Category Archives: collaborative action

Innovative Journalism Can Take Public Conversation to Scale

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We have barely begun to use major media and journalism – both old and new forms – to scale up the impact of powerful public conversations about public issues beyond the rooms and online forums where those conversations take place. Our societies urgently need innovations and development in the area of public conversation journalism in order to bring collective intelligence and community wisdom into our policy-making and into the everyday activities of ordinary citizens and organizations.

In this post I want to highlight the most remarkable public conversation journalism I’ve ever seen and explore some of the kinds of work public conversation journalists do and could do.

A few weeks ago 122 members of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation created, edited, and rated 95 ideas about what they’d like to see and do in their national conference in October 2014 (and you can see the results here). To my surprise and delight, an item I contributed ended up in third place:

Explore the best examples we can find where major media have partnered with dialogue and deliberation efforts to actually “scale up” public dialogue and deliberation to the regional, state, and national levels – or which contained lessons and best practices to help us do that in the future.

Thanks to these results I’ve decided it is finally time to share a major research project I’ve been working on over the last 15 years. I posted the last pieces of that work online last month. So now a major new resource is available – a thorough examination of what I believe is the most potent example of media-sponsored public conversation on public issues in North America and possibly the world. This initiative – all but unknown even to specialists in the field – was undertaken in 1991 by Maclean’s magazine, Canada’s leading newsweekly in collaboration with Canadian TV. The resources now available online include the entire 40 pages of Maclean’s coverage, the complete CTV documentary video, detailed interviews with four of the major players, and my own descriptions and analyses (see www.co-intelligence.org/Macleans1991Experiment.html).

What Maclean’s and Canadian TV did

These two major media innovators convened 12 Canadians whose extreme diversity reflected the diversity of their deeply divided country. They then charged these ordinary folks with articulating a shared vision for Canada. They were given two and a half days to do it. Maclean’s provided a team of leading-edge negotiators from the Harvard Negotiation Project – led by Roger Fisher, co-author of the classic negotiation handbook Getting to Yes – to help them.

The intense conversations that resulted were remarkable all by themselves. But the coverage provided by Maclean’s and Canadian TV was unprecedented and, I believe, has never been surpassed in the quarter of a century since. It generated widespread lively conversation around the country for months – and awards for Maclean’s.

Despite the fact that it happened more than two decades ago, I find this remarkable event teeming with potential lessons for all of us who want to “scale up” public dialogue and deliberation. We know that that can’t be achieved by centrally organizing millions of people into high quality conversations; there just aren’t the resources for doing that. We need some kind of catalyst that can trigger hundreds of self-organized, spontaneous conversations, including some with potential for real impact.

Maclean’s and Canadian TV provide important clues. They designed their coverage in ways that closed the gap between the small facilitated conversation and its mass audience. They didn’t provide the usual coverage to be witnessed by passive observers keeping up with the latest news. Their coverage was actively, intensely engaging. Like reality TV today, the Maclean’s/Canadian TV coverage drew millions of readers and viewers into intimate and often dramatic interactions among twelve radically different Canadians who included a few people much like themselves as well as others that they strongly disagreed with. Because of the brilliant design of both the interactions and the coverage, these journalists showed us how to vicariously engage an entire country in a higher form of conversation and a renewed sense of political possibility.

As I noted in my book Empowering Public Wisdom, a major unlearned lesson in this effort was that Maclean’s and Canadian TV didn’t repeat this process every year after that. If such a journalistic engagement of the entire country in high quality conversation were to be done on a regular basis, any country doing it would find itself thinking more clearly and creatively about its affairs than it had ever done before and creating a political force field which would profoundly influence politicians, news media, educators, businesses, and government decision-makers, as well as ordinary citizens.

Once it became part of the political culture, such collective thoughtfulness and due attention to diverse views and information would make all the difference in the world. That was, after all, the dream of democracy in the first place: an informed, conversant citizenry engaged together in crafting their collective lives and future.

The fact that we have today new ways to do that – conversational technologies as well as digital and telecommunications technologies – makes it even more important to understand what pioneers in the field did that we can now build on to succeed beyond their wildest dreams.

Public conversation journalism

The field of journalism – its theory, practice, and business models – is in upheaval.

The primary source of this disruption – the Internet – is widely recognized: Journalists, who were once the gatekeepers of news and current information, have been bypassed by millions of bloggers, citizen journalists, and community and issue activists using the web and modern communications technology to share what’s going on and what they think about it. This explosion of participatory information-sharing has many blessings for democracy. But it also has limitations, as many valuable journalistic standards have been ignored on the way to greater freedom and participation. The field is now rife – or perhaps ripe – with angst and creative conversation and experimentation. Among the most creative efforts to engage with this issue is Journalism That Matters, catalyzed for over a decade by NCDDer Peggy Holman and a handful of colleagues.

