Announcing Our New Leadership & Strategic Plan!
/We have major news for you! Last week, we released our first impact report, revealing what People Powered accomplished in its first three years. Now we share three big announcements about what’s next:
We release our new Strategic Plan.
Greta Rios joins Josh Lerner as our new Co-Executive Director.
Individuals (like you!) can now join our global community of members.
Read on for the juicy details:
Our New Strategy
Faced with a global crisis of democracy, People Powered is growing a global movement to expand people’s democratic power, beyond elections. We believe that democracy requires diverse approaches of participation, deliberation, representation and decision-making, to enable people to reach agreement about important issues in different contexts. To upgrade our democracy, we need to do more to address common challenges, weave together fragmented work and shift power toward marginalized communities.
In our first three years, we focused on building together. We built a global democratic organization. We built a global community of organizations and experts. And with that community, we built global bottom-up programs and collective resources, to transition governments around the world to a more participatory democracy.
In our next three years, we’ll keep building, but we’ll focus more on putting these global resources, programs, and community to work. With our members and international partners, we’ll help more governments and organizations launch and improve participatory programs. And we’ll apply the learning from this work to keep improving our shared global resources and programs. Our new plan has three strategic directions:
Accelerate transitions to participatory democracy
Strengthen the global community of practice
Build a more resilient and participatory organization
Read our 2024-2026 strategic plan to learn how we’ll move in these directions, with you.
Our New Leadership
Shared and inclusive decision-making is the future of democracy. To get to that future, we need to make the road by walking. To take People Powered’s democratic governance to the next level, our Community Building Director Greta Ríos will join Josh Lerner as Co-Executive Directors in January.
Based in Mexico City, Greta has over a decade of experience as founder and Executive Director at her prior organization Ollin. At Ollin, Greta activated thousands of people to participate in their democracy, supported large-scale participatory budgeting in several Mexican cities, and coordinated research and monitoring to hold governments accountable.
Greta already has over two years of deep engagement in People Powered, first as a member and for the past year as senior staff. Together, Greta and Josh will provide more balanced and resilient leadership, alongside the many other leaders within the People Powered staff, board, and membership.
Get in touch with Greta to learn more and welcome her to the new role!
Will you join us?
As important as our Executive Directors are, our real leaders are you! People Powered is a bottom-up membership-based organization. Our members are the organizations and individuals that are building and supporting participatory democracy around the world. We’re like a global union of participatory democracy workers.
In our first three years, almost 100 organizations signed up as members. They decided our priorities, budget, and policies, and they built our programs. Now, we’re opening membership to individuals (like you!). If you want to be part of a global transition to a more participatory democracy, join us! You’ll help decide what we do and be part of the global community that turns the plans into action.
Did you know that you can also make a one-off or recurring donation to show your support for Greta, Josh, and the global team and community? Take a minute to contribute now.
As an extra incentive, a generous donor has agreed to contribute a 4-to-1 match for all donations and membership fees this month up to $2,000! So if you give $100 it becomes $500. Apply for membership or make a donation now, to help make the most of this opportunity!
We’re ready to lift off, to take democracy to new heights. Will you join us?
Greta, Josh & the People Powered team
Josh and Greta preparing for liftoff
