Facing Race Panel

Attending Facing Race? Join Partners for Dignity & Rights and La Liga de Ciudades de Puerto Rico for our panel on Building the Bigger We: Transforming Power Through Solidarity and Co-Governance. On Friday November 13th from 11:15AM-12:15PM, in Room 306A, our executive director Liz Sullivan-Yuknis and La Liga’s Paloma Torres Dávila will discuss tools and models of co-governance and walkthrough our new collaborative municipal toolkit (out later this week).

Dive into collaborative governance or co-governance: a participatory process, where governments and communities work together.

• Learn how community groups are co-governing with local government
• Practice tools for building power & local democracy
• Get a first look at our new municipal co-governance toolkit

The Toolkit

Municipalities are where democracy is most tangible and where its failures are most deeply felt. Across regions, local governments face overlapping crises shaped by austerity, political preemption, privatization, colonial or centralized oversight regimes, labor precarity, and widening social and economic inequality. Traditional governance models—built on top-down decision-making and limited forms of public participation that rarely share meaningful power—have proven insufficient to meet these challenges.

Municipalities are where democracy is most tangible and where its failures are most deeply felt. This Co-Governance Municipal Advocacy Toolkit presents a distinct approach. Funded by the Ford Foundation and grounded in the integrated work of Liga de Ciudades de Puerto Rico, Partners for Dignity & Rights, and Central Florida Jobs with Justice, the toolkit positions co-governance as an urgent and necessary democratic practice— one that redistributes power, strengthens governmental institutions, and enables communities and municipalities to govern together. Co‑governance is not a fixed model. It is an adaptive, place‑based process shaped by local history, culture, political conditions, resources, and organizing capacity.

This toolkit offers a shared framework, practical tools, and guiding principles to support municipalities and organized communities in building durable, accountable, and transformative governance arrangements. It is intentionally designed to be adaptable to diverse contexts and remains flexible enough to be reshaped by the unique realities of each municipality and community.