In the summer of 1988, Richard C. Harwood, a 27-year-old public issues researcher, started the for-profit Harwood Group as a one-man firm in his Washington, D.C., apartment with the goal of proving that there was, in fact, a 'market' in America for fundamental change. The Harwood Group quickly grew into one of the most widely respected companies in the country working with people to understand and address tough public concerns. Harwood's public-spiritedness, entrepreneurial vision, bottom-line sensibility, and unyielding drive for excellence continue to guide his organizationís work to this day.

The Harwood Group first gained national attention in 1991, as many political observers were lamenting the swelling state of apathy sweeping the nation. Citizens, they said, simply didnít care about politics. But The Harwood Group report Citizens and Politics: A View from Main Street (produced for the Kettering Foundation) did not find apathy, but a deep sense of anger and disconnection among citizens. People did care; the report widely resonated across the nation.

One result of Citizens and Politics was Harwood's budding work with the news media. Soon, The Harwood Group became a leader in how to reconnect news media with the communities they cover, spearheading initiatives with major metro newspapers such as The Orange County Register and The Arizona Republic. The approach quickly spread to scores of other newsrooms. Harwood also teamed up with the American Society of Newspaper Editors to design and lead the Journalism Values Institute, at the time the largest journalism values initiative in the nation. Additionally, the company worked with Knight Ridder Newspapers in partnership with CNN on their 1992 presidential election coverage.

The Harwood Group continued to expand the scope of its work. Harwood decided that for his organization to be truly effective, it had to understand the full dynamics and relationships that make up and drive public life and politics. As a result, against the advice of many, he chose to focus across various sectors of society including the business community, leadership development, the non-profit sector, and community change in addition to politics and the news media.

Much like a small lab, Harwood and his colleagues undertook a host of initiatives to meet a range of specific challenges in public life. For example, while the national debate on health care was completely breaking down in the mid-1990s, Harwood and his colleagues had a major hand in designing and implementing Georgia Health Decisions, a state-wide engagement effort that showed that under the right conditions, Americans could reach common ground on key values and trade-offs on health care reform. Indeed, much like a lab, each initiative undertaken from the organizationís earliest days evolved out of the innovation and knowledge from preceding efforts. Each effort contributed to expanding the depth and scope of experience about how public life works and how it can work.

As The Harwood Group sought to spark change across the spectrum of public life, Rich and his colleagues began to discover the common elements and factors present where change was occurring, as well as where change efforts were stalling. These discoveries led to the creation of a collection of key frameworks that have since been the driving force behind all of Harwood's work. It soon became apparent that what Rich and his colleagues were up to was developing an alternative approach for people to act on their own aspirations and move beyond politics as usual and a stalled public life.

As The Harwood Group rolled out new ideas, crafted practical tools and led initiatives - indeed, as the organization enjoyed more success - national organizations and foundations began to ask if they could support the groupís efforts, leading to the establishment of the non-profit Harwood Institute for Public Innovation. The Institute soon expanded the reach of our approach, finding ways to apply this exciting and promising new knowledge on a much larger scale, often in nationwide efforts. Through these efforts, it was possible to see the genuine currency of these ideas and how they can be applied.

During this time, The Harwood Institute continued to place significant emphasis on its bread-and-butter research ventures. It looked more deeply into how and why people engage in community life, especially over time; how communities grow and how to accelerate their progress; what it takes to be a trusted and authentic public leader in a time when people are so deeply skeptical of their leaders; how to generate pockets of change in a community, and then successfully spread those pockets; and how to change the ingrained negative stories in public life and foster new ones of genuine self-trust and hope.

In recent years, we have taken these ideas and practices to such varied places as Flint, Michigan, and Las Vegas, Nevada, as well as Mobile, Alabama, and Orlando, Florida. We have worked with dozens of communities across the state of Ohio. Newsrooms and journalism schools continue to make use of our approaches. We have culled from all our experiences the key sensibilities and practices for people to create meaningful and sustainable change in a society where trust and hope are far too scarce.

So, now, with almost 20 years of tested approaches to creating an alternate path for public life and politics, we are ready for the next major challenge before us: to leverage this experience and knowledge and these tools so that all people throughout the nation can tap their own potential and join with others to imagine and act for the public good.

For more information on how you, too, can be part of creating change in America, here are Nine Ways to Join With Us.