Blog
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Dear "Mr. Auto-Community Recovery Czar"
Today, "Mr. Auto-Community Recovery Czar," President Obama will announce your appointment as director for the recovery of auto communities and workers. That's good news. Simply providing yet more financial aid to auto companies alone is not enough. But in the process of taking this new step, I can only hope we keep the ultimate goal in sight. Here's what I hope you consider as you undertake this job.
Many communities tied to the auto industry are reeling. Lost employment, plummeting tax revenues, empty storefronts, deteriorating neighborhoods, and other maladies ail these places. I know these hardships first-hand after working in Flint, MI for many years, and with people from Youngstown, OH, St. Louis, MO, and many other auto industry-based locales. This June, we're launching a new initiative in yet two more Michigan communities, Detroit and Battle Creek.
According to news reports, the new recovery effort will help communities find ways to create jobs and attract new industries, retrain workers, and deal with health-care insurance. These are all important things to do, and there is little doubt that such efforts are necessary for stabilizing communities. But alone they will not do the trick.
My own research and on-the-ground initiatives show that for communities to rebound they must re-grow the very conditions for change that enable communities to create and innovate. This involves generating the necessary relationships, leaders, organizations, and norms that give rise to effective and lasting action.
Indeed, no single program or initiative will turn communities around, or give them hope. Instead, it is always a combination of elements that both sparks and sustains change. Some of the key elements for change include:
- Focus on people's aspirations - often when recovery and rebuilding efforts begin, we end up focusing on "wish lists" which can never be achieved or people's complaints about what hasn't happened. Instead, our focus should be on people's aspirations - those notions that sit in people's gut about what they seek in their lives and what they're willing to go to bat for. With the wrong focus, we'll end up on the wrong path.
- Create and support Boundary-spanning organizations - communities must develop organizations that help engage people across dividing lines, incubate new ideas, and hold up a mirror to people so they can see their shared reality. We've worked with public broadcasters, United Ways, community foundations, and even arts institutions to realize their potential to become boundary-spanning organizations. But too many communities lack such organizations, and existing groups are often underutilized or overwhelmed.
- Grow Public Innovators - communities need to cultivate these change agents who hold a passion for change, know how to practically move ideas into action, and understand the realities in which they are working. It's possible to actually grow and support public innovators, and I urge you to do so.
- Find the "Sweet Spot" for public action - it is essential to take actions that meet two criteria: they are focused on a specific public challenge AND they literally create community conditions for change. It is possible to find this sweet spot that leverages resources and builds the community's capacity and strength at the same time. This is how we can accelerate progress.
- Be ruthlessly strategic - times like these require us to make clear judgments and choices, something the President speaks about often. Indeed, not all ideas are good ones, and nor should they be undertaken. If we wish to create hope, we must show signs of change; this requires growing a new culture in communities of making hard choices - of being ruthlessly strategic.
- Focus on pockets of change - change typically does not happen through one or two large actions, especially in hard-hit communities. Rather, what's key is to develop pockets of change that demonstrate lasting progress and that offer people real hope. Even in tough environments, such change is possible.
Of course, there are no quick fixes for helping communities that seek to recover and grow, but there are steps we can take to make a difference. Today, people in communities all across America are searching for authentic hope - a reason to believe that they can shape their future and create the communities they seek.
My hope is that your efforts help to create the conditions for such change.
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Finding Relevance in Tough Times
The economic downturn has sent a shiver throughout the non-profit and civic community and among funders, too. Money is in short supply, and people are scurrying about to secure their organization's future. But where are we running to, and why?
What I hear most often these days is people's belief that they must prove their worth and value to their funders, members, Congress, and others if they are to remain viable. The result is a mad dash to create new, highly targeted initiatives that will appear relevant and significant to our communities and society.
But this race to produce short-term benefits will not deepen one's relevance or significance to communities or the people who live there. Indeed, we must know that this approach is organization-centric, with the main goal of improving the organization's status and funding, but not necessarily improving the community or people's lives.
Another response to the economic crisis is for organizations to hunker down and identify cuts in programs, staff, and other operating expenses. Such steps are often necessary. But they often signal a retreat and with drawl from the very communities that are our very source of support and sustenance. Instead, the focus is the organization again; and in this way, we can become victims of an ever-intensifying obsession with internal matters.
Recently, together with the Kettering Foundation, we released a report called The Organization-First Approach which details the prevalence and danger of inward efforts. Such steps may seem familiar, even prudent, but inwardness will never produce community relevance and significance; we need to look outward for that. Thus, we must take a different path out of the current crisis:
1. Start with the community first. Mark Leonard, General Manager of WILL, the public radio and television station in Urbana/Champaign, said after going through our Community Engagement Initiative (in partnership with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) that all their efforts now "Start in the community, not in our conference room." The challenge for all of us is to know our own community context and the implications for what you do. This is not about surveys, focus groups, marketing, or similar techniques; rather, it is about developing a deep understanding of people's fears, concerns, hopes and aspirations. You must know these to know how to address them; and you must address them or risk irrelevancy.
