January 2026 Practitioner Gathering Harvest - CDLI

On Wednesday January 14th CDLI hosted our first Community of Practice gathering of the 2026 calendar year.

See our January 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 can community development practitioners meaningfully engage newcomers and underrepresented groups in community decision making?

• Stat small and meaningful, it starts with meaningful relationships.

• Language is intentional.

• Start with smaller, “safer”, initiatives.

• Always have food.

• Find the common ground.

  Next Steps/Actions to take: just start chatting with folks, set up a table with coffee and snacks, start small.

Topic 2: Opportunities for building community between specific causes to break down the silos of community actions.

• Peer support.

• Open ended space/conversations/goals.

• Openness to multiple solutions.

• Bringing the conversation to a feelings level. Building empathy/shared experience.

Next Steps/Actions to take: Continue the work. Build systems that break/challenge the silos!

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.