To this rich transformational soup of modern journalism I want to add one more ingredient – an innovative manifestation of journalism’s time-honored contribution to informed citizen engagement in a vibrant democracy: I call it “public conversation journalism” – journalism that has a professional commitment to do things like these:

  • Report on public conversations on public issues – before, during, and after – as legitimate community news.
  • Sponsor major public conversations on public issues, like Maclean’s did.
  • Welcome op eds that promote or usefully comment on public conversations about public issues.
  • Profile public conversation participants from various angles including who they are (to entice audience identification with them and thus trigger a vicarious experience of their views, their passions, their transformations) as well as their personal human interest stories and their infectious enthusiasm.
  • Profile the issues being discussed (background and framing) to deepen and contextualize the public conversation.
  • Provide multi-media coverage (print, video, even journalistic drama like Multiple Viewpoint Drama and Playback Theater).
  • Feature conversations that include well chosen, inclusive diversity such as we find in the Maclean’s initiative, Citizens Juries, WIsdom Councils, and Deliberative Polling (which convene cross-sections or random selected members of a population) and/or in “whole system” stakeholder conversations such as Consensus Councils and Future Search Conferences.
  • Provide truly transpartisan coverage – that is, coverage that includes a broad range of perspectives that move the viewer or reader beyond the reductionist, obsolete, and deeply adversarial standard of “both sides”.
  • Cover the very real drama of citizens problem-solving together, that may include but goes way beyond “the debate”.
  • Help the public understand the character and dynamics of different kinds of conversation – productive and unproductive, creative and uncreative, informed and uninformed, vibrant and restrained, diverse citizens and “the usual suspects”, colaborative and adversarial, etc.
  • Cover – and even provide forums and structure for – the social media generated around quality dialogue and deliberation.
  • Cover the actual results of public conversations on public issues – the immediate and longer term impacts on participants, communities, decision-makers, etc. – and publicize when good public conversational work gets taken seriously or ignored.
  • Cover efforts to institutionalize public deliberations, to build a “culture of dialogue”, to promote citizen engagement, etc.

I hope journalists and professionals in the fields of citizen dialogue and deliberation and public engagement engage in thinking together about how to bring about this powerful new kind of collaboration among themselves and their colleagues. I hope to hear from you about earlier and current experiments in such collaboration, including any details we can all learn from and questions and challenges you now face. I have heard of some work in Australia along these lines, and a number of people have noted that South Africa’s Mt. Fleur scenario initiative – which, intriguingly, happened one year after the Maclean’s initiative – included remarkable publicity by major news media.

There is SO much to learn and try out here…

Five Strategies to Include Community in Collective Impact

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As of late, our field and NCDD specifically has been looking more closely at “collective impact” models of creating change in our communities, and we saw an article from Rich Harwood, an NCDD organizational member and president of the Harwood Institute, on that theme recently that was worth sharing.

Rich’s article looked at the way that, though collective impact strategies are becoming more popular, the involvement of local communities is often left out of our thinking on how we create collective impact: “My chief concern here is that we sometimes leave robust notions of community out of collective impact discussions and implementation efforts. At times, the very nature of community seems like an afterthought, even a nuisance.” 

He says that rather than imposing collective impact strategies on communities, we have to ensure that the community and its civic culture are part of the calculations for how to succeed. What is civic culture? Rich says,  

Civic culture is how a community works—how trust forms, why and how people engage with one another, what creates the right enabling environment for change to take root and accelerate. It directly contributes to the degree of readiness and appetite for change among leaders, groups, and everyday people.

Each community has its own civic culture, and to make progress, it’s important that everyone understands and develops it.

As part of making sure that civic culture is factored into the ways we approach change, Rich describes what he says are five characteristics of a community’s civic culture that effective collective impact efforts have to address.

The first characteristic is community ownership:

…the success of collective impact depends on genuine ownership by the larger community, and that starts with placing value on both expert knowledge and public knowledge, which can come only from authentically engaging the community.

The starting point is to determine shared aspirations for a community and to know the challenges people face in moving toward those aspirations.

The second is selecting strategies that “fit” the community:

…organizationally aligned strategies will produce measurable progress when teams base them on data, evidence-based decision-making, best practices, and other inputs. But it is important to not confuse a commitment to rigorous analysis with developing strategies that actually fit a local context.

