Telling the Story of Solidarity and Collaboration During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Alameda County

ALL IN Alameda County
Written By Kim Nguyen
Two volunteers outside in face masks, packing Thanksgiving food to distribute to community members in 2020

Overview

ALL IN Alameda County leads, innovates, and collaborates across public, private, and community sectors to catalyze the equitable policy and systems change required to address the root causes of poverty. ALL IN is a business unit within the Alameda County Administrator’s Office (CAO) and a multi-stakeholder collaborative overseen by a 28-member steering committee.

reimagine collective worked with ALL IN and its partners to tell the story of how four grassroots organizations organically came together to hold space for their communities at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.

Our Approach

Using a collaborative framework, reimagine collective worked with ALL IN and the partners to write up their story of solidarity and collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic. We established an understanding of their work through a discovery session, which is a listening session for us to establish purpose and goals of the work as well as to develop an initial understanding of their work. Our team held key informant interviews with each partner to learn more about their experiences in and with the collaborative; we then reviewed the transcripts for themes and presented it back to the partners.

Incorporating everyone’s feedback and ideas, we designed and published an 18-page report, “In Solidarity, We Feed Our Community,” which documents the partners’ story of how they came together to work through the challenges they faced during COVID-19 and how they worked together to capitalize on the opportunities. The report highlights concrete ways in which the organizations rethought the distribution of resources and reconceptualized the way collaboration happens.

Impact

After the publication of the report, we hosted a stakeholder’s briefing with over 100 funders and collaborative partners in attendance. At the briefing, the partner organizations collectively urged funders, government, other grassroots organizations, and community to reimagine how they work towards social change.

Kim Nguyen
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