Community-driven leaders are some of the most incredible, creative, inspiring people in the world. But you can’t realize your vision for community change until you draw your ideas out of your head and into the world. When we started working with Makoce’s founder Nick, we immediately recognized the power of his vision for systems change on the Pine Ridge Reservation. But we could also see that creating a local, community-driven food system from the ground up would demand a strategic, multifaceted approach. Nick’s vision was huge, with so many connected ideas and objectives. We had to break it down into manageable parts, and start to create an actionable plan to move forward.

How did we do it? We started with a day-long planning process with Nick and our team. We talked through Makoce’s context–the needs the organization was trying to address, including the barriers to food production and land access on the reservation. Then we outlined all the different levers that needed to move to spark change at a larger scale. We tracked all of Nick’s ideas and quite literally threw them onto the wall (or in our case, the windows!), so that we could all see and absorb the scope of Makoce’s vision–and begin to organize its key components.