Collective impact efforts should actively use public knowledge to drive the definition of a common agenda and to understand what strategies are relevant to the community.

Third, it’s important that collective impact strategies create a sustainable enabling environment:

…it is critical to create the right enabling environment in a community. This means focusing on the underlying conditions in a community that allow change to occur—and for the community itself to change how it works together.

…These include different layers of leadership in a community, norms for interaction, the presence of multiple groups that span boundaries and bring people together, conscious community conversation, and networks for learning and innovation.

The fourth characteristic is a focus on impact and belief:

…the intense focus on impact alone is not enough to create that desired goal. Another necessary ingredient is belief… Belief, after all, is that intangible factor that prompts and prods people to step forward and engage… Belief arises when people feel they are part of something bigger than themselves. How we structure collective impact efforts can either enlarge or diminish people’s belief.

And finally, Rich writes that collective impact efforts that genuinely involves community have a story:

…traditional aspects of communications strategies are not adequate for addressing the challenge that narratives play in a community. This is the story the community tells about itself. And it is this story that helps shape people’s mindsets, attitudes, behaviors, and actions.

We took a lot from Rich’s insights and think that as we strive to innovate and change the way we engage with our communities for the better, keeping these five dynamics in mind will help us to do that better.

The full version of Rich’s article was published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review and we encourage you to read the full article, which you can find at www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/putting_community_in_collective_impact.

Art of Hosting Trainings & NCDD Discounts

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We’ve previously highlighted the newest round of skill-building retreats from the Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics team, and we wanted to make sure that NCDD members know it’s not too late to sign up for this year’s retreats. The next retreat will be taking place May 15th – 17th in Nova Scotia, followed by another in British Columbia this September 21st – 24th.

We are excited to announce that NCDD has been able to secure a discount for our members at the retreats! Teams of 3 or more NCDD members are eligible for a 15% discount on registration if you sign up as an “NCDD group”.  So if you plan on attending the AoH retreat, we encourage you to let the network know via our Discussion Listserv (find out more and sign up for the listserv here) so that you can connect with others interested in attending.  

We have been hearing very good things about the AoH retreats, and want to hear about the experiences our members have with them, so we also encourage you to consider sharing your reflections on the experience via our Submit-to-Blog form if you do attend an retreat.

For more information, or if you’re ready to register, visit www.aohbtb.com/nova-scotia.html for the Nova Scotia event or www.aohbtb.com/british-columbia.html for the British Columbia event. You can also learn more by checking out the new round of videos that the Art of Hosting team has shared on YouTube to help people get a better sense of the AoH gatherings.

We encourage you to watch the video below as a teaser on the retreats and sign up today!

Position Opening with InterFaith Works of CNY

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We recently heard about a position opening with our friends at InterFaith Works of CNY that we wanted to share. IFW is seeking a new Program Director for their Center for Dialogue, and the position sounds like a great fit for some of our NCDD members, so we hope some of you will be interested in learning more about the opening.

IFW describes the position this way:

Creation of the Center for Dialogue: IFW is creating the Ahmad and Elizabeth El-Hindi Center for Dialogue (CfD) to build upon several successful models of dialogue that are currently part of the agency: Community Wide Dialogue to End Racism, Courageous Conversations about Race, Seeds of Peace, Sustained Dialogues for Communities in Conflictual Relationships, InterFaith Dinner Dialogues, Interfaith World Harmony Assembly, and InterFaith Dialogues to Understand Islam. The Center for Dialogue will build the capacity within the organization and within the community to more fully actualize the use of the dialogue-to-action model to address critical issues through cross-cultural dialogues…

Position Summary: The Program Director, under the guidance of the IFW Executive Director, is responsible for the overall operation of the Ahmad and Elizabeth El-Hindi Center for Dialogue.

Qualifications: Individual should have experience in the practice and philosophy of dialogue as a tool for human and community transformation; skills in human service administration and program development and delivery; demonstrated management experience including supervision of staff, budget, finance and fund development; awareness of and interest in the Central New York region; high level of initiative and creativity; proven ability to be an effective manager and leader; ability to handle a variety of tasks and responsibilities simultaneously and effectively; ability to work with diverse groups of people with diplomacy and discretion; ability to assume leadership in planning and programming for all areas of the Center for Dialogue.

You can find more info by visiting InterFaith Works’ website at www.interfaithworkscny.org, or you can find the full job description and application details at www.interfaithworkscny.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Director-Center-for-Dialogue.pdf.

Good luck to all the applicants!

