Organizing

The Seedbed of Civic Involvement

February 26, 2013 By Otis White

Everything works better in cities with high levels of citizen involvement. Social scientists tell us that politics are kinder when more people pay attention to government and vote, and social problems are diminished when people are close to their neighbors. Quality of life improves when people support festivals and attend local concerts and shows. Cities look better if people turn out for neighborhood cleanups and park conservancy projects. And when trouble comes—a big local industry closes or a natural disaster strikes—people are far more likely to see things through when they’re involved and invested in the place they live.

If civic involvement can do all these things, then there’s really only one big question: Where do you begin? Assuming yours is not a place where people vote in high numbers, check up on their neighbors, and turn out in large numbers for cleanup projects, what can governments and civic organizations do to get it started?

Answer: They can help people find one another and get organized for any legitimate purpose: recreation, self-improvement, religious, family betterment, education. And then be patient.

This won’t satisfy impatient leaders who want people involved in high-level civic work . . . now! How about calling some town-hall meetings or starting a citizens commission? You can do that, and if you do it well, you might see some improvement in community involvement. But if you want deeper, long-term change—big shifts in how citizens relate to one another and to the community—you need to work on the seedbed of civic involvement, which is self-interest plus connection plus organization. Then trust that these seeds will grow into a more involved citizenry.

Why begin with the seedbed? Because most people who are leaders in their communities didn’t start out as involved citizens; they grew into the role. A few had jobs that took them into local politics or civic causes, but the vast majority came up through volunteer work. And their first experiences with volunteering were usually about things in their immediate areas of interest (family, home, recreation, etc.). Go through the biographies of your city’s elected officials and you’ll find many started out volunteering for the PTA and got drawn into school district issues, or were on a neighborhood association board and got interested in local politics, or were active in a bicycling club and got caught up in a campaign for bike lanes. Once they figured out how things worked in their community, they were hooked.

This, then, is one reason you start with the seedbed: Multiply the number of opportunities for volunteer leadership, and in time you’ll multiply the number of deeply involved civic leaders. It won’t happen quickly. And not all the seedlings will grow into city leaders; many will be happy to serve in the PTA for years, or organize neighborhood cookouts, or teach safety classes to generations of young cyclists.

And that brings us to the second reason for tending the seedbed: Just as healthy forests don’t need all trees to be tall, we don’t need only highly involved civic leaders. We need moderately involved citizens, too: People who vote, serve on PTA committees, volunteer as Scout leaders and soccer coaches, turn out for neighborhood projects, and make small donations to good causes. Just as leaders do, these people strengthen their communities.

I can see this in my own life. My mother belonged to a business women’s club that, as far as I could tell, functioned as a social organization that, on the side, gave out college scholarships. Mostly, though, it just met, listened to speakers, and socialized. The scholarships were a good thing for the community, helping a few deserving students along the way. But an even better thing may have been the connections that these women forged as they helped one another in their careers. Who knows how many of them stayed in my hometown because of this network, enriching the community’s human capital?

We’ve known about this link between social networks and healthy communities for more than a decade, since Harvard Professor Robert Putnam wrote his book “Bowling Alone.” It was a convincing look at the decline of what Putnam called “social capital,” the connections that people have with one another. Where Americans once played bridge in foursomes, bowled in leagues, and joined Kiwanis Clubs to meet other business people, we now spend time in cars commuting long distances or in front of TVs or home computers. Putnam learned that people still do bowl; they just don’t do so in leagues. Rather, most bowl alone or as couples. Without the leagues, the bridge parties, the Kiwanis Clubs, and all the other group activities, modern Americans don’t form relationships and work for common purposes as easily as they once did. And this, he warned, threatens healthy communities and democracy itself.

Putnam’s book was a brilliant but depressing analysis of the problem that didn’t give us many starting points for changing things. But a new book and a think-tank report from the U.K. do. They point us to simple ways for connecting people around shared interests, by using a few incentives and a little help.

The book is “Unanticipated Gains” by Mario Luis Small, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago. As the title suggests, it was about something surprising: the rich networks of support that some families in New York developed when their children were young.

