. Together, we support them in mapping the new plan, offer our political and movement expertise, while asking key planning questions. What does it mean to relationally and digitally organize? How does current staff need to be reboarded? What new infrastructure and vendors are needed to execute this new plan? -
While holding their communities together and pivoting their strategy is a lot to hold, many women and women of color in social justice organizations are facing new levels of balance as parents and caregivers. At Rivera Consulting Inc, we hold the multiplicity of this challenge by facilitating and providing space for leaders in these organizations to both reflect on their lived experience, what they need to lead, and how they take care of themselves in order to take care of their organization and members. Change and progress happens at the speed of trust and accountability to self and others.
Our role as we see it is to facilitate problem solving for the future while balancing the grief and stress of today’s work environment. We are by no means prescriptors, our client and their families are on the front lines of this battle and reimagination. Every moment this country is deciding what new community and world we will become. Will we demand radical change to long broken social, economic, and political systems? Or one that leans ignores the destruction of late stage capitalism to all of us, especially for Black, Latino, and Asian communities.
We have a moral responsibility in this time to collectively dream, problem solve, and establish just and sustainable communities. No doubt that those opposed to liberation and equity will fill the void if we do not. We were founded on the mission to produce and shape a more inclusive public commons through co-creation, innovation, and co-advancement of a 21st-century social contract. That has never been more important than now.