Archive of March’s Confab on Everyday Democracy

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EvDem LogoLast month, as part of NCDD’s Confab Call series, we spent time with the staff of one of NCDD’s founding members, Everyday Democracy, exploring what Everyday Democracy has learned over the years, through their close work with community partners, about how to create dialogue and change.

We’re happy to share a recording of the the webinar, now available on the Everyday Democracy website, presented by Malik Russell, Everyday Democracy’s Communications Director, Carolyne Abdullah, their Director of Community Assistance, and Rebecca Reyes, Communications Manager.

More about Everyday Democracy…

Everyday Democracy helps communities build their own capacity for inclusive dialogue and positive change. Everyday Democracy’s ultimate aim is to create a national civic infrastructure that supports and values everyone’s voice and participation.

Because structural racism and other structural inequities affect communities everywhere, Everyday Democracy helps community groups use an “equity lens” in every phase of dialogue and change – coalition building, messaging, recruitment, issue framing, facilitation, and linking the results of their dialogues to action and change. They provide advice, training and flexible how-to resources on a wide range of issues – including poverty, racial equity, education, building strong neighborhoods, community-police relations, violence, early childhood, and community planning.

Look over the resources in the EvDem/Study Circles tag in the NCDD Resource Center to get a sense of the breadth and depth of work these folks do!

Update from Participatory Budgeting Campaign in CA

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We are always happy to hear good news from our partners with the Participatory Budgeting Project, an NCDD organizational member, and we wanted to share an update on their campaign in California from the PBP blog. We encourage you to read about how PB is growing below, or find the original post by clicking here.

PBP-logoLast October 2013, PBP began a year-long partnership with one of California’s foremost foundations to promote participatory budgeting (PB) across the state. Through our work with The California Endowment (TCE), PBP is supporting local advocacy for PB in the foundation’s Building Healthy Communities (BHC) program sites around the state. BHC is a 10-year initiative focused on empowering residents in 14 low-income California communities to eradicate health inequalities through community organizing and policy change. In each of these communities, PB presents a unique opportunity to channel public resources toward services and infrastructure that promote health and foster community economic development.

PB in Schools: Proposition 30 and the Local Control Funding Formula

Since PBP began working with Building Healthy Communities, a major shift in education funding in CA has presented an unexpected but promising opportunity for PB throughout the state. Through a new statewide tax passed by voters in 2012, millions of new education dollars are now flowing to California’s school districts, along with greater control over funds at the local level and new requirements to engage local stakeholders in the budget process.

C4J Workshop_California

In response to interest from advocates around the state, we held a webinar on this new Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) and international models of PB in schools and school districts for over 60 participants, with representatives from the California Teachers Association, Californians for Justice, and EdTrust West. PBP is now working with BHC groups and other community allies in Oakland, Sacramento, and Los Angeles to explore options for moving PB forward in schools.

In the picture to the right, youth leaders and staff from Californians for Justice rank project ideas at a PB demo workshop in Oakland. Participants discussed projects to support student health and learning in Oakland and San Jose school districts.

PB in Cities: Long Beach, San Diego, Richmond

In addition to developing new PB models, we’re also supporting BHC groups in Long Beach, Richmond, and San Diego in launching new citywide and district-based processes. In November, PBP staff and Chicago Alderman Joe Moore went to Long Beach for a speaking tour, including a City Council briefing, several strategic meetings and a community form (pictured on the left). Since then, three candidates running for Long Beach City Council have endorsed PB, and a current council member, James Johnson, held a PB workshop with his constituents in February.

Right across the bridge from Vallejo, the City of Richmond is considering a youth PB process in conjunction with the city’s Youth Council. PBP will be leading a workshop at the Richmond Youth Summit on April 19. In San Diego, BHC groups active with the Community Budget Alliance, coordinated by the Center for Policy Initiatives, have also been meeting with their council members and Planning Department staff over the last few months to build support for PB. They’re looking at both district funds and CDBG funds as possible pots of money for PB.

Stay tuned for upcoming PB events in Long Beach, Richmond, and San Diego!

PB Conference

We’re now planning the first PB conference to take place in California, in the Bay Area in September 2014. Our 3rd annual international PB conference will bring together practitioners and advocates from across the state, country, and world. See more info.

Join us in expanding PB in California!

If you live, work or attend school in any of California’s 14 BHC sites and want to see PB in your community, contact Ginny Browne, Project Coordinator, at ginny@participatorybudgeting.org.

