September 10, 2025
In summer 2025, community leaders, activists, and organizers from the United States, across Africa, and Latin America came together in Accra, Ghana for something new: the Community Power Studio. For one week, participants set aside the usual routines of workshops and reports to try a bold experiment—what happens when grassroots leaders are not just invited to share their stories, but are given the time, tools, and creative freedom to become knowledge producers themselves? The result was a vibrant mix of podcasts, videos, poems, and frameworks that captured lived experience in powerful new ways and pointed to a promising future for democratizing knowledge in social change movements.
The Community Power Learning Initiative (CPLI)
The Studio was part of the larger Community Power Learning Initiative (CPLI), launched in 2023 by Root Change with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. CPLI brings together community leaders and activists from 13 organizations (seven in the U.S. and six from other countries) alongside researchers and academics.
Over three years, this network has asked: How is community power built and sustained? The answers have not come from reports or consultants alone, but from a blend of evidence and lived experience – from grassroots organizers, mutual aid networks, women’s groups, and civil society leaders working across borders, whose day-to-day practice generates insights as valuable as formal studies and expert analysis.
The Challenge: Democratizing Knowledge
Even before movements take shape, grassroots communities—and especially those from marginalized groups—hold tremendous knowledge rooted in lived experience. They understand what sustains families, what fractures trust, and what inequities feel like on a daily basis. Yet this knowledge is often undervalued, overlooked, or excluded from the spaces where decisions are made. Too often, “knowledge” is narrowly defined, sidelining oral traditions and non-written forms of communication and casting community members as “learners” or “beneficiaries,” rather than as knowledge makers with insights that can shape solutions.
This exclusion weakens movements by building on incomplete foundations, while surfacing and validating community knowledge and lived experience provides the raw material for building and sustaining authentic power-building. The act of generating new knowledge, especially knowledge that challenges, reframes, and influences, is itself a critical expression of community power.
Root Change’s Innovation: The Community Power Studio
The weeklong Community Power Studio event was structured to mirror the arc of community life: beginning with reflection and healing, moving into creative collaboration, and culminating in tangible knowledge products. The aim was to compress months of fragmented knowledge work into a focused, creative sprint—where everyone, regardless of academic training or professional background, was a co-creator.
Innovation lay in the methods. By creating videos, podcasts, poems, art, and music, teams captured knowledge in forms that traveled across languages and traditions. In doing so, the Studio demonstrated that knowledge is not only produced through formal reports, but can be created and shared through many ways of knowing.
Creative Teams in Action
The heart of the CP Studio was its Creative Teams. Participants organized themselves into groups around themes that mattered most to them, producing an extraordinary portfolio of work in just a few days.
The Seeding Our Healed Futures Team, having participated in a peace-building summit held in Sierra Leone in October 2024, centered its work on the Healing Circles Bonfire practice pioneered by Fambul Tok. This practice brings communities together for truth-telling, reconciliation, and reintegration after conflict. Their outputs included short videos and a panel discussion that revealed how deeply rooted practices of healing can offer global lessons for reconciliation and justice.
With another group, what began as a single podcast episode quickly snowballed into a multi-episode podcast series—recorded spontaneously during the Studio. The Community Power Knowledge Team explored big questions of community power across six episodes, covering such topics as:
- Mental health and community resilience
- Development experiences in Uganda, Kenya, and Cameroon
- Social movement building in Kenya and Ohio
- Women’s leadership in community power
- Alternative ways of measuring transformation
The sheer momentum was striking. The expansion from one conversation to a series demonstrated how quickly rich knowledge surfaces when practitioners are given agency, tools, and encouragement to create together.
The Healing Stories Team created a two-part video panel called the Community Power Healing Hour, alongside 12 personal “healing story” interviews. Leaders shared deeply personal journeys of trauma, ancestry, and resilience. The outputs highlighted that healing is not just personal but political—a form of regenerative resistance that fuels community power.
The Rural Women Power Team amplified the voices of rural women in Sierra Leone and Cameroon, producing a podcast conversation and companion video interviews. Their work highlighted the often invisible leadership of rural women, challenging narratives that overlook their central role in sustaining communities.
Lessons Learned
The week in Accra left us with important lessons:
- Agency transforms outcomes. When grassroots leaders become knowledge producers, their outputs are more authentic, resonant, and impactful.
- Diverse mediums democratize access. Music, spoken word, podcasts, and visual storytelling allow people with different literacies and cultural traditions to participate fully.
- Knowledge becomes mobilization. The products were not created to sit on a shelf—they were designed to travel, influence, and inspire.
- The process builds power. Co-creation deepened trust and solidarity, forging bonds that extended beyond the Studio itself.
Looking Ahead: Why the Studio Matters
The Community Power Studio is not a one-off experiment, but a scalable model for democratizing knowledge that can be adapted by movements worldwide. By shifting knowledge production from an extractive process into a mobilizing force the Studio demonstrates that when communities are given the space, resources, and trust to create together, they generate knowledge that is rigorous, authentic, and useful—not only to themselves but to movements everywhere. It affirmed a simple but radical vision: a world where communities most affected by inequity are not just subjects of study, but authors of knowledge.
Root Change is committed to refining this approach, both within CPLI and in future partnerships. The lessons from Accra will travel—to other contexts, other communities, and other movements seeking to build power from the ground up.