LEADERSHIP TRAJECTORY
The FFLIC Leadership Trajectory is a people and community-centered model that moves people through tiers of leadership by way of trainings, involvement, and experiential learning in advocacy, campaigns, and direct-action organizing.
FFLIC was founded on the belief that people are the power and that those most directly impacted are the chosen ones to lead permanent change by disrupting and dismantling broken racist systems. By fighting to win seats on leading decision-making tables throughout Louisiana, FFLIC ensures that directly impacted people have a meaningful voice in shaping policies that most affect their lives. To do so, families must be whole and have access to the community-based services necessary to raise healthy and supported children. FFLIC’s vision for an equitable future also includes creating living wage jobs for those most severely impacted by systemic racism. Without ways for people to build their economic capacity, freedom is tenuous at best. FFLIC’s objective is to develop our members’ leadership capacity to carry on the fight for equitable, healthy, and functioning systems that provide opportunities for generations to come.
Over the past decade, FFLIC has guided dozens of parents, community leaders, and youth through the trajectory. Many of them came into contact with FFLIC as a result of their own challenges with the current systems, including unjust school discipline, referral to Families in Needs of Services, profiling by the criminal legal system, and abuse and neglect in the youth incarceration system. At each of these contact points with the system, FFLIC has offered advocacy and leadership skill development to help parents fight for their children and all children. Our leadership trajectory continues to build the collective power of directly impacted families to help pass critical legislation and advocate for healthy functioning networks of support for youth and families.