5-Year Report: Transformation in Moments of Disruptive 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 Cunningham
Executive Director