Si Se Puede Case Study | JG Portfolio

How do you keep a neighborhood from being erased?

Strategic planning for a five-organization anti-displacement coalition in East San Jose

with SI SE PUEDE COLLECTIVE, 2025-2026

ROLE

Lead Researcher & Strategist

METHODS

In-depth interviews, Focus Groups, Intercepts, Synthesis, Stakeholder Mapping, Co-design Workshops, Executive Storytelling & Report Design, Workshop Facilitation, Stakeholder Alignment

DELIVERABLES

Visioning Session, Ecosystem Research, Organizational Analysis, 5-Year Strategic Plan, Strategic Plan Implementation Roadmap

THE CHALLENGE

Five organizations, one neighborhood, and no shared plan.

¡Sí Se Puede! is a coalition of five community-rooted nonprofits serving Mayfair, a historic immigrant neighborhood in East San Jose facing mounting displacement pressure. Between them they had deep trust, strong programs, and decades of credibility. What they didn't have was a shared plan.

Five organizations meant five sets of priorities, five working styles and five theories about what the neighborhood needed most. They needed one strategy for the next five years, and no single organization's view could be allowed to dominate it.

Their questions:

What do residents actually experience as the biggest displacement pressures, and what support do they trust?

What should SSPC focus on over five years?

What should five organizations build together, and how should we coordinate resources to prevent displacement and protect our neighborhood?

MY ROLE

I led nine months of research and strategic planning.

I owned the engagement end-to-end with my team of 2. We designed the research, led synthesis, facilitated the executive alignment among the 5 organizations and built the strategic plan.

I was responsible for:

Designing and owning the full research plan
Leading participant recruitment across a hard-to-reach population
Developing guides and protocols for interviews and focus groups
Facilitating interviews, focus groups and co-design sessions
Owning synthesis - turning stories into actionable high leverage points
Building the program logic models and evaluation framework from scratch
Facilitating workshops that brought staff, leadership and funders to a shared diagnosis
Creating executive-ready design deliverables
Managing the client relationship through 2+ years of biweekly meetings

WHAT I DID

Three layers of evidence on where to focus.

I ran in-person community engagement in Mayfair.

The approach had to give five organizations one plan without flattening their differences, so I built the research in three layers, because no single one could force a hard tradeoff alone.

Community research showed what residents actually experienced.
Organizational research showed where the five nonprofits' strengths overlapped and where they collided.
Systems analysis connected both to the forces driving displacement.

Only with all three on the table could the coalition see that no single-organization strategy could address a problem this distributed. I sequenced the work to start from vision before evidence, so alignment began from shared purpose rather than competing programs.

THE PROCESS

From a shared vision, through evidence, to a sequenced plan.

Visioning Session

Listening to the People

Co-creation Sessions

Built a shared vision: What does thriving in Mayfair look and feel like?

Learned about the current realities through Interviews, focus groups, site visits, surveys.

Synthesized insights into clear priorities and hosted cross-sector ideation sessions to generate solutions.

Strategic Planning

Developed a 5-yr strategic plan for the collective including pillars, objectives, strategies and metrics.

Visioning session

THE FINDINGS

Displacement was bigger than housing, and the coalition had gaps of its own

one.

Displacement is not just a housing problem.

Families were being pushed out by unstable income, immigration fear, healthcare gaps, youth opportunity, and cultural erasure at once.

two.

Culture and belonging are anti-displacement infrastructure.

Residents defined thriving as staying rooted and keeping their culture visible, not just economic stability.

three.

Stability is the ground everything else stands on.

Many residents lived one disruption away from collapse.

four.

The coalition had the ingredients but not the connective tissue.

Five organizations with programs and trust, but no shared systems to operate as one.

WHAT WE DESIGNED

A five-year strategic plan built as a decision system - designed for residents, executives, funders and SSPC staff.

A 2026–2030 strategic plan organized around three pillars: Breathe, Dream, and Build
12 strategies with defined lane leadership across the five organizations
Shared language for displacement, resilience, and permanence
A governance and operating model for a 230-person coalition
A phased implementation roadmap clarifying near-term actions, roles, and investment needs

THE IMPACT

Five organizations, one adopted strategy, and a shift in how they think

All five organizations aligned on a shared direction and adopted the plan.

The engagement moved the coalition from "what programs should each of us run?" to "what system must we build together?"

The executive directors who arrived with competing agendas left aligned on displacement as the central threat, with a sequenced roadmap and the governance model to hold them to it.

REFLECTIONS AND TESTIMONIALS

What I learned

The research was the easy part; the room was the work.

Shared commitment to the community got five independent organizations to the table, but it took structured facilitation, evidence they could each see themselves in, and explicit tradeoff decisions to get them to move as one. Old tensions and organizational ego are what block the listening real collaboration requires, and structure is what gets past them.