October 2024

By Jennifer Ito, Sean Angst, Lupe Renteria Salome, and Leah Gose

We offer this guide for movement builders and philanthropic allies who are looking for indicators to track changes, shifts, and transformations in California’s power-building infrastructure. It is based on developments in the power-building field in California, national reports on power-building metrics, and interviews with California-based advisors and partners. While there is a wide breadth of measures to collect and track, we focus on a specific set of strategies that power-building groups are deploying and evolving over the next decade—and thus shaping the types of learning and evaluative measures and indicators.

Two core strategies that are foundational to power building are base building and movement building. For a longer discussion on other core power-building strategies and measures, see our report Transactions-Transformations-Translations.

Additionally, we highlight four strategies that the field is exploring, innovating, and experimenting with, which makes them key areas as part of the learning process. These strategies are narrative building, healing justice, connecting across places and populations, and Indigenous sovereignty. For a longer discussion of these strategies, see Looking Around the Corner.

Read our other publications by research area

    Immigrant Inclusion & Racial Justice

    Our work on immigrant inclusion and racial justice brings together three emphases: scholarship that draws on academic theory and rigorous research, data that provides information structured to highlight the process of immigrant inclusion over time, and engagement that seeks to create new dialogues with government, community organizers, business and civic leaders, immigrants and the voting public to advance immigrant inclusion and racial equity.

    Economic Inclusion & Climate Equity

    In the area of economic inclusion, we at ERI advance academic theory and practical applications linking economic growth, environmental quality, and civic health with bridging of racial and other gaps; produce accessible and actionable data and analysis through the data tools; and establish research partnerships to deepen and advance the dialogue, planning, and actions around racial equity, environmental justice, and the built environment.

    Social Movements & Governing Power

    ERI’s work in the area of governing power includes: conducting cross-disciplinary studies of today’s social movements, supporting learning and strategizing efforts to advance dialogues among organizers, funders, intermediaries, evaluators, and academics, and developing research-based social change frameworks and tools to inform—and be informed by—real-world, real-time efforts towards a vision of deep change.

    Publications Directory

    In 2020, the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) and the USC Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII) merged to form the USC Equity Research Institute (ERI).

    The full list of publications published under our previous and current names can be found in our publications directory.

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