Spitfires come in all shapes and sizes. How did Laurel Dumont, from Sherborn, Mass., in 1978, end up in Newark in 2000? More to her purpose, what keeps her in Newark?

"Newark is at a crossroads," she said. "Under a national spotlight, and with hundreds of millions of dollars of public and private funds being invested in our city, Newark must now break the cycle of poverty, violence and disinvestment that has hampered it for half a century or more. ... The nonprofit sector is expected to play a significant role in bringing about a new cycle of wellness, opportunity, and abundance."

Those arguments start a draft proposal from the Center for Collaborative Change's (Collaborative Change) commitment to develop and operate the Newark Action Lab, a combined entity with a goal to work "across all Newark social enterprises, which will ultimately improve the economic competitiveness of Newark."

Dumont's Collaborative Change is one of the organizations trying to integrate areas of expertise to identify Newark's endeavoring problems and to collectively resolve them. Her journey of brokering partnerships starts where all lessons are best learned — in school.

Starting her career with Teach for America, Dumont was assigned to Newark's 13th Avenue School in 2000. Through that experience, she developed a desire to understand how to help people learn. She also experienced the many negative mental and physical health barriers the children were facing. The experience left her with the question: "What are the safety nets and social welfare systems and how do they work?"

Going beyond her teaching position and examining her next professional steps led Dumont to pursue her Juris Doctorate, coupled with a Masters of Social Work degree, at the University of Michigan. The dual degree helped her hone the skill set to identify and explore social welfare issues with the practicality and means to affect change by navigating the legal system.

Once out of law school, it wasn't a linear path to forming Collaborative Change. It rather grew out of the organic process of working with groups such as Essex-Newark Legal Services and New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. Through working with those organizations, Dumont was able to join her legal acumen with a client's expertise of their stark reality to bridge the gaps to work within the system. It also reinforced her understanding of Newark's operations, recognizing that change cannot be affected without understanding where the community is coming from.

In 2008, Dumont formed Collaborative Change with a mission "to engage community and civic leadership in policy and program development in order to accelerate Newark's revitalization while ensuring that the process includes and responds to the priorities of its community members." She is the organizations executive officer.

Most notably, the organization has achieved success with its Strong Healthy Communities Initiative, where its proposal won them $15 million in capital to "develop new school-based health clinics and concentrate on ongoing initiatives related to access to fresh and healthy foods, and affordable housing." 

Together, with her staff of six, the nonprofit is looking towards Newark's future and its role in effecting change. As for the future, Dumont wants "to create lasting impact by having developed the structures to identify unmet needs and best practice solutions, incubate or broker solutions by coordinating external partners and pro bono teams and measure and evaluate impact and progress of solutions."