Relationships
To know each other enough to call each other expands our abilities, creates less duplication of work, and enables us to be a better resource for others.
We are a West Virginia community development network reinforcing strategic guidance and capacity support statewide.
We strive to be inclusive, impactful, innovative, constantly learning together, collaborative, transparent, and optimistic.
We work to support partners in the community development system, strengthen the system, pioneer new thinking, build sustainable relationships, and emphasize community.
Our long term priorities are to engage young people, build trust within the Community Development system, identify and create collective impacts, increase capacity within the Community Development system, build shared strategies, build and share resources, share success stories, increase funding, and bring about policy change.
The Importance of Building A Network
Networks benefit us all in our individual and collective work by focusing on 4 things*:
Clarity of Vision
Getting on the same page for a vision. If we are on the same page and thinking alike, we will be working collectively even in our own area of work.
Coordination and Collaboration
What we can not do by ourselves that we could do together? Focus on issue areas, geographic areas, and address systemic challenges.
Collective Clout
Allows us to build power to go after bigger resources, like funding or policy change.
Network Building Support
Our Leadership Team — composed of over 60 organizations, individuals, and agencies in the community development field — stepped up this past year to volunteer time to build some of the more formal structures and guiding principles for the network, and to elect the steering committee.
Meet our Leadership Team »
Our Journey to Now
Over the course of almost 2 years (February 2019 – November 2020), over 350 organizations, individuals and agencies came together to map the sectors that makeup West Virginia’s community development system, to identify critical needs and opportunities that could be collectively addressed through that system’s coordination, and to build an infrastructure to manage and coordinate a statewide network to provide strategic guidance and capacity support to the state’s community development system.
Resources
Members of the Network formed Action teams in early 2020 to identify, create, and assemble resources that would be useful for communities and community development, especially during this time. This resource section is an assemblage of that work.