Interview on GovLoop Innovation Report

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We recently read a great interview over at EngagingCities on an interesting report detailing 20 significant innovations made in government last year, and we thought it would interest our NCDD members. We encourage you to read the interview below or find the original post here.

engaging cities logoIn late December,  GovLoop released a new report, “The GovLoop Guide to 20 Innovations that Mattered in 2013.” EngagingPlans editor Della Rucker recently sat down with Emily Jarvis, lead writer of the report and producer of the GovLoop podcast, the DorobekINSIDER, to talk about how Emily and her colleagues uncovered those innovations, and what they found.

DGR: Thanks for taking the time to talk, Emily.  Where did the idea for the20 Innovations that Matter report come from?

EJ:  2013 was a rough year for government people, especially federal employees.  We felt like most of the media wasn’t telling the whole story about government employees – and we knew that government is one of the most innovative entities out there.  So we wanted to highlight those achievements.  Last year (2012) we did a report on technology in government, so that was kind of a stepping stone.

DGR:  How did you uncover all these trends, and so much information about them?  There are a lot of concrete examples in this report. 

EJ: We had a team of 14 people who were involved.  We went through various resources that GovLoop had generated over the year – guides, trainings, the podcast, etc.  We ended up seeing four categories of stories that were very much about people in governments taking risks, trying something new.  We wanted to call those out.

When we had those four categories identifies, then we went back through the specific stories to find the five strongest examples.  We wanted to choose stories where we could make a strong case for why that innovation matters.   A great example is the I-Center in North Carolina, which allows government agencies to try out technologies before they buy them.  This innovation was powerful because resources are so tight, governments can’t take risks on buying the wrong equipment.  The I-Center was a great way to manage that risk.

We ended up with 150 stories, which was of course way too many.  So we put them all on Google Docs and out staff voted to end up with the 20 we highlighted in the report.  There’s probably another 125 that we could have put on the list!

DGR: What did you see that surprised you?  Did any trends surface that were unexpected?

EJ: We’re very tech-forward at GovLoop, so to see large agencies taking that risk and seeing what they can do with social media was great.  For example, the Department of the Interior’s Instagram feed… I kind of use my dad as a litmus test for things like this!  If it catches his attention, if it demonstrates to him what government can do, then I know it can have an impact.  He was so excited about the Department of Interior Instagram feed – now he has a different relationship with that part of the government!  He can see an agency at work.

What’s really amazing is how social media use like that example changes peoples’ views of government agencies and workers.  It showcases how cool a government worker can be!

In May 2013, when the Open Data Directive first came out from the White House, that was critical to another trend that we identified.  It basically said that all new federal data needs to default to open – it needs to be open to the public unless there is a necessary reason to not release it.  I don’t think that’s something that someone in the general public would necessarily understand or care about, but so many of the apps and projects that are being developed now are based on open data.  There are whole sectors of the economy that are based on government data.  But it’s hard for people who are outside of government to understand that.  It’s not just about opening it up to the public, but it’s also making it so that the data can be shared and used.  That’s transformative.

One of the coolest things I saw was what local governments are doing with libraries.  These institutions needed to find new ways to interact with people, and they are basically reinventing themselves as a tech hub.  For example, Anne Arundel County’s library is across the street from a new Target, and people who wanted to apply for jobs had to do it online.  But if you don’t have a computer or internet access, how do you apply for those jobs?  The library basically set up an employment center, and it helped people do their applications.  We’re seeing a resurgence in libraries that you wouldn’t have bet on a few years ago.  You see government changing.

Another fascinating example of government changing, and changing swiftly and responsively, came from the Boston Police Department.  As a lot of us remember, the first news that they had caught the fugitive from the Boston Marathon bombing came from the Police Department’s Twitter.  That tweet got 3 million retweets in the first three minutes.  Even two years ago, no one would have imagined that news would have been spread like that.  Even more fascinating, that department now has a chance to really do something different.  They have a huge audience, and people have trust in them.

DGR: What kinds of trends are you seeing with regard to Innovation Officers?  That’s been a subject of some debate, at least in the local government world. 

EJ: Governments are at a point where money is tight but the demand for their services is higher than ever.  We’re seeing that some cities have dedicated themselves to trying something new every chance they can.  They realize that it might not work, but that they can try and learn from it and do something better.  They’re becoming more agile.  It’s flipping the script on how people assume that government works.  The Innovation Officer becomes the person who is out on the leading edge, saying “follow me, let’s give it a try and learn from it.”

We talked to one of the White House’s Innovation Fellows – Clay Johnson.  He was working on improving the federal procurement process, and he noted that the biggest challenge was the senior leadership – he said, “they had to change the way they think.”   That’s incredibly hard for government employees.  They’re intensely cognizant of their responsibility as stewards of the taxpayer’s money, and they have to walk a very fine line between being responsible and enabling necessary new ideas.  There’s reasons why governments do things the way they do – there are checks and balances.  The Innovation Officer – or anyone who is supporting government innovation, whatever their title — can’t go crazy.  It’s more about having someone within the government or agency who is willing and able to say “Let’s try this, let’s fail smartly.”

