Reflections On Community Agility

September 2009S September 2009 Reflections on Community Agility1 What is Community Agility? Two years ago – when we launched the Community Initiatives Team – agility was on ours minds. Pre-‐recession, we were hearing flat,2 but seeing spiky.3 Our team members live and work in regions as diverse as Portland (OR), Tucson (AZ), Charlotte (NC), and Southeast Michigan. While the U.S. economy was widely perceived as booming4, our communities were still smarting from the steep downturn a few years before. Yet, we were also bearing witnesses to infinitely creative responses to change, and the beginnings of new kind of economy. In our work, we were confronting significant structural challenges:  Decreasing overall economic security for families despite job growth  Industry-‐wide transitions changing job and skill requirements for large numbers of workers  Lack of access to investment capital where entrepreneurs seemed to need it most  Chronic budget shortfalls compromising basic public services in our communities, and  Institutions, agencies, and organizations with clearly shared missions acting in isolation. Opportunities for collaboration (on and offline) and reinvention everywhere. We focused on building agility. Developing a Methodology for Change With the aim of helping communities find opportunities to thrive, and with partners including the U.S. Department of Labor, the Council on Competitiveness, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, we developed methods and approaches for cultivating agility:  Developing shared intelligence, by collecting and making meaning out of data that matters to multiple community organizations and agencies.  Promoting network weaving,5 based on the theory that a whole host of benefits derive from well-‐networked communities (we had been studying networks for 1 Based on one of our recent blog posts, see http://startgrowtransform.org/2009/09/revisiting-‐our-‐ community-‐agility-‐ecosystem/ 2 A reference to Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, first published in 2005. 3 A reference to Richard Florida’s competing hypothesis, “The World is Spiky,” first presented in The Atlantic Monthly in October 2005 http://www.theatlantic.com/images/issues/200510/world-‐is-‐ spiky.pdf. 4 News reports like this one were quite prevalent at the time http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=1901270. 5 A deliberate approach to community building first popularized in the non-‐profit sector by June Holley and Valdis Krebs http://www.orgnet.com/BuildingNetworks.pdf.

some time, but found Sean Safford’s early work at MIT – subsequently published in book form6 – very compelling). Later we partnered with June Holley to learn techniques for social network analysis.  Facilitating collaboration across “silos”, so that people from across disciplines, departments, agencies, programs, organizations, and institutions could find common ground and begin to share ideas, talent, and resources in ways that maximize wider community benefits.  Encouraging public engagement, since real change happens in firms, schools, and neighborhoods, not just boardrooms.  Advancing an entrepreneurship agenda that emphasizes not just new ventures, but entrepreneurial culture itself. These methods emphasize the building of capacity – to collaborate and to innovate – so that communities can reinvent themselves over and over, not just build the next new thing. We worked with (and learned from) community leaders and project partners from five U.S. Department of Labor WIRED regions7 (Southeast MI, Mid MI, Southern AZ, Kansas City, and the Piedmont Triad NC partnership), two communities with economies undergoing structural changes because of military base realignment8 (Ft. Bragg NC and Southwest OK), and a host of other communities in transition. Checking In Recently, our team met to review progress, and take a look at the current (and growing) ecosystem around community agility (now increasingly called resilience). New Trends While we’d been paying attention to the emergence of new conversations and community innovation spaces individually, sharing this information helped all of us see that we are now in the company of more (and more diverse) people advancing some of the same goals. Here are some key developments we’re pretty excited about. Social Innovation The “social innovation” community comprises a wildly diverse, eclectic and exciting bunch, ranging from academically-‐inclined Stanford Social Innovation Review writers and readers to the entrepreneurial thinkers and doers affiliated with Social Edge (Skoll Foundation) to the activists, organizers, and media mavens who see new ways to make change through the social web. The new White House Office of Social Innovation will certainly accelerate interest in the field, which is now beginning to map itself, through a recent Social Actions initiative.9 6 See Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown: The Transformation of the Rustbelt (Harvard University Press, 2009) http://www.amazon.com/Garden-‐Club-‐Couldnt-‐Save-‐ Youngstown/dp/0674031768. 7 Information about this initiative and access to projects and tools can be found on the U.S. Department of Labor website http://www.doleta.gov/wired/. 8 For more information about the Base Realignment and Closure program, see http://www.brac.gov/. 9 Major actors in the social entrepreneurship space have pooled their data about social innovators/entrepreneurs and, with the support of the Peery Foundation, made it available through the Social Entrepreneur API effort http://www.socialactions.com/social-‐entrepreneur-‐api. 2

