Building a Neighborhood of Economic Opportunity in Atlanta

This four-page case study (2014) from The Intersector Project outlines how cross-sector collaboration was used to transform the East Lake Meadows community in Atlanta, Georgia.

From the Intersector Project

In 1995, in the East Lake Meadows public housing complex located four miles from downtown Atlanta, only four percent of residents earned incomes above the poverty line. The unemployment rate was 86.5 percent, and the neighborhood was home to a multi-million dollar drug trade with a crime rate 18 times higher than the national average. Less than 10 percent of children attending the neighborhood elementary school met basic proficiency standards in math by fifth grade. In 1993, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) a $35 million grant to renovate the crumbling housing stock of East Lake Meadows. Renee Glover, who had recently joined AHA as President, realized that merely renovating housing would not create a safer, more prosperous community. Concurrently, Tom Cousins, Founder of Cousins Properties, Inc., formed the East Lake Foundation to support and lead an integrated and holistic community approach which would provide mixed income housing, cradle-to-college education, and community wellness resources through public and private partnerships. Along with Carol Naughton, a real estate attorney for AHA, and Greg Giornelli, the Executive Director of the East Lake Foundation, and neighborhood residents, Tom and Renee catalyzed a collaborative effort to transform East Lake Meadows. This model and its success led to the development of Purpose Built Communities – a national network that redevelops distressed communities in cities throughout the United States.

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“Cross-sector collaboration isn’t merely an option but a necessity to create neighborhoods where everyone can thrive. The necessary skill sets, funding streams, and leadership aren’t found only in one sector, but live in all sectors; collaborations allows for better coordination, more efficient use of resources, and greater impact. The revitalization of East Lake in Atlanta is a strong example of the power of cross-sector collaboration. Purpose Built Communities is helping leaders around the country use the model developed in East Lake to build healthy, sustainable neighborhoods with pathways to prosperity for the lowest income families.”— Carol Naughton, Senior Vice President, Purpose Built Communities

This case study, authored by The Intersector Project, tells the story of this initiative.

More about The Intersector ProjectThe Intersector Project
The Intersector Project is a New York-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that seeks to empower practitioners in the government, business, and non-profit sectors to collaborate to solve problems that cannot be solved by one sector alone. We provide free, publicly available resources for practitioners from every sector to implement collaborative solutions to complex problems. We take forward several years of research in collaborative governance done at the Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School and expand on that research to create practical, accessible resources for practitioners.

Follow on Twitter @theintersector.

Resource Link: http://intersector.com/case/eastlake_georgia/ (Download the case study PDF here.)

This resource was submitted by Neil Britto, the Executive Director at The Intersector Project via the Add-a-Resource form.

Retrofitting Homes for Energy Efficiency in Portland

This four-page case study (2014) from The Intersector Project outlines how Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability used cross-sector collaboration to address the need to retrofit homes for increased energy efficiency.

From the Intersector Project

An estimated 40 percent of carbon dioxide pollution in the United States comes from energy used in homes. In Portland, Oregon, the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability wanted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the city while bettering the economic and social development of local residents and businesses. In 2009, stakeholders came together to draft a plan designed to provide energy upgrades to 500 Portland homes and cut energy consumption by 10 to 30 percent using an innovating financing model to eliminate the upfront costs that deterred homeowners from pursuing environmentally-friendly energy retrofits. Led by Derek Smith, a sustainability expert with a record of working in the private, public, and non-profit sectors, collaborators came together to create Clean Energy Works Portland (CEWP), an innovative program that used a revolving loan to finance upgrades, working with local contractors to add high-quality jobs to the economy which resulted in a reduction of twenty percent or greater energy consumption in most participating homes.

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“Cross-sector collaborations are the most practical and effective way to make progress in this era of massive resource constraints and necessary economic realignment.”— Derek Smith, CEO, Clean Energy Works Oregon

This case study, authored by The Intersector Project, tells the story of this initiative.

More about The Intersector ProjectThe Intersector Project
The Intersector Project is a New York-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that seeks to empower practitioners in the government, business, and non-profit sectors to collaborate to solve problems that cannot be solved by one sector alone. We provide free, publicly available resources for practitioners from every sector to implement collaborative solutions to complex problems. We take forward several years of research in collaborative governance done at the Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School and expand on that research to create practical, accessible resources for practitioners.

Follow on Twitter @theintersector.

Resource Link: http://intersector.com/case/cewp_oregon/ (Download the case study PDF here.)