DGR: If someone were flipping through this report casually, what would you want them to take away from it?  What’s the message you most want people to get out of it?

EJ: If someone were to flip through it like a magazine, I’d want them to realize that government isn’t made up of a bunch of bureaucrats.  Governments can be, and a lot of the time they are, on the cusp of innovation.

I’d want them to come away with a different interpretation of government employees, to understand that the media’s portrayal is not what they are.   Innovation is alive in government, and it matters!

PAGE Fellowship Opportunity for Grad Students

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We recently heard about a great opportunity for our grad student members from NCDD supporting member Steven Kull, and we wanted to make sure to share it with you. The Imagining America initiative is a great venue for scholars to integrate civic engagement into their work , and we encourage you to learn more about their PAGE network below or by clicking here. 

Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) is Imagining America’s network for publicly engaged graduate students in humanities, arts, and design. PAGE enhances the theoretical and practical tools for public engagement, fosters a national, interdisciplinary community of peers and veteran scholars, and creates opportunities for collaborative knowledge production. The PAGE consortium, made up of alumni and allies of the program, promotes opportunities for mentorship and peer support from IA’s network.

Imagining America (IA) invites graduate students with a demonstrated interest in public scholarship and/or artistic practice to apply for a 2014-2015 PAGE Fellowship. Awardees receive $500 to attend a half-day Fellows Summit on October 8th and the 2014 Imagining America national conference, October 9th-11th in Atlanta, Georgia.

Fellows also commit to participating in a yearlong working group to promote collaborative art-making, teaching, writing, and research projects. PAGE alumni and Fellows will work together to organize monthly conference calls around themes and questions relevant to the needs of publicly engaged graduate students. In doing so, PAGE looks to foster a cohort of Fellows interested in pursuing collective and innovative scholarly practices.

Fellows are asked to be active participants in the Imagining America network through posting on the IA blog, presenting at regional meetings or campus workshops, or other related professional convenings. Additionally, each Fellow will be tasked with co-facilitating a webinar or workshop during the 2014-2015 academic year. Past examples include: book group discussions, virtual dinner parties, guest lectures, skill-building demonstrations, and music performances.

Learn more about PAGE from its 10th Anniversary Retrospective Video:

Graduate students from IA member campuses at all stages of their MA/MFA/PhD programs may apply to be PAGE Fellows.

The submission deadline is May 16th.

For more information and to apply, click here.

CM Call on Sustaining Neighborhoods this Thurs.

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Our organizational partners at CommunityMatters are hosting another one of their great capacity building calls this Thursday, April 10th, from 4-5pm EST. NCDD is a partner in the CommunityMatters collaboration, and we encourage you to hop on the call and learn with us.

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This month, the call is focused on Building and Sustaining Vital Neighborhoods. This month’s call will feature insights about neighborhood building from Felisa Conner, manager Garland, Texas’ Office of Neighborhood Vitality and Scott LeMay, Councilman in Garland, Texas and Former President of the Camelot Neighborhood Association. CM describes the call this way:

Think about a neighborhood you just love. What is it that makes it feel so welcoming, so inspired, or so vibrant? The best neighborhoods make greatness seem effortless, but what you don’t see is that behind the scenes, a lot of hard work and dedication is going into sustaining a strong place.

What does it take for your neighborhood to achieve greatness, for residents to act neighborly and work together to achieve shared goals?

On the next CommunityMatters® conference call, Felisa Conner of the Office of Neighborhood Vitality in Garland, Texas will join us to talk about building and sustaining vital neighborhoods. We’ll also hear from Councilman Scott LeMay of Garland, a graduate of the city’s Neighborhood Management Academy and former President of the Camelot Neighborhood Association. Felisa and Councilman LeMay will share tools and strategies for neighborhood management – ways to foster collaboration and build capacity to develop and realize neighborhood vision and goals.

If you are you ready to learn about strengthening your neighborhood, then make sure to register today for the conference call. We hope to hear you then!

As always, CM created an insightful blog piece to prime our thinking before the call. You can read it below or find the original post here.

Don Your Cardigan, It’s Time for Us All to Be a Little More Like Mr. Rogers

by Caitlyn Horose

Let’s be honest. Most day-to-day relations with our neighbors don’t reflect a Mr. Rogers mindset. Haven’t we all at least thought about writing a note like this or this once in our lives?

