Ujima: Collective Work, Collective Impact in 2024

TCI is closing out 2024 ready for the work ahead and bolstered by collaboration with Collective Work, our racial and economic justice coalition made up of Black and brown community leaders across Virginia and whose name comes from the Kwanzaa principle Ujima. Ujima — celebrated on December 28 —  means Collective Work and Responsibility and teaches us to build and maintain our community together, to make our community’s problems our problems, and to solve them together. Over the past few years, Collective Work has played a significant role in shaping our Collective Agenda and driving legislative advocacy. This year has been even more impactful and engaging, and we are proud to share more about our work together in 2024.

We started the year off strong, alongside partners in the halls of power during the 2024 legislative session. Together, Collective Workers:

Throughout the summer, member organizations hosted events to promote and educate their communities on Collective Agenda — the people’s agenda. Collective Agenda draws from TCI’s experience in policy and data analysis, coalition building, and, most importantly, conversations with community leaders and trusted partners to envision a future where everyone in Virginia has the resources they need to thrive and to spotlight specific state policy solutions that will help get us there. With events in Harrisonburg, Norfolk, Loudoun County, Hopewell, Fredericksburg, and Richmond, TCI was “on the road” to show up for our coalition members and support their work in communities.

Later in the summer and early fall, Collective Workers met with TCI policy analysts in our Meet the Analyst series. In these sessions, we discussed wins and challenges from the past session and what members are hearing and learning from their communities. Our ongoing conversations are helping us to build upon our Collective Agenda and co-create priorities specific to the upcoming legislative session. We also met in Portsmouth for a Fall Retreat and in Richmond for our annual Policy Summit, where they hosted a Collective Visioning and Dreaming Session, participated in skills-building sessions, and learned how to navigate the state budget and Virginia’s database for tracking bills (Legislative Information System or LIS).

We shared in Collective Agenda wins! Together, we advocated for and won historic K-12 education funding and rejected harmful tax cut proposals that would have drained resources from our communities. We are strengthening our community brain trust around tax policy that helps families make ends meet and broadening discussions around safer communities and what the word safe means and feels like to our neighbors. 

What’s ahead? We will soon launch Collective Agenda in Spanish! With a focus on language justice, we will address a barrier that some communities face in fully participating in our democracy and decision-making processes. We will be present during the upcoming legislative session, lending voice to issues that our neighbors care about. We will continue community education and will strengthen our collective relationships with a peer-to-peer shadowing effort. We’ll be growing! We are looking to add new members and are exploring Lynchburg, Martinsville, Wise County, and Danville. Lastly, we’ll finalize Collective Investing, a framework that coalition members collaborated on that provides best practices to funders looking to invest in coalition-based policy work. 

But first, we rest. Collective Work joins TCI in Collective Rest through the end of the year. We will see you in the new year, refreshed and inspired by our collaboration with Collective Work and their support for one another in this incredible work.

Categories:
Budget & Revenue, Decriminalizing Poverty, Economic Opportunity, Education, Health Care, Immigration