This resource was submitted by Neil Britto, the Executive Director at The Intersector Project via the Add-a-Resource form.

Reducing the Risks of Catastrophic Wildfires in Flagstaff

This four-page case study (2014) from The Intersector Project outlines how a cross-sector collaboration partnership created the Flagstaff Watershed Protection Project (FWPP) to reduce the risks of wildfires in Flagstaff, Arizona.

From the Intersector Project

Years of extensive wildland fire suppression in the Southwest has left many forests with unnaturally high levels of forest fuels, like dense undergrowth and thick litter fall. This has changed the natural fire ecology from low, fast-burning wildfires, to much larger crown fires that kill trees and undermine landscape integrity. In 2010, a wildfire and subsequent flooding on the east side of the San Francisco Peaks, just north of Flagstaff, Arizona, caused over $150 million in combined suppression and recovery. A similar wildfire in either of the two Flagstaff watersheds could potentially flood much of downtown and/or disrupt 50 percent of the city’s water supply, resulting in significant long-term financial and life-style impacts within the community. Recognizing the need for preventative action, a partnership between the city, county, state, and federal governments, with support from local non-profit and for-profit organizations, has resulted in the Flagstaff Watershed Protection Project (FWPP). With Flagstaff Wildland Fire Management Officer Paul Summerfelt coordinating FWPP activities, FWPP plans to mitigate the risk of potentially devastating wildfires in Flagstaff’s critical watershed areas by managing forest fuels and restoring natural ecosystem functions. This will include thinning out dense forests and reintroducing a low-intensity fire regime. To fund FWPP, Flagstaff passed a $10 million municipal bond with 74 percent approval rate, making FWPP the only forest restoration work on National Forests funded through municipal bonds.

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“The strength of a management group is much better when it’s not just a single agency. When you get different people involved, they see things differently and everybody brings something into the collaborative process… If you want to go fast go by yourself, but if you want to make a difference, go with others.”— Paul Summerfelt, Flagstaff Fire Department’s Wildland Fire Management Officer

This case study, authored by The Intersector Project, tells the story of this initiative.

More about The Intersector ProjectThe Intersector Project
The Intersector Project is a New York-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that seeks to empower practitioners in the government, business, and non-profit sectors to collaborate to solve problems that cannot be solved by one sector alone. We provide free, publicly available resources for practitioners from every sector to implement collaborative solutions to complex problems. We take forward several years of research in collaborative governance done at the Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School and expand on that research to create practical, accessible resources for practitioners.

Follow on Twitter @theintersector.

Resource Link: http://intersector.com/case/flagstafffire_arizona/ (Download the case study here.)

This resource was submitted by Neil Britto, the Executive Director at The Intersector Project via the Add-a-Resource form.

New Research on Public Engagement Practitioners

This blog post was submitted by NCDD supporting member Caroline W. Lee, associate professor of Sociology at Lafayette College and author of Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry

There has been a recent explosion of research interest in public engagement practitioners, much of which uses qualitative research methods and ethnography to capture the rich practices and processes in the field (see, for example, Oliver Escobar’s work here). In this vein, I wanted to share with readers of the blog about a symposium on public engagement professionals I participated in at the International Political Science Association conference in Toronto in July.

Organized by Canadian and French researchers Laurence Bherer, Mario Gauthier, Alice Mazeaud, Magalie Nonjon and Louis Simard in collaboration with the Institut du Nouveau Monde, the symposium was unique in that it brought together international scholars of the professionalization of public participation with leading practitioners of public participation from the US, UK, and Canada like Carolyn Lukensmeyer.

You can find the program schedule and more details about how to access the papers here. Topics covered participatory methods and strategies in a variety of public and private contexts in North and South America and Europe.

The organization of the symposium made use of participatory practices such as Open Space and a dialogic round table format bringing the scholars and practitioners together to comment on each others’ work. There was honest discussion at the symposium over the areas where practitioners and researchers might collaborate with and learn more from each other, and the areas where the goals and aims of researchers and practitioners may diverge. Of course, there was also acknowledgment that some researchers are also practitioners, although there seemed to be near universal rejection of the term “pracademic”!

Despite some tough criticisms of the results of participation efforts on the part of scholars, practitioners were extremely generous and open to debate. Simon Burall from INVOLVE and Peter MacLeod from MASS LBP in Canada both inviting interested researchers to study their organizations, practices, and processes in-depth (grad students, take note of this amazing opportunity!). Public engagement practitioners are eager to talk about the larger politics and micropractices of the field—even when some of the symposium attendees acknowledged that being subjects of ethnographic study was an odd and sometimes uncomfortable experience.

