Ron Dwyer-Voss is the owner and founder Pacific Community Solutions, Inc., a training, consulting and technical assistance company focused on working with community-based initiatives, nonprofit organizations and local governments. His work focuses on asset-based community development and organizing, community engagement and mobilization, and participatory evaluation – all for the purpose of shifting power in communities. Since 1983, Ron has been a community organizer, community development corporation director, leadership development coach/trainer and elected school board member.
He began working with the Asset-Based Community Development model in 1991 while organizing on the south and west sides of Chicago. Since then he has worked with a mix of urban and rural communities; African-American, Latino, Southeast Asian and Native American and Hawaiian communities and communities seeking to develop and respect the leadership of their young people.
Ron's education and training has come from both institutions and mentors. He earned a master's degree in planning and policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Master of Theology from the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. He has been trained and mentored by John Kretzmann and John McKnight, co-founders of the ABCD Institute, for more than 25 years.
Ron's work focuses on helping organizations understand and apply asset-based strategies to community revitalization and community organizing. This means discovering the power within a community and mobilizing the assets of a community before looking for outside resources. Community change is more authentic and more sustainable by working from the inside out rather than simply seeking outside resources to drop in or on the community. Asset-based approaches are also more fun and more sustainable for staff and volunteers as well as residents. Every community has assets from cultural to economic and environmental to individuals. Some of the most rewarding part of this work is organizing or re-organizing those assets to make a stronger community with powerful local leadership.
Ron especially enjoys working with communities to take control of their story by using participatory evaluation techniques and narrative development.
He lives with his wife in Oceanside, California where he enjoys hiking, biking,sunsets, playing in the ocean, tidepooling and sand castle making with his grandson, trivia nights, live jazz and blues and any time he can spend with his children and grandchildren. Ron is an avid baseball fan, an active member of Bethlehem Lutheran Church and a sincere but inconsistent practitioner of meditation and yoga.
Contact info:
Pacific Community Solutions, Inc.
1250 Natoma Way Unit D Oceanside, CA 92057
916-203-4051
ron@pacificcommunitysolutions.com
www.pacificcommunitysolutions.com
Pronouns: He/Him/His