Overview: In this project, I collaborated with four community garden organizations to examine how grassroots groups can optimize their partnership networks while remaining grounded in their mission and values. Using stakeholder mapping and power analyses, I helped these groups identify which partnerships truly supported their goals and where they faced risks of mission drift or cooptation. The project resulted in practical, actionable strategies for building strategic networks, maintaining community trust, and navigating complex institutional relationships as organizations scale. For the full thesis, read here.

Challenge: Grassroots innovations groups often operate in an environment dominated by "regime giants” - the landowners, grant-makers, and supermarket monopolies - that hold structural power. While community gardens rarely struggle to win local support or build social capital, they often find themselves negotiating for the structural power required for long-term survival. In this landscape, partnerships are more than just collaborations; they are the key to resilience and sustainability.

Solution: Rather than measuring surface-level alignment, I designed a Strategic Autonomy & Impact Matrix (SAIM) to measure structural substitutability (the ease with which an organization can replace specific resources) and decision-making leverage (the degree of control external actors exert over the organization). By plotting stakeholder relationships on this matrix, organizations can identify where they are functionally trapped. The SAIM provides a clear roadmap for transitioning from restrictive, dependent relationships toward adaptive, professional partnerships. It empowers grassroots groups to move from being passive recipients of support to partners with structural integrity—all without compromising their core mission.

Scaling Up: The delicate balance between autonomy and dependency isn’t just a challenge for a neighborhood garden, it’s a fundamental law of organizational physics. When a business, no matter the size, fails to evaluate its agility and resilience, a single shift in government policy or a disruption in a non-substitutable supply chain can paralyze its entire operational system. By applying the Strategic Autonomy & Impact Matrix (SAIM) at scale, a corporation can identify which partnerships are true allies that drive innovation, and which risk threatening its long-term independence and strategic mission. Whether you are managing an acre of urban land or a multi-tiered global supply chain, the imperative remains the same: building a system robust enough to absorb external resources without surrendering the internal values that define its success.