What does it take to impact disability advocacy in a community?

Students from the Brown School’s CBSD class worked with CTI to better understand how the organization functioned when coordinating an advocacy campaign around an issue impacting people with disabilities in the St. Louis region. Through a series of three workshops with CTI members, a causal loop diagram was created describing a system of CTI as an organization and how it interacts with the community around it. This informal model was used by the CTI leadership team and the CBSD student facilitators to create a list of action ideas for the organization to implement in the future to improve their capacity to conduct an advocacy campaign.

Project Goals

• Identify the factors, both internal and external, that influence CTI’s success as an organizing coalition.
• Build a common language within CTI around its operational capacity and challenges to its effectiveness in organizing campaigns supporting the rights and interests of people with disabilities.
• Modify the traditional scripts and methods used in Group Model Building so that people with different abilities can all engage and participate fully in the workshops.