Toolkit for Neighbor-led Systems Change

Goal

Transforming Cincinnati Children’s “Neighborhoods as Systems” concept into a replicable, community-accessible framework and toolkit for neighborhood-led systems change.

Strategy & Alignment • Process Facilitation • Framework Development • Theory of Change

Role

  • Designed emergent process to surface insights and co-design a theory of change to articulate how neighborhood-level interventions create systems-level impact

  • Conducted discovery interviews with active community project teams to surface learning, patterns, promising practices and co-create a process journey map

  • Gathered broad feedback to ensure usability, replicability, community accessibility and organizational scalability.

  • Translated process and tools to interactive website to support accessibility and reach

Outcomes

Developed comprehensive "People, Place, and Progress" toolkit and website documenting a four-phase process with 26 tools for neighborhood-led systems change. Created replicable framework positioning communities to identify leverage points, redesign inequitable systems, and build cross-sector coordination that scales upward to influence broader policy and practice changes. Model is being piloted with Cincinnati’s Neighborhood Changemakers Network, a community coalition for collaborative change.

Explore the web toolkit.

Download the pdf toolkit.

“ You navigated this complexity and team engagement in a way that would go unappreciated — it was so seamless… The team is buzzing seeing that they really have something important to contribute to the field.”

— Client partner