Thriving Together’s August Convening

On August 26, 2025, residents, partners, and leaders gathered at The Hub in Winston-Salem for Thriving Together’s latest convening – a day that marked an important shift from talking about systems change to practicing it together. Click here to view the presentation and artifact from the convening.

This convening piloted two frameworks that sit at the heart of Thriving Together’s approach:

The Aligned Contributions Model (ACM): a way to see how individual and collective efforts connect, making it possible to align contributions toward true systems change.
The Community Feedback Loop (CFL): a process that begins at the point of urgency, ensuring that residents most impacted when systems fall short are centered in decision-making.

Together, these tools begin to form the civic infrastructure Forsyth County needs to create lasting conditions for thriving.

Starting Where Systems Don’t Work

The big question we hear often is: where do we begin in such a big system?

On August 26, we started with Salem Gardens. The apartments are home to 150 families, many navigating low incomes alongside ongoing challenges with housing quality, safety, and access to opportunity. In 2024, residents came together with courage and determination, raising their voices about unsafe conditions, harassment from management, and the neglect of basic needs.

The Salem Gardens Community Action Plan (CAP), which was developed by residents with support from Partnership for Prosperity, the Peoples’ Research Council’s newest asset-building community development and research partner, reflects months of listening sessions, surveys, and study circles. Families named their priorities: safe housing, childcare, transportation, education, job pathways, digital access, and food security.

By lifting up the Salem Gardens CAP, we honored residents’ leadership and used their blueprint as the foundation for our collective exercise.

Partnership for Prosperity (P4P) is dedicated to reducing poverty and empowering underserved communities in Forsyth County.
Moving Families Forward focuses on engaging families and empowering them to create sustainable, community-based solutions.
Their approach is resident-driven, with a focus on culturally affirming practices and trauma-informed care.

Learn about P4P Here

Multisolving in Action

Participants worked in small groups to test how the Community Feedback Loop and Aligned Contributions Model function in practice. Each group selected a priority from the Salem Gardens CAP and mapped:

Possible strategies and activities
Knowledge and resource gaps
Partners who need to be at the table
Policy or funding shifts required

This wasn’t about finding perfect solutions. It was about practicing a new way of working: centering the perspectives of people who are impacted by systemic inequities, the collective contributions of the partners in the room, and exploring how urgent needs can be addressed in ways that also build toward long-term thriving.

Across all four groups, common themes emerged:

Bring opportunities into neighborhoods. GED, trade certifications, and workforce pathways should be accessible onsite, family-centered, and culturally relevant.
Remove barriers. Childcare, transportation, and digital access are non-negotiable supports.
Strengthen resident leadership. Solutions must be co-designed with residents, not simply delivered to them.
Align systems and institutions. Employers, schools, funders, and policymakers all have a role in building pathways that last

Why This Matters

The Salem Gardens CAP is more than a document: it’s a living roadmap. By using it as the guide for this convening, we modeled how urgent community priorities can be connected to broader systems and aligned across partners.

This is the beginning of a Community Feedback Loop that makes visible how decentralized efforts — from neighborhood organizing to institutional investments — can be connected and scaled into true civic infrastructure.

Looking Ahead

The August 26 convening was a proof-of-concept, the first of many touchpoints that will strengthen Forsyth County’s Community Feedback Loop. Thriving Together will:

Share detailed notes from the workgroups publicly for transparency and accountability.
Explore building a digital system on our website where anyone can track urgent needs lifted by residents, and see how partners are aligning around them.
Ensure information flows back to Salem Gardens residents and other communities where priorities are being lifted, closing the loop in both directions.

This is long-term work. Building civic infrastructure for systems change means moving in smaller, iterative steps, learning as we go, and adapting based on what residents tell us.

We’re not here to design perfect answers. We’re here to practice a new way of working together. And with each step, Forsyth County moves closer to becoming a community where all people can thrive – no exceptions.