General

Read more about gather@cepa planning cooperative.

What can I do in gather@cepa planning cooperative?

The goal of gather@cepa planning cooperative is to provide a space for ongoing engagement among the cepa community. This includes the community partners we work with as well as our co-op members. It is designed to act as a hub where we share ideas, present proposals, debate, inform, and choose the path forward together. The first step toward taking part is to create an account.

The main building blocks of the gather site are assemblies. These are areas that can be customized as needed with blogs, discussion boards, meetings, proposals and surveys. They are organized into three umbrella sections:

  • community partner spaces belong to the groups we work with as clients. Each partner typically has one or more assemblies within this area, depending on their requirements.

  • co-learning lab is a location for sharing across groups. It is designed to be an information and ideas hub open to community partner and cepa staff groups, and allows us to build on our common knowledge and creativity.

  • cepa governance is an assembly for organizing the strategic and daily management of cepa planning co-op itself. It is designed to allow all members of the co-op to participate and give input about how we operate.

The second main element of the gather site consists of processes. These are designed to organize initiatives that have a specific structure and time period. They are normally tied to an assembly group, and provide a step by step way to participate and track progress from start to finish. An example of a process might be a participatory budget or the development of a neighborhood plan.

We also have the ability to promote general initiatives and organize conferences through the gather platform. These are spaces that allow cepa staff or the broader community to propose ideas or to organize an agenda of events or talks aimed at a wider audience.

Together, these spaces provide an opportunity for the entire cepa community to interact, move initiatives forward, and share our challenges and successes on the way to creating thriving communities.