May 2026 Practitioner Gathering Harvest - CDLI
On Wednesday May 13th CDLI hosted our fifth Community of Practice gathering of the 2026 calendar year.
See our May 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 2: How do you see “best practices” applied in your work or work happening in your communities? Where were these practices gathered from?
the only best practice we can have is ensuring that community is doing the driving of the work and making sure others feel empowered to take it on when transition happens
funders, boards and supporters often want to know about procedures and frameworks - we can name these based on what the community says - making space for folks in the community to name the best practice
survey and evaluation is important as a best practice and need to make sure that narrative is captured
Topic 3: When things get messy how do you keep people invested?
need to understand who people are - looking for belonging? looking to contribute? looking for mentorship? looking for people to work with shared vision?
are there ways for people to own the work and drive it while having others come along and be mentored by the group in a non-invasive way? so parts of the work can be moved forward by allies in a good way
when there is energy but schedules don’t align is it possible to take a hiatus and re-align, find structures that others are using and try them
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.