Despite the overview of exciting international research on participation, I left the conference with the sense that our work thus far has just scratched the surface of what it is like to be a democracy practitioner in a world of deep inequalities. The opportunities for additional research in the field and dialogue between researchers and practitioners are expanding—and even more essential at a time when participatory practices are proliferating across the globe.

For those interested in studies of the impacts of the public engagement field, many of the researchers at the IPSA Symposium have books on participation and deliberation coming out in 2015. Jason Chilvers has a volume coming out from Routledge with Matthew Kearnes entitled Remaking Participation: Science, Environment, and Emergent Publics. Genevieve Fuji Johnson’s book, Democratic Illusion: Deliberative Democracy in Canadian Public Policy, includes comparative case studies of “best case” deliberative efforts and their sometimes disappointing outcomes.

My own book, Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry, focuses primarily on participation professionals in the U.S. and how they manage D&D processes that are increasingly popular at times of economic crisis and retrenchment. For more on the prospects of all kinds of democratic participation in a landscape of economic and social inequalities, see my edited volume with Michael McQuarrie and Edward Walker, Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation.

The work of Laurence Bherer, Alice Mazeaud, and Magalie Nonjon presented at the conference looks more broadly at participation professionals in Europe and Canada, and is a valuable complement to prior work focused on Australian practitioners by Hendriks and Carson. Bherer is even organizing an edited volume with Mario Gauthier and Louis Simard on participation professionals in North America and Europe. The new French-language journal Participations has many articles that should be of interest to blog readers, as does the English-language Italian journal Partecipazione & Conflitto.

Do you know of new research on the growth of public engagement in the 21st century? If so, please share links in the comments!

Reforestation of Parks in Seattle

This four-page case study (2014) from The Intersector Project outlines how the City of Seattle used cross-sector collaboration to establish the Green Seattle Partnership to  help reforest the city parks in Seattle, Washington.

From the Intersector Project

In 1994 the City of Seattle and the Parks Department began to notice something wrong with trees in city parks. Research found that Seattle’s 2,500 acres of forested city parks were at risk from invasive plants such as English Ivy, Himalayan blackberry and bindweed. In 2004, experts projected that within 20 years about 70 percent of Seattle’s forested parkland trees would be dead. Previously, park-goers removed invasive species on their own, while non-profit and government organizations likewise worked independently. Rather than helping the problem, however, these piecemeal efforts placed an undue strain on the city’s existing resources. In order to save the parks, a shared effort between community members, experts in forestry, and the departments that held park resources was necessary. In 2004, the Green Seattle Partnership was formed, with the aim of arming citizens to help the city’s trees in partnership with the Department of Parks, Public Utilities and the Office of Sustainability and Environment. Under the leadership of Mark Mead, Senior Urban Forester, the Partnership created a 20-year strategic plan to sustain Seattle’s forested parks. Green Seattle Partnership is now the largest urban forest restoration project in the country. Mark’s use of agents across all sectors connected to the issue, and mobilizing community members to volunteer 500,000 hours by 2013 to the reforestation program, have put the Green Seattle Partnership in place to achieve their goal of planting 500,000 new trees by 2025.

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“What really energized me and brought me into the fold of doing this work was in the very early days…working with the community members, seeing their enthusiasm, their drive, and their commitment to making their community a better place.”– Mark Mead, Senior Urban Forester

This case study, authored by The Intersector Project, tells the story of this initiative.

More about The Intersector ProjectThe Intersector Project
The Intersector Project is a New York-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that seeks to empower practitioners in the government, business, and non-profit sectors to collaborate to solve problems that cannot be solved by one sector alone. We provide free, publicly available resources for practitioners from every sector to implement collaborative solutions to complex problems. We take forward several years of research in collaborative governance done at the Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School and expand on that research to create practical, accessible resources for practitioners.

Follow on Twitter @theintersector.

Resource Link: http://intersector.com/case/greenseattle_washington/ (Download the case study here.)

This resource was submitted by Neil Britto, the Executive Director at The Intersector Project via the Add-a-Resource form.

Participatory Practices in Organizations

This 17-page review article, Participatory Practices in Organizations by Caroline Lee was published 2015 in Sociology Compass, an online journal aimed at reviewing state-of-the-art research for a broad audience of undergraduates, researchers, and those who want to stay posted on developments in particular fields.

