Living and working in Newark as a teacher, lawyer, and social worker, Laurel Dumont, a 2000 AmeriCorps alumna, has built a network across professional and demographic lines. Ability to work with diverse communities and elected leadership and a bent for linking needs and resources earned her a reputation as a Connector. Uniquely positioned to build bridges and facilitate collaboration to generate trust and momentum around change, Laurel decided to use her skills and experience to launch The Center for Collaborative Change (CFCC), an innovative intermediary organization built to be hands-on with both community consultation and policy and program development.

Laurel has over a decade of involvement with the Newark community since she was placed in Newark as a 2000 Teach For America Corps Member and taught fifth grade at Thirteenth Avenue School.

Her work in Newark since leaving the classroom has included a number of professional and volunteer projects that engage community members in identifying needs and collaborating around solutions. These include working to create a school-based health clinic at the school where she taught, and helping to create and then overseeing the Newark Reentry Legal Services (ReLeSe) program that has now served over 2,000 clients with civil legal barriers to successful community reintegration after incarceration.

Before starting the Center, Laurel worked as a staff attorney at Essex-Newark Legal Services, representing tenants in eviction actions and administrative hearings, and as Legal & Policy Counsel at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, where her work included legal and community-based approaches to court reform and driver’s license restoration.

In its first two years of operations, the Center has emerged as a driver of innovative reform, as well as a go-to resource for community consultation.

Their experience demonstrates 1) ability to bring key players together in pursuit of a common interest, 2) position as a trusted, neutral party whose views are based in research, engagement, and sound judgment and are thus taken seriously by policymakers, and 3) organizational capacity for developing creative, ambitious solutions in a highly professional, efficient and effective manner.

Through engagement, planning and collaboration, they develop and support high impact initiatives that address issues most critical to the people of the city and to breaking the current cycle of poverty, violence and disinvestment. The following projects are examples of how we:

• Assess community needs, assets, and issues that are most critical to the people of the city and to breaking the current cycle of poverty, violence and disinvestment, • Build solutions informed by best practices and innovative ideas, and • Connect and integrate our efforts across sectors.

Rather than try to impose top-down reforms that may have worked in other cities, CFCC works with the Newark community to build systemic change, harnessing the unique assets of our community to meet its unique needs.

In 2010, the Center led the collaborative development of Newark’s Strong, Healthy Communities Initiative (SHCI). Facilitating discussions and working groups that involved over 50 participants from the nonprofit, corporate, philanthropic, and public sectors, the Center developed a multi-sector, holistic and sustainable approach to improving community wellness and arresting the cycle of poverty in several low-income neighborhoods. This work secured $15 million from the philanthropic collaborative Living Cities, to be matched by local philanthropy for a three year effort to develop systemic long-term approaches to establishing and maintaining individual and community wellness in Newark. Through SHCI, a collaborative partnership will develop several “healthy hubs” throughout Newark — neighborhoods in which we will develop new school-based health clinics and concentrate ongoing initiatives related to access to fresh and healthy foods, and affordable housing.