Community Organizing and Advocacy

Training To Impact LLC (TTI) has been working alongside communities in the Dominican Republic to support community organizing, strengthen local leadership, and create opportunities for residents to address issues affecting their families and communities.

Our work in Yaiba and El Naranjito began with conversations about health, environmental concerns, and climate resilience. Since then, the work has continued to expand based on community interests and needs. TTI has facilitated programs related to parenting and family well-being and is now introducing additional conversations and educational opportunities around mental health, substance use prevention, and other health and education-related topics.

While the topics may change, our approach remains consistent: bring people together, listen to community experiences, identify shared concerns and strengths, develop local leadership, and support residents as they organize around priorities that matter to them and take action in advocating for their community needs.

Community Organizing Starts With Listening

TTI uses popular education as a foundation for this work. Popular education recognizes that community members bring important knowledge based on their lived experiences and their understanding of their own families and neighborhoods.

Rather than arriving with predetermined solutions, we create spaces where residents can talk openly about what they are experiencing, learn from one another, identify concerns they have in common, and consider what they can do collectively.

The goal is not for TTI to decide what a community needs. Our role is to support a process in which residents can identify their own priorities, strengthen relationships, develop leadership, and take action.

This approach has allowed the work to evolve over time. In El Naranjito, residents organized to create community gardens, while in Yaiba, community members have built support from local businesses, elected officials, and members of the diaspora to form a community group that is now leading neighborhood cleanup efforts, securing garbage cans, and obtaining the tools and supplies needed for residents to carry out the work themselves.

Building Relationships and Identifying Shared Priorities

Yaiba is a rural community where TTI began facilitating community health and climate education sessions in 2023.

Approximately 30 residents participated on the first day of the initial three-day gathering. By the end of the program, participation had grown to nearly 50 community members.

Residents returned, invited others, and contributed their own experiences and ideas. Through group conversations, interactive activities, and popular education exercises, participants explored connections between health, environmental conditions, climate change, and daily life.

They also identified concerns affecting their community.

Waste management emerged as one shared priority. Participants discussed possible solutions and identified the need for garbage cans and better systems for managing waste. Community members later began advocating for these improvements.

The process demonstrates an important part of community organizing:

People come together, identify a shared concern, discuss possible solutions, and determine what actions they can take collectively.

From Community Conversations to Action

TTI has also worked with residents of El Naranjito, a coastal community in Las Terrenas, since 2023.

More than 50 adults and 10 children participated each day and discussed environmental and health concerns while also identifying community strengths and possible solutions. Ideas included neighborhood cleanups, reducing waste, improving shared spaces, growing food locally, and developing a community garden.

The community garden became one of the priorities residents chose to pursue.

What began as a discussion during a community gathering became an opportunity for residents to organize around a shared project and begin taking steps toward implementation.

For TTI, this is where training and community organizing intersect. The session itself is not the final outcome. What matters is whether people leave with stronger relationships, greater knowledge, new ideas, and a clearer sense of what they can do together.

Expanding the Conversation to Families, Mental Health, and Prevention

As relationships with the communities have grown, so has the scope of the work.

TTI is now partnering with Pacific University students in the Master of Social Work to bring parenting education designed to create opportunities for parents and caregivers to discuss family relationships, communication, challenges affecting children and youth, and ways to strengthen family well-being.

We are also beginning to expand the work to include mental health and substance use prevention.

These topics are closely connected to community organizing because prevention cannot depend only on individual behavior. Families and communities also need opportunities to talk about the conditions affecting young people, identify protective factors and concerns, strengthen communication, reduce stigma, and determine how they can support one another.

Mental health and substance use can be difficult topics to discuss. Community-based education can create spaces where residents ask questions, share experiences, challenge misinformation, identify resources, and begin conversations that may not otherwise happen.

Over time, TTI plans to continue incorporating other health and education topics based on the interests and priorities identified by community members.

Developing Local Leadership Through Community Health Workers

Community organizing requires local leadership. As part of the initial work, TTI trained participants to serve as community health workers, or promotores de salud. More than 30 individuals in each community received certificates recognizing their participation as community health workers.

Promotores can play an important role in helping information and conversations continue beyond a formal training. Their role can include sharing health and prevention information, connecting residents with resources, encouraging participation, identifying emerging concerns, facilitating community conversations, and helping neighbors organize around shared priorities.

As TTI introduces topics such as parenting, mental health, substance use prevention, and other areas of health and education, local community leaders can help make those conversations more accessible and relevant.

Developing local capacity is important because sustainable community work cannot depend entirely on an outside organization. Our goal is to strengthen the knowledge, confidence, relationships, and leadership already present within the community.

Popular Education as a Tool for Community Organizing

Popular education allows community members to move beyond simply receiving information. Participants are encouraged to reflect on their experiences, ask questions, share what they know, analyze problems together, and identify possible solutions.

This process can help people recognize that something they have experienced individually may also be affecting other families. A conversation can move from: “This is a challenge my family is experiencing.” to “Other families are experiencing this too. What can we learn from one another, and what can we do together?”

That shift is an important part of community organizing. It applies whether the conversation is about garbage collection, climate resilience, parenting, children’s education, mental health, substance use prevention, or another issue affecting community well-being.

Supporting Community-Led Efforts

TTI has also provided practical resources to participating families, including mosquito nets, fans, hygiene kits, kitchen supplies, blenders, air fryers, and sheets. These items were distributed through raffles during community gatherings.

While material resources can help address immediate needs, they are not the center of the work. The larger goal is to strengthen the relationships, knowledge, leadership, and collective capacity that communities can continue using long after a particular program or training has ended.

Local Volunteers Make the Work Possible

This work would not be possible without local volunteers and community leaders. Residents have helped invite participants, organize gatherings, prepare and serve meals, coordinate activities, and encourage neighbors to participate.

During the programs, TTI provides dinner each evening with significant support from local volunteers. Their participation reflects an important principle of community organizing: residents are not simply attending a program. They are helping build it. Local volunteers understand their communities, relationships, challenges, and strengths in ways that an outside organization cannot. Their knowledge and leadership are essential to the work.

From Shared Concerns to Collective Action

Since 2023, the work in Yaiba and El Naranjito has continued to develop. In Yaiba, residents have advocated for garbage cans and improved waste management, and in El Naranjito, community members have worked toward developing community gardens. Families have also participated in parenting education, and TTI is now expanding the conversation to include mental health, substance use prevention, and other health and education topics.

Each of these efforts may focus on a different issue, but the organizing process is similar:

Community conversations lead to shared understanding → Shared understanding helps identify priorities → Priorities create opportunities for collective planning → Collective planning strengthens local leadership → Local leadership can lead to action, advocacy, and continued learning.

Continuing to Organize, Learn, and Work Together

Community organizing is not a one-time event or a single training. It develops over time through trust, nurturing relationships, participation, learning, leadership, and continued action.

Since 2023, TTI has been committed to maintaining relationships with residents of Yaiba and El Naranjito and continuing to respond to the issues communities identify as important. Our work has grown from environmental health and climate resilience to include parenting and family education, and it is now expanding into mental health, substance use prevention, and additional health and education topics. We see these areas as connected.

Healthy communities require access to information, strong families, opportunities for young people, supportive relationships, community leadership, safe environments, and residents who have meaningful opportunities to participate in decisions that affect them. At Training To Impact, our role is to help create the conditions for those conversations and actions to happen while keeping community voices, lived experience, priorities, and leadership at the center of the process.