Partners For Change Tri Valley’s Vision:

Our vision is that everyone has enough money, meaning, and friends to thrive.

We seek to inspire and equip our community to reduce poverty and remove the barriers that stand in the way. Our goal is to help cut the poverty rate of our participants by 10%. Studies have proven that 10% is a tipping point, after which change spreads more readily and rapidly. A 10% reduction is an achievable and measurable goal — and it’s enough of a change in each community to tip the scale toward a prosperous and strong nation.

Our model (NETworX) focuses both on what individuals can do to change their situations and on what society can do to remove the barriers that stand in their way.  We know that when people are brought together from all socio-economic levels and from all backgrounds, they can form strong networks.  Using an assets-based approach to celebrate the strengths of each individual enables us to become mentors and allies to each other and in so doing, we can support each other along the way toward a sustainably flourishing future. Further, knowing that those who experience housing instability, food insecurity, or educational inequity have often fallen through the “cracks” or are lost in vast bureaucratic systems, Partners for Change seeks to create opportunities for community mentorship in which participants can share their knowledge and experience to cultivate resources and support to achieve a more sound foundation.  In so doing, these strong communities become networks full of community members who walk together and support each other as they surmount the barriers that any one person cannot do alone.

As a community grows and learns together through our educational program, we shift from a deeper understanding of holistic poverty and its impacts on our individual lives to a broader focus on the systemic barriers in our community that impede our community as a whole.  As we examine these barriers, through acts of “reciprocity” we begin to do the hard work of dismantling larger, systemic barriers to a sustainably flourishing future.  In this way, participants who may have needed help in the beginning, now become agents of change, actively working to dismantle systemic poverty for all.  Thus, this kind of work has a multiplier effect: as the community grows, so does our ability to address issues associated with poverty in our community.