Do Your Part: Coordinated Action that Transforms Lives
Community Partnerships. Community Solutions.

​We help you make the difference you want to make in your community, industry, region, nation, and world.

  • We connect communities and sectors who together innovate solutions to our deepest divides.
  • We provide transformative methods of communication for relationship-building within and across sectors.
  • We engage communities and organizations in inquiry-based conversations that generate cross-cultural problem-solving, collective envisioning and coordinated regional action.
  • We support organizations (government, academia, businesses) in streamlining their services through culturally responsive, community-centered collective envisioning and collaborative leadership.
  • We help individuals, communities, and organizations understand the significance of their actions as they contribute to coordinated community-centered development.

Mission: Innovative Cross-Cultural Community-Based Solutions to Your Deepest Challenges

Our mission is multi-faceted:
  • Our mission is to transform our deepest divides through informed cross-cultural, multi-sector communication that helps build stronger bridges and thriving communities. We support innovation in unified institutional, regional, national, and international collective action that leads to the development of sustainable healthy communities. We provide cutting-edge culturally responsive frameworks and methods that streamline endeavors within and across sectors and benefit all demographics in our industries, regions, our nation, and our world. 
  • Through the ethnodramatic approach Honoring Stories and Integrating Curriculum™, we help organizations understand what it means to do their part – to benefit an entire industry, region, nation, and/or world and contribute to sustainable thriving communities for all demographics.

How does the ethnodramatic method Honoring Stories and Integrating Curriculum™ work?
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  • Honoring Stories and Integrating Curriculum™ integrates Ethnodrama, Community-Engaged Learning, and Teacher Research.
    • Our ethnodrama practices infuse community-engaged learning with drama, music, dance, art, film and digital platforms.
    • Ethnodrama =
      • the collaborative study of social issues 
      • by collecting interviews with people from many backgrounds 
      • turning the interviews into dramas, films, plays, and/or art, and 
      • using the art to facilitate cross-cultural dialogue towards problem-solving and informed collective action. 
  • Through Honoring Stories and Integrating Curriculum™ organizations not only learn how to incorporate ethnodramatic community-engaged methods that support them in designing and implementing services, but they also expand their abilities to systematically document and follow their own learning trajectories and the learning trajectories of colleagues, clients, community members, patients, or students. 
  • Organizations gain methodological resources for coordinating community-centered interdepartmental and interprofessional research and writing communities. These professional learning communities foster culturally responsive values and language for policies, practices, services, and products that align with the needs of specific demographic markets.
  • They help everyone contribute to and take ownership of an emerging vision as well as identify whose knowledge is missing, which populations are being served or not, and how  to build legitimate socially responsive brands, products, and services that the public trusts. In short - to do their part.

Guiding Principles for Honoring Stories and Integrating Curriculum™
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  1. Collective envisioning for organizations rooted in histories of local, regional, national, and international collective action
  2. Collaborative leadership
  3. Collaborative research within and across organizational departments and fields
  4. Interdisciplinary drama, media, and arts-based problem-solving about any kind of organizational and community issue
  5. Organizational cultures, communication patterns, products and services that bring needed change
  6. Facilitation of cross-cultural dialogue and problem-solving towards coordinated collective action that transforms lives

What are our services?
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On-Line Platforms, Courses, Workshops, Instructional and Assessment Materials
  • We facilitate cross-sector communication that helps each sector recognize their spheres of influence that will unleash mutually beneficial innovations that transform organizations and communities.
  • We help facilitate conversation within and across sectors that generates industry trends that help employers, employees and communities build stronger bridges to one another and design products and services that contribute to coordinated regional investments in community-centered development. 
  • We provide creative ethnographic support in researching institutionalized cultures, systems and communication processes - to help strengthen employee relations, productivity, and collective ownership of organizational missions, values, and goals.
  • We design and implement workshops and instructional systems for professional learning through which work associates expand their collective capacity for industry, regional, national, and international leadership in institutional cultures, products and services that contribute to sustainable thriving communities.
  • We help organizations expand and systematize their documentation of their learning, community impact, and market knowledge and growth by tracking with a wide range of cultural metrics over time. 

Whom We Serve
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Organizations/Small and large businesses/Non-profits
Universities/Colleges/Community Colleges
Government agencies
K-12 Schools
Teachers
Students

Our Current St. Louis Regional Coordinated Action
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  • Bobby Bonner with Afterschool Labs and BM3 Technology is in conversation with the city about being a lead community developer, who will develop cutting-edge interactive technology centers for youth programming and adult education. In the process, he will help rehabilitate and update homes with green technologies that return energy credits to North St. Louis. 
  • Community Allies has a partnership with Afterschool Labs to organize ethnodrama afterschool programs and teacher trainings for North St. Louis youth and teachers that upon approval will start at Sumner High School and spread to a number of other centers and schools. 
  • The vision for these programs is for youth to use ethnodramatic research to capture community member desires for the development of these interactive technology centers and of North St. Louis. 
  • Students will capture place-based oral histories of areas of North St. Louis, piecing together past and present collective action and innovation communities have been envisioning to overcome barriers and build and design their neighborhoods. 
  • Students will work with a range of technologies to map the kind of development that provides for the best community-centered housing, educational, entrepreneurial and employment opportunities for NSTL residents. 
  • Youth will present their research at working group meetings. 
  • As North St. Louis residents share their desires for North St. Louis, companies and investors who want to support this effort will be needed to provide equipment, capital investment, and development support for the construction of centers, and sponsorships for youth programming and teacher trainings. 
​Help us share with St. Louis what you see as our region’s greatest issues – what needs to happen in different sectors for those challenges to be addressed. Help us understand what your sector is doing and what partnerships and resources are needed.
Share what you know about the history of community-centered organizing in North St. Louis or your vision and desires for North St. Louis development and/or what your neighborhood or organization is currently working towards.

Share what you are doing in your industry or partnerships across sectors to support sustainable community-centered development (i.e. providing programs and mentorship that leads to industry training for youth, designing equitable community benefits agreements, establishing housing trust funds and embedding them in public schools, providing leadership mentorship and resources to St. Louis non-profits, providing backpacks, supplies, clothing, job training, transportation to communities, etc.).
Every North St. Louis neighborhood has an active community meeting that needs your input. Bobby, a community developer is attending these meetings and has placeholder plans for how to build interactive technology centers for youth and adults and for how to rehab housing in neighborhoods in the process. He needs your input on what you want him to do with his plans so he can be a better advocate with the city as he works to get plans approved.

Other Ways to Get Involved

If you are a North St. Louis community organization: Please bring us in to help us better understand your goals and needs and how our region (multiple sectors) could best support you.
 
If you are a business: Please bring us in to learn what you are doing/want to be doing to support North St. Louis organizations, neighborhoods, places of worship, and initiatives to better coordinate your efforts with regional efforts.
 
Be or connect us to sponsors: We will need business communities to help provide the cutting-edge technologies North St. Louis youth and adults need to thrive. We will need sponsors for programs and teacher trainings and capital investors for development. Please email us to learn more about the range of ways you can serve as a sponsor. Sarah.hobson@communityalliesconsulting.com
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