The past five years have been ones of pervasive struggle and disruption. With a focus on building economic democracy and self-determination in communities facing the harshest impacts, CoLab has leveraged these moments to accelerate change.
Going places where strategic planning can support more equitable solutions, we’ve worked with faculty and placed students in hotspots of crisis:
- in the Bronx after a failed plan to turn the world’s largest armory into a shopping center offering dead-end, low-wage retail jobs
- in East Brooklyn in the face of a threatened closure of a critically needed safety-net hospital
- in the Colombian Pacific Region in the wake of civic strikes to demand critical infrastructure in Afro-descendant communities
- in the Amazon following environmental disaster
And in 2021, during the pandemic, we partnered with entrepreneurs in Brooklyn to support procurement of urgently needed medical equipment and with community groups in Colombia to support farmer’s markets for emergency aid in its national strike for better lives.
As access to capital remains a critical challenge in marginalized communities, we work with socially innovative banks around the globe seeking to invent new financial tools and practices that serve the real economy in marginalized communities.
In every case, our students, faculty and community have played vital roles, providing hands-on planning support to communities seeking to shape their own development trajectory based on the knowledge of the community itself.
In each place we go, work in disruptive moments has taught us and our partners about larger systems failures in ways that help shape our longer-term interventions. In large part because of this approach, over the years students have consistently identified CoLab as the go-to place for grounding their educational experience in real-world problem-solving.
Students today want to make an impact in the world and they want to do it now — to leave school with practical skills they can quickly deploy to make a difference in confronting the global challenges they will inherit. Students want to work with innovative leaders at the margins who are facing the harshest impacts of institutional failure, learning alongside them about co-creating knowledge, developing smart solutions , and reinventing institutions toward building a better world.
Over these past five years, CoLab has emerged strengthened by the disruptions: more focused, more deeply engaged with community partners, and ready to launch the next generation of students as practitioners and scholars who, with community leaders, will carry forward the work of building economic democracy and self-determination.
Dayna CunninghamExecutive Director
We face a trifecta of existential threats—climate change, wealth inequality, and racial divisions—that threaten to stall multi-racial democracy.
The journey to create a future that is equitable and green must be led by people at the margins of society.
During this time, our work has been guided by a set of strategic challenges:
From students and academics to civic leaders, partner organizations and members living closest to the margins, CoLab has worked tirelessly to accelerate social innovation and equip those working to achieve self-determination.
Roger Green
Co-Chair, Coalition to Save and Transform Interfaith
“CoLab has served as an essential partner as our community/labor coalition endeavors to address the healthcare disparities that originate from the structural racial and economic inequalities challenging Communities of Color within Central Brooklyn. Our coalition celebrates the social and intellectual capital that originated from CoLab students and faculty. Colab provided invaluable contributions as we engaged in participatory research, participatory planning and the development of the Brooklyn Community Collaborative and Citizen Share Brooklyn non profit organizations. As a result of the contributions originating from CoLab students and faculty, we believe these new non-governmental organizations will empower Communities of Color to co-create innovative approaches that build health and wealth in traditionally marginalized communities.”
Aditi Mehta
DUSP MCP ’14, PhD ’17
As an MCP, Aditi worked with CoLab as a New Orleans Fellow, supporting community organizations rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina. Later, as a PhD candidate, she received CoLab’s Marilyn Jacobs Gittell Activist Scholar PhD Fellowship and helped to design CoLab’s Participatory Action Research course. Always drawn to community-based, action-oriented research, CoLab gave her the vocabulary and theory to talk about the work she had been doing and to argue with academic rigor for the importance of community work.
Now an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at University of Toronto, Aditi’s first course, Youth Arts and Engagement in the City, was based on CoLab’s philosophy: it involved a partnership with a neighborhood organization and provided opportunities for youth to use media to tell the story of redevelopment processes in their neighborhood.
Bruce Richard
Advisor to 1199 SEIU, Community Health
“Working with MIT CoLab has been extremely valuable to the work we have been doing in the Coalition to Transform Interfaith Medical Center, The East Brooklyn Call to Action, and all the civic infrastructure formations that are coming into being. CoLab has enabled us to think as an ecosystem and not just as separate parts operating independent of each other. Without the intervention of CoLab, we would not currently be able to imagine the immense possibilities that lie before us to strengthen community to truly be powerful voices in their own tomorrow.”
Michael Partis
Executive Director, Bronx Community Development Initiative
“MIT CoLab is and remains one of BCDI’s most valued partners in the work of advancing economic democracy. Our ecosystem-system approach to community-wealth building is strengthened through CoLab’s data and policy analysis —from their public podcast series with policy-makers, to collaborating with our staff as thought partners and strategists. Their commitment to racial and economic justice aligns to the community-power building in The Bronx. BCDI looks forward to continuing to build a just, equitable economy with the CoLab team.”
Nick Iuviene
DUSP MCP ‘10
Nick came to MIT with organizing experience and looking for a place to do community work and critical practice. He found that at CoLab. CoLab encouraged him to complicate his work intellectually and dig in deeper. It challenged his ideas, supporting them or knocking them down.
It was also an important link to stakeholders, helping to put him in relationship with powerful labor leaders of color seeking to make important changes in the way unions work. There was no place else at MIT where he could engage with such powerful change makers in such a rich way. After graduating, Nick worked for CoLab for over 8 years before launching his own tech startup in 2019.
Lily Song
DUSP PhD ‘12
As a PhD candidate, Lily wanted to do community engaged research and CoLab was the place to do it. CoLab was a great space to learn by doing, be with activists, and learn about justice planning. “CoLab makes space for radical traditions across the world. Radical feminism is Korean culture and using that as a planning repertoire was critically important to me.” Her experience with CoLab helped her navigate and address issues of informality and transport planning in Indonesia in a post colonial ethnic democratic society.
During her tenure with CoLab, her work focused on community development and justice, exploring the new green economy, and research on organizations that were working on the margins, including in healthcare and workforce development. This eventually grew into her dissertation. CoLab continues to shape her work. As a senior lecturer and the director of the community design and learning initiative at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, the work she does with students in partnership with community-based organizations in the greater Boston area is informed by her time at CoLab.
If the past five years have taught us anything, it’s that disruption has become a constant and we can expect it to be a mainstay in the years to come, with accelerating climate change, vast and growing wealth inequality and racial/ethnic divisions that threaten prospects for multi-racial/ethnic democracy worldwide.
Yet, within the currents driving these daunting challenges, are bright spots, places in which the upheaval has cleared a path for transformation, for new ways to work collaboratively—with new and more diverse voices at center—to shape the kind of future that is more equitable and democratic.
The past five years have shown us that CoLab can build multi-sector ecosystems for change with unlikely partners ready to respond and innovate in the most disruptive moments, co-creating new models of development that center economic democracy and self-determination. We can co-found entirely new organizations such as Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative (BCDI) and Brooklyn Communities Collaborative, that take on a life and critical mission of their own and exponentially increase the reach and impact of the work. We can train political and community leaders through initiatives like CoLab’s Mel King Fellows Program to take critical lessons back to their spheres of influence so that civil society, government and the private sector can serve as a solution and not a hindrance to equitable housing and healthcare. And we can train the next generation of leaders through CoLab programs like the Racial Justice teach-in that CoLab runs and through Participatory Action Research.