Even if you’re intentional about your interactions – maybe you bake cookies for newcomers on the block, or introduce yourself to unfamiliar faces at the neighborhood park – do you really believe that the future of your ‘hood really depends on your commitment?

The best neighborhoods make greatness seem effortless, but what you don’t see is that behind the scenes, a lot of hard work and dedication is going into sustaining a strong place. Great neighborhoods happen on purpose – people take stock in the idea of shared responsibility, the notion that everyone plays a part in upholding the health of a neighborhood.

So, what does a vital neighborhood look like? The Healthy Neighborhoods program identifies four characteristics of healthy neighborhoods: a positive image, confident real estate market, well-maintained physical infrastructure and strong neighborhood management.

On the next CommunityMatters® conference call, Felisa Conner of the Office of Neighborhood Vitality in Garland, Texas will share her 13 years of experience in building and sustaining vital neighborhoods with a three-pronged approach: build relationships, increase collaboration and develop leadership. In 2003, Felisa initiated an annual citywide neighborhood summit to help local residents understand how to use organizing tactics to boost trust, accountability and the willingness to act for the benefit of all neighbors. A few years later, she established Garland’s Neighborhood Management Academy to inform and empower residents about local decision-making processes and how they can get involved to manage neighborhood growth and change. The academy now includes a track for faith-based and non-profit organizations to encourage partnerships.

Councilman Scott LeMay, a graduate of Garland’s Academy, is a prime example of its success. After participating in Garland’s program and serving as President of the Camelot Neighborhood Association, Councilman Lemay was inspired to run for office. As a City Councilor, he seeks to increase public awareness of and participation in city government and foster future leaders in Garland. Councilman LeMay will join Felisa and CommunityMatters on April 10th from 4-5pm to share his perspective on the importance of building vital neighborhoods.

Other communities across the country are joining Garland in the quest to help all neighborhoods succeed. They are focusing on strategies to foster neighborly relations, establish neighborhood partnerships, and increase neighborhood leadership capacity.

A key piece of neighborhood management is helping neighbors feel comfortable being neighborly – they look out for one another, work together and reinforce neighborhood values. There are many simple, yet powerful ways to catalyze neighborly interaction and relationship building.

NeighborCircles are a lightweight way for neighbors to come together to meet each other and start talking over dinner. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, NeighborCircles have helped bring neighbors together in a safe and comfortable environment. After an initial series of three dinners, some circles take the next step and identify an action for making change in the community, while other circles continue to host dinners. In either case, the result is a strengthened social network. As one participant reflected, “The more of us who come together, the more power we have.”

GOOD’s Neighborday resources might be a year old, but their toolkit is timeless, offering inspiration for knocking on doors and asking, “Won’t you be my neighbor?” In fact, more than 2,000 people organized Neighborday events in 32 countries last year, just because they wanted to spend some time getting to know their neighbors. Watch this video for a quick recap of the awesomeness:

The second core component of neighborhood management is developing the critical partnerships to bring residents, city staff and nonprofits together to work on shared goals.

The Milwaukee Leadership Institute brings residents and non-profit representatives together as project partners. Two-person teams tackle the first steps of larger processes – they initiate resident engagement strategies, lay the foundation for neighborhood organizations and identify opportunities for local communication. In 2013, its pilot year, the program saw tangible results – increased confidence among residents, stronger relationships, and shared power in decision-making. Plans are to continue the program with a train-the-trainer model, where participants will bring Institute practices back to their neighborhood to ensure future neighborhood decisions employ a similar collaborative approach.  Listen to this podcast on the Institute’s first year from Grassroots Gratmakers.

Neighborland is an online platform for initiating collaborative projects at the neighborhood level. Online participants can generate ideas to tackle neighborhood problems and gather support to bring an idea to fruition. Using Neighborland, the N-Judah Turnaround Beautification Project engaged residents around ideas for improvements of a local park. See what the locals have to say about this initiative by watching the project video:

Leadership development is the third core piece of neighborhood management. To ensure residents have the capacity to manage the day-to-day activities on their blocks, communities like Raleigh, North Carolina, Cleveland, Ohio, and Tampa, Florida have established neighborhood leadership programs. These programs introduce residents to how city government works.

Whether you’re looking to get active in your neighborhood association, a non-profit leader who wants to work at the grassroots level, or a government employee interested in building similar capacity in your town, you won’t want to miss the next CommunityMatters event. Join our free conference call on Thursday, April 10 from 4-5pm Eastern to be inspired by Felisa Conner and Councilman Scott LeMay of Garland, Texas. They’ll share their experience in creating supportive programs for vital neighborhoods.