The piece is a relatively quick overview and digest of a range of historic and current research on participation (not just deliberation, but much that is relevant to it) in a variety of different types of organizations. It might be useful for NCDD members seeking a quick literature review, students looking for gaps in existing research, or anyone interested in how organizational scholars view the evolution of participatory practices over the last century.

From the Abstract…

The literature on participatory practices in organizations has been less coherent and more limited to subspecialties than the literature on bureaucracy in organizations – despite a number of celebrated studies of participation in 20th century American sociology. Due to the practical nature of participatory reforms and the ambiguity of participation as a concept, attempts to review participatory knowledge have a tendency to focus on refining definitions and clarifying frameworks within subfields.

This article instead provides a broad thematic overview of three different types of research on participation in organizations, all critical to an understanding of today’s dramatic expansion of participatory practices across a variety of organizations. Classic research studied participation as dynamic and central to organizational legitimacy. Institutional design research has focused on participation as a stand-alone governance reform with promising empowerment potential, but mixed results in domains such as health care, environmental politics, and urban planning. Finally, recent research seeks to place participatory practices in the context of shifting relationships between authority, voice, and inequality in the contemporary era. The article concludes with suggestions for building on all three categories of research by exploring what is old and new in the 21st century’s changing participatory landscape.

Download the article here.

About the Author
Caroline W. Lee is Associate Professor of Sociology at Lafayette College. Her research explores the intersection of social movements, business, and democracy in American organizations. Her book Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry was published in 2015 by Oxford University Press. Her co-edited volume with Michael McQuarrie and Edward Walker, Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation, was published in 2015 by NYU Press.

Resource Link: http://sites.lafayette.edu/leecw/publications/

This resource was submitted by Caroline Lee, Associate Professor of Sociology at Lafayette College, via the Add-a-Resource form.

Creating an Environment for Healthy Lifestyles in Brownsville

This four-page case study (2014) from The Intersector Project outlines how the University of Texas School of Public Health used cross-sector collaboration with local clinicians and the City Health Department to create opportunities for healthier lifestyles in Brownsville, Texas.

From the Intersector Project

In 2001, the University of Texas School of Public Health (UTSPH) Brownsville campus began clinical research to identify and quantify what health risks existed in Brownsville. They found 80 percent of residents were either obese or overweight, one in three were diabetic (50 percent unknowingly), and 70 percent of residents had no healthcare coverage. After initiating a community media campaign called Tu Salud Si Cuenta, UTSPH formed a Community Advisory Board (CAB) in order to speak about the findings and promote change in the Brownsville community. They involved local clinicians, including Dr. Rose Zavaletta Gowen, an Obstetrician Gynecologist, to inform clinicians and encourage them to get involved. After agreeing actions needed to be taken, a team of UTSPH, the City Health Department, a local community health clinic Su Clinica, and Rose organized and designed a farmers’ market, with the goal of making fresh fruits and vegetables accessible and affordable to every income level in the city. The Brownsville Farmers’ Market opened in 2006 followed by an integrated network of initiatives including The Challenge, an annual weight loss event; CycloBia, an open streets program; policy changes including Sidewalk ordinance, Safe Passing ordinance, Complete Streets Resolution, and Smoking ban ordinance; and a Master Bike and Hike Plan aimed at providing a trail within one half mile of every residence in the city. The CAB, which today includes over 200 members, is actively involved in all of these programs in a variety of capacities to promote a healthier Brownsville.

IP_Brownsville“For cross-sector collaboration you might need to talk in terms that you’re not necessarily familiar with, but you have to do your research in order to find those connections to other areas and harness those partners. That is how we were able to make our projects work with very little funding and no line item in the city budget for what we were doing.”— Dr. Rose Zavaletta Gowen, Brownsville City Commissioner

This case study, authored by The Intersector Project, tells the story of this initiative.

More about The Intersector ProjectThe Intersector Project
The Intersector Project is a New York-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that seeks to empower practitioners in the government, business, and non-profit sectors to collaborate to solve problems that cannot be solved by one sector alone. We provide free, publicly available resources for practitioners from every sector to implement collaborative solutions to complex problems. We take forward several years of research in collaborative governance done at the Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School and expand on that research to create practical, accessible resources for practitioners.

Follow on Twitter: @theintersector.

Resource Link: http://intersector.com/case/health_brownsville/ (Download the case study PDF here.)

This resource was submitted by Neil Britto, the Executive Director at The Intersector Project via the Add-a-Resource form.