And interest in social innovation is appropriately global. The Young Foundation, SIX, and the Skoll World Forum, together with institutions like Ashoka and the Aspen Institute have nurtured social innovation networks around the globe for years. More recently, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has sponsored a host of initiatives designed to help innovators of all ages and stations leverage the power of social media and the web. New platforms like YouTube and Twitter have helped make much of this activity accessible and transparent. Last week, 900 people gathered at SoCap09 in San Francisco to figure out how to fund it. Gov2.0 Government (at all levels) is also beginning to reimagine itself. The Obama campaign demonstrated the power of technology to enable self-‐organization in a campaign context, now we’re working through the implications of this kind of mass connectivity on governing itself. Catalyzed by Tim O’Reilly’s advocacy of “Government as Platform,” gov2.0 has become a rallying cry for transparency, participation, and just better, smarter, government – among people inside government and out. The recent Gov2.0 Summit10 brought together public servants and technologists but also advocates and organizers, many of whom are already working together to build the next generation of public intelligence systems and platforms for participation.11 The Resilience Movement The resilient communities movement stems from two different though related sets of ideas: one relating to security, and the other to sustainability more broadly.  The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is exploring Community Preparedness and Resilience in a variety of ways – the Community and Regional Resilience Initiative (CARRI), for example, reflects a partnership between DHS, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab, and a handful of communities in the Southestern U.S.  The Institute of Urban and Regional Development at the University of California Berkeley (supported by the MacArthur Foundation) has established a Building Regional Resilience Network, which has published a variety of papers on different dimensions of resilience (environmental, social, economic).  The Council on Competitiveness made the materials used in its Risk and Resilience workshop available to the public. People are helping communities become more resilient outside the U.S. as well – parallel efforts exist in Australia,12 and more locally-‐driven approaches have launched in England13 and spread beyond. 10 Summit agenda, materials, and media will be available at http://www.gov2summit.com/. 11 The Sunlight Foundation, for example, has been at the forefront of these efforts http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/, funding, promoting and championing innovations like Apps for Democracy http://www.appsfordemocracy.org and Apps for America http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/apps-‐america-‐winners/. 12 The University of Southern Queensland’s Center for Rural and Remote Health has published a Building Resilience in Regional Communities Toolkit http://www.usq.edu.au/crrah/publications/2008publications/resiliencetoolkit.htm. 3

Smart Communities Firms like Cisco are promoting smart communities from a data-‐connectivity point of view,14 and IBM is advancing its “internet of things” agenda.15 But people and processes matter just as much. The stakes are high, the promise, great, and the need, urgent. Brookings is tracking the impact of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) on cities and regions seeking to advance innovation or leverage structural change. Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Stanley Litow offer a manifesto for smarter, more connected communities.16 John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison’s Big Shift17 focuses on change dynamics in firms, but their analysis offers insight relevant to communities, too. Going Forward? We’re taking a good look at this context in an effort to learn from others, and focus our efforts in ways that maximize impact. We believe in the power of not just tinkering, but “unbundling and reconstituting”18 – in search of whole new ways of being and doing, sustainably. 13 The Transition-‐Town movement – aimed at addressing climate change and peak oil – started in the UK, and has since spread across parts of Europe and into the U.S. http://transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork/TransitionNetwork. 14 Cisco is launching something called the Smart + Connected Communities http://www.slideshare.net/connectedurbandev/wim-‐elfrink-‐cisco-‐smartconnected-‐communities. 15 ReadWriteWeb reported on this effort in July 2009. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ibm_internet_of_things.php 16 See http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6238.html. 17 See Harvard Business Review’s The Big Shift: Measuring the Forces of Change http://custom.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/implicit/p.jhtml?login=DELO062909S&pid=R0907Q 18 A reference to Don Tapscott’s observation in one of our favorite clips from one of our favorite documentaries, UsNow http://www.usnowfilm.com/ Kristin Wolff, Director of Community Initiatives, CSW kwolff@skilledwork.org 4 Lisa Katz, Senior Policy Associate, CSW lkatz@skilledwork.org www.skilledwork.org

Reflections On Community Agility

by kristin wolff on Apr 12, 2010

Accessibility

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

Statistics

Reflections On Community Agility — Document Transcript