Public policy development can sometimes be an exercise in detachment and data-driven dispassion. To those at the margins of public sector power in such instances, it seems that the rules, policies, and programs created by others are designed to impact the inanimate and unfeeling—not them. It is this context of impersonal policymaking that makes the work of our Chicago-based nonprofit, Community Organizing and Family Issues (COFI), meaningful.

Leading COFI’s campaigns to center community, families, care, and humanity at the heart of policy decisions are “COFI parents”—primarily mothers and grandmothers of color who come from historically underinvested communities. In her research, sociologist Jennifer Cossyleon called COFI parents “motherleaders,” and noted how feminist scholars have shown that “the labor of mothers of color inside and outside the household is inseparable from family, kin, community, and their lived experiences of intersecting oppressions.”

COFI’s model is an important example of how low-income and working-class mothers and grandmothers of color are making rigid public policies and public finance systems more responsive to their needs. COFI staff help these mothers and grandmothers, who start off as volunteers, recognize that the skills they honed as parents translate into leadership skills. After participating in training and team-building exercises with their peers, COFI parents go on to lead collective action efforts to make policy changes that address their daily family challenges and those of their communities.

Read the full article about community development work by Rosazlia Grillier, Ellen Schumer, and Tonantzin Carmona at Brookings.