How CHANGE Does It

CHANGE has had many successes in making our community a better place.  If there is one key to these successes, it is the relational meeting.  These are one-on-one meetings for finding out what motivates the other person to engage in public life, and for that other person to find out what motivates you.  You may find yourself hearing and telling life stories.  It may surprise you, as it surprised us, to learn how powerful and engaging simply setting aside the time to get to know one another can be.  Building on these meetings, CHANGE creates diverse networks of people who understand something about one another.  We research, build relationships, and, when necessary, have mass meetings.  We have minimal money and no clout of a conventional sort.  Whatever power we have in local politics comes from our diversity, our numbers and our hard work.  But it is not about any one project, any one person, any one group or any one thing.  It is about building social capital in the form of dense networks of people who are not alike who have come to know one another, and we use that social capital to make things better in Forsyth County.

CHANGE has one full-time employee, Lead Organizer Rev. Ryan Eller, and about one FTE in clerical support.  Ryan is our coach and advisor, but we do the work.  Clergy, including our Rev. Charlie Davis, participate through the CHANGE Clergy Caucus, as well as through action teams.