Vision and Mission
Vision
We envision a world of resilient communities able to create, sustain, and regenerate local livelihoods and community wellbeing.
Mission
LiKEN is a link-tank for communities – to build capacity to grow good livelihoods based on local assets, to monitor community health and wealth to avoid boom and bust, and to take evidence-based action for future well-being based on deep understanding of the past.
Strategic Focus Areas
- To build community resilience: The heart of our projects is the power of communities to dream and act. LiKEN networks support communities:
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- To nurture local leaders, peer mentoring, community-driven quests for excellence, and mutual empowerment;
- To document community assets and develop action plans;
- To do creative place-making and story-sharing for empathy, neighborliness, diversity, and a wise grasp of history;
- To create healing spaces to name historical trauma and injustice and to transform it into community resilience;
- To steward the resources that support life and livelihoods–especially water, food, forest, health, energy, and cultural commons;
- To build climate resilience.
2. To catalyze knowledge exchange among communities, non-profits, experts, and government agencies: We specialize in un-specializing knowledge:
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- To translate among diverse stakeholders, sectors, and expertises;
- To ensure timely, transparent, and useful access to public data, public revenues, and public goods;
- To co-design participatory action research tools and trainings;
- To co-design multi-stakeholder platforms to link statistics and stories;
- To honor local knowledge and certify community researchers;
- To increase civic participation and community engagement.
3. To assess community health and wealth over scales of time and space appropriate to patterns of risk: The vibrancy of community action comes from resolute engagement in the here and now. But, coiled in the present, are old patterns.
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- We understand community well-being to include not just economic wealth, but also the accumulation of social, cultural, political, natural, built environment, and human capital;
- We assess impacts of ‘boom and bust’ economies and extreme weather disasters on the wealth and health of communities, and, the affordability and availability of basic life resources;
- We create forums to ponder root causes of entrenched problems.
4. To communicate success stories and findings: We disseminate the outcomes of our projects and aggregate and translate local stories and statistics into trans-local generalization and policy-relevant findings:
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- In videos, blogs, news items, social media, film, etc. for popular education;
- Through issue briefings, research reports, policy recommendations, and peer-reviewed scholarly pieces.