His study focused on mothers from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds who had children in day care centers. Parents turn to centers, of course, for economic or professional reasons: They have to work or want to work, and they need a safe, nurturing place for their children for a portion of the day. You’d think that the interactions of mothers and fathers dropping off and picking up small children would be hurried and, therefore, not great for creating connections. But some centers, Small found, had very effective ways of bringing parents together and connecting them with the city around them.

The keys were that some centers required parents to do something in addition to leaving and picking up their children: organize a field trip, serve on a parents’ advisory committee, raise money, and so on. And some were good at connecting parents with needs with resources elsewhere in the community. As a result, through these centers, some parents got a lot more than child care; they gained lifelong friends, new resources, and much closer connections with the community.

What was important, Small said, were the activities the parents were asked to do. If the work was organized by the parents themselves, which required understanding, and the interactions were repeated, which built trust, friendships grew even among parents who were not much alike. This is particularly important in multi-cultural communities where people often don’t recognize themselves in their neighbors.

And some of the centers were more than good facilitators, Small found. They were good brokers of information. That is, they could help parents find information and get help outside their neighborhoods, by showing them how to navigate the public school system, get help in domestic abuse cases, find doctors and hospitals, even get family tickets to museums and circuses.

What does this have to do with civic work? As my mother’s business women’s network did in my hometown, it made it far more likely these families would stay in New York and be successful there. It meant their children would also be more likely to succeed. And simply having a network of friends—and a stake in the city—meant for many that they would take greater ownership in and care of the community. People with friends are less likely to litter, deface property with graffiti, or ignore criminal activity. And they are more likely to vote, volunteer for good causes, and care about their neighbors.

And something else. This kind of self-interested volunteering teaches people the basics of leadership: organizing meetings, managing projects, finding resources, handling disputes, negotiating with other interests. Some will take these skills to larger venues.

With the New York day care centers, government had a hand in getting the parents connected. Centers that served low-income families and received state aid were required to have parent advisory committees. That incentive alone got some centers started in involving parents, although the smart ones went well beyond that.

Governments can’t require other forms of volunteerism, of course. All they can do is encourage and facilitate it. But that can be a powerful tool, as a report from a British think tank argues. The report is called “Clubbing Together: The Hidden Wealth of Communities,” and it argues that “casual connections” among citizens can be generated with little effort and cities can play a big role in doing so by making it easier for people to meet.

What are “casual connections?” They could be anything from people playing bingo to weekend sports leagues (think of softball leagues here, soccer there). These connections introduce people to one another, promote ethnic understanding, create “sentiments of trust, reciprocity, and purpose,” and in time “spur members into social actions, such as voluntary work or charitable giving,” the report says. In other words, they act as seedbeds.

This brings me to the great opportunity for communities. They have lots of places for people to meet, from playgrounds and softball fields to libraries and community centers. And with a little imagination, they could multiply the number of meeting places tenfold: school cafeterias, museum lobbies, concert halls, city hall meeting rooms, college classrooms, YMCAs. There are private spaces too, such as coffee shops, apartment clubhouses, and (yes!) bowling alleys that could be induced to open their doors to citizens—and potential customers—if there were property tax breaks involved. We could also make it easy for groups to find these spaces, with online reservations. (Attention, community hackathons!)

But what about security and cleanup? Organizers could sign forms assuming responsibility for hauling out trash and locking the doors. Would it work? I’ve been involved in scores of public meetings in schools, churches, and recreation centers over the years. I’ve never seen a volunteer group—even an informal one—refuse to take these responsibilities seriously.

But there’s a lesson here too. Much like mulch in a real seedbed, trust is the ingredient that enriches civic seedbeds. Yes, once in a while, you will be disappointed when a group doesn’t clean up the school cafeteria as it promised. But as you’re obsessing about the few, be sure to look about you and see all the healthy trees that are growing up.

Photo by Pictoscribe licensed under Creative Commons.

Planning Phase: The Slog of Civic Projects, and Why It’s Critical

November 18, 2011 By Otis White

In a series of postings, we’re exploring how conscious change happens in communities. If you haven’t read the first posting in this series, please take a moment to do so.