2. Focus on community, not institutional impact. If you want your efforts to be significant, then you must focus on community impact, not simply the impact on your organization or institution. Too many efforts are undertaken with the organization in mind, and with the community merely serving as a playing field to reach our organizational goals. But this is backwards. The community itself should be the focus of our efforts; only then can our organizational mission be truly achieved.
3. Change how business is done. When things are topsy-turvy is the best possible time to strike new relationships and forge more productive norms for how public business is done. Simply pushing your own programs may create short-term notoriety for your organization, but such efforts won't change the underlying conditions you and others face. It is these underlying conditions that must change if we are to have a fighting chance at creating long-term hope and change. Now is precisely the time to address, and change, these underlying conditions.
4. Don't wait, act now. This is a time to step forward and take action. But you must be crystal clear about your mission and return to your core values. If you want to be visible to others, if you want to be seen as being relevant and significant, then put a stake in the ground on what matters most. Know what your real contribution is.
Over and again I encounter good people who are running faster and faster to find the short-term fix to their relevance challenge. But these individuals and organizations will not find success, only more churn, activity, and inwardness. It is those who step up and turn outward who will be the real winners. They will create needed impact for their communities, and they will discover along the way a renewed sense of community relevance and significance.
Hard times demand that we turn outward. Simply running faster won't get us there. -
A Major Step for Us: Why we're going online
Today, I'm excited to tell you that we're making a major down payment on opening up our ideas, frameworks and tools so that anyone, anywhere, can use them, at anytime. We are launching Harwood Online. This is a pivotal step in the evolution of our work. Especially in these hard times, people want to make their efforts in public life more relevant, effective, and connected to communities and the people who live there. I want to do everything I can to support them. So, here's why and how, we're moving in this direction.
A couple of years ago, the Board and Staff at Harwood decided it was time to move from a projects-based organization focused on public innovation, to an organization focused on getting our learnings of twenty years out to Public Innovators everywhere.
While the projects we work on are terrific, their benefits often remain with the people we are working with. Even the individuals, organizations and communities using our work have been limited in how they can share and spread the work with others. It just has not been in a form that they can easily grab hold of.
Increasingly, the question on my mind became: How can we fulfill our mission to create hope and change, so that people everywhere can tap their own potential to make a difference and join together to forge a common future. Simply doing good work wasn't enough.
So, we set out to cull the essential innovations we had developed over the years, and make them more readily available. I didn't want us to be in the way of anyone who wanted to create hope and change. What's more, I didn't want cost, or complexity, or capacity to stand in the way, either. Too many good and necessary initiatives stall because funding runs out, or a funder pulls out. There's an underlying equity issue here for me; everyone should be able to use these innovations, and no one should be stymied simply because funding expires or they have limited access to funding.
But merely putting up "information" online isn't enough, either. People want to be able to make sense of the challenges facing them; they seek pathways forward; and they yearn for a sense of possibility. We set up the site in service of these key aspirations.
On the site, you'll be able to learn about our ideas, frameworks and tools, but even more, the site is a platform for you and others to create your own knowledge about your community, your own common understanding of your challenges, and your own common agreement of how you want to move ahead.
Indeed, you can use the site as a platform to form groups for working together, using the frameworks together, and sharing ideas together. You'll also be able to find other public innovators across the country who are working on similar challenges, including those who have used one of our frameworks (think about connecting with people who used the Community Rhythms framework, who are in the "Catalytic Stage", and want to discuss how to move a community in that stage forward!).
I hasten to add that the online site is a part of a series of new opportunities we'll be unveiling in the coming months to support people who want to create hope and change. What all these opportunities have in common is an unwavering commitment to open up our ideas, frameworks, and tools so that people can make them their own and to remove barriers of cost and complexity.
I want to thank a number of funders that supported this effort, especially Pierre and Pam Omidyar, and the Omidyar Network. In addition, I wish to thank Sterling Speirn and the Kellogg Foundation, David Mathews and the Kettering Foundation, and William White and the Mott Foundation. Let me also thank Eric Rigaud, Christine Donohoo, and Aaron Leavy on my staff who did yeoman's work to make this site possible. And, Tanya Renne at Orchid Suites, our technology partner, whose own innovation and creativity helped us get here.
Consider today's launch a down payment. No doubt, there will be bugs; there's content still to fill in, and there are many other frameworks and tools we will be adding. But, I'm thrilled to make this start. For me, this is all about how we, together, can create hope and change in our communities. It is about how we build a stronger, more just, public life, where all people, have a voice, a place, and a pathway to make good on their urge to do good. Let us know what you think of the site, and how you can put it to use.