Mel King Community Fellows (MKCF) Program
In order to create a more just and equitable future, spaces are needed where the knowledge and tools to drive change in communities can be developed.
Each year, the Mel King Community Fellows (MKCF) Program brings together leaders from around the world to explore innovative models of planning and development, examine new methods and approaches to enable these models, and investigate practices for collaborative innovation.
In 2018, the MKCF class brought together thirteen New York City and State legislators from the Bronx and Brooklyn. The Fellows spent a year learning about models for community-driven economic development based on shared ownership and wealth, and exploring how to advance economic democracy through City and State government. The fellowship began with a week-long learning journey to the Mondragon Cooperative in the Basque region of Spain, where the Fellows explored how the cooperative has created an ecosystem of institutions that support worker-owned businesses and community wealth, the underlying public policy infrastructure enabling that ecosystem, and how the cooperative has helped achieve a high level of social and economic equity locally.
Moving from inquiry to action, the culminating event of the fellowship was an historic joint New York City and State hearing on economic democracy, held at New York City Hall. At the hearing, Fellows, community organizers, residents, business owners, and others, shared their visions of an economy that works for New Yorkers of color and the work they are doing to build shared community wealth through democratic ownership and control of economic assets. Jamaal Bailey, an MKCF 2018 alum and current New York State Senator representing Senate District 36 in the Bronx, has used his position in the legislature to advance cooperative enterprise development and employee ownership. In December 2020, he appeared with NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio and Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson to announce a new municipal program--the largest in the nation--supporting employee ownership and conversion.
PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH
Institutional change projects are strengthened by including the voices of those closest to the challenges. People with first-hand experience with the sharp edges of institutional failure often have essential ideas about the solutions that can be most effective. To this end, CoLab uses Participatory Action Research (PAR), a methodology that “values the significant knowledge people hold about their lives and experiences. PAR positions those most intimately impacted by research as leaders in shaping research questions, framing interpretations, and designing meaningful research products and actions.” Public Science Project
Clinical Education
At CoLab, we are elaborating a formal pedagogy and skills-training that prepares planning professionals and scholars with the analytical competencies to understand and address structural racism, and the skills-based competencies to work alongside marginalized communities to develop solutions to the most pressing problems. Inspired by the pedagogy of clinical legal education, we have developed a program that:
Immerses students in field-based practice to learn skills and methods of community knowledge co-creation
Provides students with hands-on project-based experience learning about institutions through institutional change efforts
Focuses specifically on addressing racial disparities and exclusion
Prepares students with the intellectual grounding, the theory and epistemology of collaborative knowledge-creation with communities
Leverages student effort to help democratize access for communities to planning expertise
Provides reflective practice and self-assessment rubrics to help students develop a sense of “professional self-examination” for continuous improvement of their practice.