In a time when many wonderful parks have been built, New York’s High Line may be the most wonderful of all. It’s a park that runs above the street and through buildings on Manhattan’s west side. If you climb the stairs and walk the portions that are completed (it will eventually be a mile and a half long), you’ll see something at once modest and spectacular. The modest part is the park itself, a narrow trail edged with plants and trees with resting areas along the way. The spectacular part is the setting: a park in the sky, wending its way through post-industrial New York. The reviews, as you can see in this video, have ranged from glowing to awestruck.

But my interest is not in the park itself. It’s in the project—the road the High Line traveled from a pair of neighbors looking up and seeing potential in an old elevated track until its opening in June 2009—and what that journey tells us about the second phase of our map of community change, the planning phase.

Background: In 1999 two men, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, attended a neighborhood planning meeting on the future of the abandoned rail line known as the High Line. Some landowners wanted it torn down to make way for new developments. David and Hammond, who did not know one another, came with another idea, that you could turn this elevated freight line into . . . something else, some kind of community asset.

Their ideas were vague. They thought about a park of some sort, but what kind of park could you build on a narrow set of elevated railroad tracks? And David and Hammond hardly seemed the type to turn vague civic ideas into reality. David was a writer who specialized in travel articles for glossy magazines. Hammond was a consultant to business startups. Neither had run a nonprofit, managed a park, or had any serious contact with government at any level. They came to the meeting with hopes of volunteering for a nonprofit—any nonprofit—that would make the High Line into a community asset. What they learned was there was no such nonprofit. So, pretty much on the spot, David and Hammond decided to do it themselves.

If you’re following this on the map of community change, we’re at the very start of the discussion phase, with the recognition of a need. Or, in this case, two needs. The first was David and Hammond’s belief that, in the crowded lower West Side of Manhattan, there wasn’t nearly enough open space. That part of New York takes in many old industrial areas (one neighborhood is still called the Meatpacking District). In the late 19^th and early 20^th century, New York didn’t build parks in places like that.

The other need was for quick action. If somebody didn’t act soon, they believed, the city would tear down the High Line and an opportunity for public space would be lost forever. (They were right. Less than two years later, the Giuliani Administration sided with the landowners and signed a demolition order for the High Line.)

A funny thing happened, though, once David and Hammond took up this project. It turned out—to their surprise and others’—that these two were uniquely equipped for a civic project of this magnitude and complexity. While they had no experience in leading an urban change effort, they had valuable and complementary skills. One could write well and knew some in New York’s social and philanthropic circles. The other was experienced in starting things, was at ease in asking people to do things (including giving money), and had a good sense of strategy. They were both quick learners, and each had an interest in art and design, which became important as the project moved forward.

It took three years of contacts, conversations, fundraising and strategic planning for David and Hammond to accomplish two things that ended the discussion phase and began the planning phase: First, they halted the demolition order with a lawsuit; second, they arrived at a workable solution for the High Line. You can view their workable solution online. It’s a 90-page document titled “Reclaiming the High Line,” researched by a nonprofit called the Design Trust for Public Space and written by David.

It’s an interesting document for three reasons. First, it’s beautifully designed. It had to be because it was aimed at multiple audiences: the political and planning communities that had such a big say in what would happen to the High Line; the community nearby, which at that time had barely any idea of the High Line’s potential; and possible donors who needed to understand the High Line’s vision.

Second, it’s modest in spelling out that vision. While it makes a strong case that the old freight line should not be torn down, used as a transit line, or turned into a commercial development (a long, skinny retail area, perhaps?), it doesn’t say it ought to be a park, either. It simply says its best use is as open space in a part of the city where there isn’t enough. In other words, the workable solution keeps its options open.

The third thing that’s interesting is who wrote the foreword: Michael Bloomberg, who by 2002 had succeeded Rudolph Giuliani as mayor. This gets to an important element in any change effort: luck. The High Line project was lucky in who got elected during its 10-year path from concept to ribbon-cutting, starting with the person in the mayor’s office.

Well, if a workable solution is at hand and a powerful new mayor wants it to succeed, that’s that, right? What else is there to do? The answer: The real work was just beginning. And this is my central message about the planning phase. Getting agreement on a workable solution is like getting everyone to agree on the design concept for a new house. Now comes the difficult, detailed work of hammering out costs and financing, drawing blueprints and mechanical plans, obtaining building permits, and bringing together a small army of independent contractors.