Register for the call now.

The original version of this piece can be found at www.communitymatters.org/blog/dawn-your-cardigan-it%E2%80%99s-time-us-all-be-little-more-mr-rogers.

Defining Public Innovation

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We saw yet another great piece recently from our friends at the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, an NCDD organizational member – this time reflecting on the meaning of “public innovation”. We encourage you to read the piece below or find the original here.

This post was written by Rich Harwood, president and founder of the Harwood Institute.

HarwoodLogoRecently, I was on the public radio program “Innovation Trail” in Rochester, N.Y. to talk about “public innovation.” The station posted the following statement on its website about my appearance: “Two recent interviews by Innovation Trail served as reminders of how often the ‘innovation conversation’ is framed in terms of technology and economics…” But as we discussed on-air, there’s another way to define it.

Rochester is home to Eastman Kodak, the venerable though now long-suffering company best known for making camera film and now feverishly trying to transform itself into a digital technology company. To Kodak, innovation is about developing new product lines that generate high profits. But Rochester also is trying to transform itself from a town once dependent upon Kodak to a community with a more diverse economic base, a revitalized downtown and stronger public schools, among other goals.

Even when talk turns to innovation regarding community goals, the tendency among community leaders, funders, activists, and others is to focus on specific education reforms, local tax policy, or maybe infrastructure plans and the like. Other conversations about innovation often center on the use of mobile devices, development of new online platforms, or the launch of new citizen participation processes.

All potentially important. Each possibly necessary. But, I believe, they miss a larger point.

When the public radio hosts from Rochester asked me to define public innovation, I said that it is about how we choose to see what is around us in a community and to make intentional choices and judgments about how to move a community forward. In other words, public innovation isn’t necessarily about something shiny or new or complex, but about something that works better, leads to better results, and creates a better pathway forward.

It is about how communities generate and re-generate themselves. For example, The Harwood Institute is working with partners in Battle Creek, Mich. – including the local United Way, Chamber of Commerce, Kellogg Community College, Project 20/20, BC Pulse and the city government. These entities are focused on addressing issues concerning vulnerable children in a way that altogether changes how they and others work together in the community.

Indeed, the very output from being innovative may be so simple that it hardly seems to be an innovation. Consider, for instance, the following example: innovation can involve changing the way we talk about a common concern in a community. Is the discussion framed in terms of “problems,” which usually degenerates into people pointing fingers and placing blame for what’s wrong in the community? Or is it about our shared aspirations for what we are trying to do right?

The public innovation I have in mind starts with an orientation, a mindset: Are we turned outward toward our community? Put another way, is the community our reference point for our efforts, or is our reference point our conference room? This is a vital distinction. The danger here is that we innovate in a vacuum, based on our own wishes, our own beliefs on what we need, our own personal desire to increase our notoriety.

Innovation in a community is about how that community comes to take ownership of a common concern and how strategies are developed that fit the local context of the community. And yet so often we rush to plug-and-play solutions that may have worked elsewhere but aren’t right for our particular community. That’s not innovation.

Innovation is about how to actively create a community’s enabling environment: focusing on what it takes to generate the underlying conditions necessary for productive change to emerge, take root, and spread. Such conditions include norms for interaction, layers of leadership, networks for learning and innovation. The civic culture of a community – like the culture of an organization – is critical to whether a community can move forward.

Innovation is about knowing that while creating measurable impact is essential, so too is whether people hold the belief that they and others actually can produce something meaningful together. Engendering belief in a way that is authentic, real, and lasting requires us to rethink how people can feel part of something larger than themselves, how to engage people so that we work together, and even how to celebrate ways that lead to greater confidence within a community.

Innovation is understanding that stories and narratives play a critical role in signaling to people that change is even possible – and that their own engagement is pivotal to that change ever occurring. How to discover and construct such stories, and then weaving them into a naturally unfolding narrative requires innovation.

The type of innovation I am speaking about demands that we each step forward ready to engage in a different way. We must be willing to see and hear people around us, especially those who are different from us and who challenge our own comfort levels. It means that we must be willing to make choices and judgments about where to place limited resources.

Being “ruthlessly strategic” is at the heart of public innovation. We can’t be all things to all people. We must be willing to place a stake in the ground about the change we think is necessary, and we must be ready to re-calibrate those ideas as conditions around us change.

Public innovation starts with a turn – of ourselves.  We must be turned outward. Then we must engage differently so that we can move forward together.

You can find the original version of this piece at www.theharwoodinstitute.org/2014/03/what-does-public-innovation-mean.