Intersector Toolkit: Tools for Cross-Sector Collaboration

This 31-page Toolkit (2014) is the cornerstone of The Intersector Project’s work. It provides practical knowledge for practitioners in every sector to implement their own intersector initiatives. At The Intersector Project, we think of a toolkit as a resource that provides actionable guidance on how to solve a problem. Toolkits can be broad or narrow in focus, providing general guidance or sector-, industry-, or issue- specific guidance.

The Intersector Project_ToolkitIn a cross-sector context, toolkits assist practitioners in navigating the differences in languages, cultures, and work practices that exist across sectors, differences that can prove challenging to align when pursuing shared goals in a consensus-oriented environment. Our Toolkit is designed to be process-specific, rather than issue- or sector-specific because we believe there are common elements to all successful cross-sector collaborations and because we want to ensure that our Toolkit is accessible to practitioners working on a broad range of problems in varying types of collaborations.

Our Toolkit is composed of 17 tools organized into four stages of Diagnosis, Design, Implementation, and Assessment. It has been crafted as a flexible handbook that guides practitioners’ thinking on when and how to implement a specific tool, regardless of the practitioners’ sector affiliations. Each tool describes an action that practitioners can take together to help forge successful collaborations. These tools are not static. We encourage practitioners to select the tools that are most appropriate for their project stage and partnership structure, and to use them repeatedly at different stages when needed.

To date, this resource is informed by our library of case studies and correlating leadership interviews, literature reviews that address the theories and practices that characterize cross-sector collaboration, and in-depth analysis of similar guiding resources in the fields of collective impact, public-private partnerships, and other collaborative frameworks.

We consider this Toolkit a living document, which we are continually improving based on practitioner feedback. If you have suggestions on how to further enhance this resource, please share them with us at research[at]intersector[dot]com.

More about The Intersector ProjectThe Intersector Project
The Intersector Project is a New York-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that seeks to empower practitioners in the government, business, and non-profit sectors to collaborate to solve problems that cannot be solved by one sector alone. We provide free, publicly available resources for practitioners from every sector to implement collaborative solutions to complex problems. We take forward several years of research in collaborative governance done at the Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School and expand on that research to create practical, accessible resources for practitioners. Follow on Twitter @theintersector.

Resource Link: http://intersector.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/The-Intersector-Project-Toolkit.pdf

This resource was submitted by Neil Britto, the Executive Director at The Intersector Project via the Add-a-Resource form.

Bologna Symposium on Conflict Prevention, Resolution, & Reconciliation

The Bologna Symposium on Conflict Prevention, Resolution, & Reconciliation is held at the John Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Bologna Center and is direct training by world leaders in: international negotiation, mediation, facilitation, strategic nonviolent action, social entrepreneurship, project planning and design, trauma healing, economics of peace, and more. It is recommended for exceptional professionals, graduate students, or accomplished undergraduates. Optional M.A. credits offered from Johns Hopkins SAIS.

Today’s conflicts are incredibly complex. As an effective peace leader, you need a core toolkit of essential practical skills and a diverse global professional network. In the Bologna Symposium, you go through an intensive training process with the world’s top practitioners/academics in those core skills and join the ever-expanding IPSI family of over 500 alumni.

From ISPI…

In cooperation with The Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), the Bologna Symposium bring together the globe’s brightest minds from top academic institutions, NGOs, international organizations, grassroots peace movements, and the armed services. Over a four-week period, participants undergo intensive training by the field’s premier political leaders, academic experts, practitioners, and advocates in the practical skills necessary to foster peace and security in their communities and the world.

All participants receive an IPSI Post-Graduate Certificate in “International Conflict Management” upon successful completion of the course.  Participants who choose to undertake additional rigorous assignments alternatively have the opportunity to earn an IPSI Post-Graduate Certificate in “International Conflict Management with Distinction.”  In addition, qualified participants may apply to earn graduate-level MA course credit from SAIS, one of the world’s premier graduate schools for international affairs.

Find out more about the Bologna Symposium curriculum here.

More about IPSIIPSI_logo
The International Peace & Security Institute (IPSI) empowers the next generation of peacemakers. Founded on the core belief that education can mitigate violent conflict, IPSI facilitates the transfer of knowledge and skills to a global audience from the world’s premier political leaders, academic experts, practitioners, and advocates. The Institute develops comprehensive training programs, advances scholarly research, and promotes efforts to raise public awareness of peace and security issues.

Resource Link: http://ipsinstitute.org/bologna-2015/

This resource was submitted by the International Peace and Security Institute via the Add-a-Resource form.