December 2025 Practitioner Gathering Harvest - CDLI
On Wednesday December 10th CDLI hosted our last Community of Practice gathering of the 2025 calendar. The practitioners who attended chose to stay in one space together and work through two of the three proposed topics.
CDLI extends our gratitude to all community-minded people we had the opportunity to connect with, in the COP space, and throughout the CDLI network in 2025.
See our December shared harvest here or in the slides below. If you have a topic in mind that you would like to discuss with other community development practitioners please let us know and we will include it in a future COP date that works for you.
Some of the key points of reflection:
Topic 1: How might we establish a sense of place in virtual spheres and groups?
Intentional planning for virtual or hybrid can include as many if not more people than in person gatherings.
Need the support people in the room for virtual - tech, co-facilitators, breakout room hosts, etc. even if you wouldn’t have those folks in person.
Invitation before, presence during, including novelty and intentional connection moments, and follow up after make for a good virtual experience.
Next Steps/Actions to take: try a “novel”/fun way of building connection into a virtual gathering in a way that is linked to the content/audience/community.
Topic 3: How to advocate for the changes community members tell you they need? (minimum wage increase)
Living wage impacts almost all of us and yet it isn’t championed by many of us as a main focus of work (paid or un paid).
There are some groups that have structures in place to advocate but for orgs/groups to get into that work there is very little funding or support for this to be a paid role.
Next Steps/Actions to take: Do one thing to support a group trying to coordinate the larger actions.
September’s COP had a similar topic with this key reflection point:
What are the boundaries or people who are advocating for themselves within funding cycles - can groups come together and form coalitions to be supportive in this way?
Click through the slides to view the notes in their entirety, we do our best to include hyperlinks to resources or articles shared.
CDLI looks forward to hosting open space COP’s for Community Development Practitioners, which includes paid and unpaid folks doing community work, on the second Wednesday of each month in 2026. Register to join us here.