Accelerate Change in Your Community

How can you accelerate change in your community?

The Harwood Institute seeks to forge relationships with individuals and organizations that want to pursue an alternate path in public life and politics. Ours is an approach defined by authentic engagement and authentic hope instead of one-size-fits-all engagement models and the false hope of unrealistic promises.

Like many around the country you may be struggling with how to:

Engage people when so many have already retreated from public life
Help your community grow and accelerate its progress
Be a trusted and authentic public leader in an environment when people are so deeply skeptical of their leaders.
Generate pockets of change, and successfully spread those pockets
Transform our deeply ingrained negative stories about public life into ones of self-trust and genuine hope.

Make Hope Real: A Tool To Accelerate Change

Hope has become a buzzword for political candidates but how do we create the conditions for change in our own neighborhood, in our organizations and our towns.

Make Hope Real the latest essay from Richard Harwood discusses 5 key factors to making hope real in our communities.

The essay is a tool for both understanding the challenges of creating change, as well as a way to begin a national discussion on what each of us can do to make hope real in our own community.

To create hope requires strategic choices -- Make Hope Real offers readers an opportunity to explore the ways that they can help to accelerate change in their community and make hope real.

The essay addresses:

The sweet spot of public life		This is a place where groups focus on a key public issue while simultaneously building community. Is your community in a sweet spot? Why not?
Citizen-based values		These are values shared within a community, values that reflect our desire for greater integrity and honesty from our public leaders and a recognition of the connection each of us has to the community. What values do you share with your community?
A new breed of leaders		These leaders are sprouting up across the country, and bring with them a new sense of hope and possibility. But they cannot do it alone, are you helping support these kinds of leaders?
Activity happy yet action deprived		Too often we create long lists of tasks and devote ourselves to doing something, rather than focusing on the most effective action. By filling our lives with tasks we often convince ourselves and others that we are working to create change, when in fact we're just doing busy work to avoid answering tough questions. Is your day filled with activities but little action?
Create civic mindshare		Too often we view our fellow citizens as consumers. Consumers expect to be served, to receive exactly what they want all the time, at a low personal cost. Instead of a consumer model we need to consider a citizen model -asking and expecting one another to put the public interest before private consumption. Do you think of the public as consumers or citizens?
		To get your own copy of the essay and begin to accelerate change in your community click here

The Focus Of Our Work

Our current work is focused on bringing to scale our innovations so that people and organizations across the nation can gain affordable access to our content and make it their own. Central to these efforts is our work to cultivate new public innovators and build new boundary spanning organizations that will serve as catalysts for change and hope in communities across the nation.

Currently our work focuses on three key areas:

	Annual Public Innovators Summit	A safe space in which leading public innovators and leaders explore underlying issues in public life and rejuvenate themselves.
	Public Innovators Lab	A highly focused learning experience for cultivating the sensibilities and practices of public innovators to create change and authentic hope through the application of the Institute's ideas, frameworks, and tools.
	Strategic Alliances with National Partners	Relationships with nationally networked organizations to embed our ideas, frameworks, and tools in ways that accelerate and deepen an organization’s work in public life and communities. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is the inaugural alliance, and is focused on incubating new ways for public television and radio to strengthen civic health and deepen their local significance.

Future Direction

In the future we will be expanding into two new areas

	Public Innovators Portal	Developing new online site where people can learn about, use, and spread our ideas, frameworks, and tools, and to create a new knowledge base and network for themselves, organizations, and communities.
	Public Innovators Network	A national network of public innovators who are dedicated to learn, work and innovate together to create change and authentic hope.Who we partner with: individuals and organizations, from single community groups, organizational collaborations, and national organizations, to networks of individuals and organizations.

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Accelerate Change in Your Community

Make Hope Real: A Tool To Accelerate Change

The Focus Of Our Work

Future Direction

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The Harwood Institute