As David and Hammond explain in their book, “High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky,” even with the new mayor on their side, there was still a gauntlet of approvals to be run, from community planning boards (basically, neighborhood organizations that review developments) to the owners of the High Line (CSX, the railroad company) and the federal agency that approves transfers of railroad rights of way. And they had opposition: from landowners who had expected to build where the High Line stood, but also from residents who couldn’t see how the dark, peeling, scary elevated railroad could ever be anything but an eyesore. Finally, they realized a truth about government: that, even in a strong-mayor government such as New York has, the mayor doesn’t call all the shots. As Hammond writes:

(By late 2002) the Bloomberg Administration fully supported the High Line, but if they’d only endorsed it and done nothing else, the project would have died. Everything about the High Line was complex, and it had to pass through so many different agencies and departments. City government is like the human body: the head, which is the mayor’s office, may want to do something, but the body has a number of different parts that want to go their own way.

Everything hinged on three tasks that occupied much of the High Line’s planning phase: Coming up with a design for the park that would please politicians and neighbors and excite donors; dealing with the landowners’ objections; and figuring out how to pay for the construction and maintain this most unusual park in years to come.

If this doesn’t sound like exciting work, it wasn’t. This is the slog of civic projects, but it’s also why the planning phase is so important. Managing these details determines the success or failure of projects. And there were hundreds of details, from mapping the decision points and how to approach each of them to knitting together a coalition of supporters and funders. There were competing interests that had to be satisfied and intense politics. Oh, and they had to design a park unlike any in the world, and figure out how to pay for it.

What this phase requires from leaders are three things: the ability to plan (that’s why it’s called the planning phase), a mastery of detail (in an earlier posting, I called this the realm of “small-p politics”), and a willingness to ask for things. Throughout its development, David and Hammond asked people to do things for the High Line. Early on, they asked for information and advice (who owns the High Line, and how should we approach them?). Soon after, they asked for support and permission. In time, they asked for money. They started by asking for a small sums for printing costs and filing the lawsuit against the demolition. Eventually, they asked philanthropists and politicians for millions to pay for the park’s construction and maintenance. And they got it, in ways that surprised even them.

This brings us to the three elements of the planning phase that are in the map of community change: champions, narrative and strategy. I put them in the map as reminders. We’ve talked about one, strategy—that’s about mapping the decision points and making plans for each decision. This is the “inside game” of civic change, the political and bureaucrat checklist of approvals.

But there is always an “outside game” as well, and that’s where the narrative becomes critical because it speaks to citizens and potential supporters and donors. A narrative, of course, tells a story. It explains the need, why the need exists, the opportunity for addressing the need, how the solution was arrived at, and the future benefits of the change. Sometimes, the narrative has to change how people think about their community and its potential, something I call “reframing the community’s mind.”

And finally, there are the “champions.” Obviously, David and Hammond are the central figures of the High Line project. Without them, the freight line would be a memory and a remarkable asset squandered. But they aren’t the champions I have in mind; they’re the leaders and strategists. The champions are those whom David and Hammond asked for support who brought others along. Some were political champions who used their influence to win approval and gain government funding—people like Mayor Bloomberg, two successive city council presidents, New York’s senators and congressional representatives, and a host of people inside the bureaucracy.

There were also business and philanthropic champions, like media tycoon Barry Diller and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg who lent their names, made major financial gifts themselves, and hosted fundraisers for the High Line. Finally, there were celebrity champions who helped raise money and call attention to the High Line. An early celebrity endorser was actor Kevin Bacon, whose father had been an urban planner. Another actor, Edward Norton, also had a family interest (his grandfather was the pioneering urban developer James Rouse). When he read about the High Line project in a magazine article, he tracked down David and Hammond and offered to help out. As you can see from this video about the High Line, made before its opening, what Norton brought was public attention, which is what stars do.

The final box in the planning phase is “the plan,” but that’s a little too simple. In all likelihood, it’s not a single plan but a host of plans: one describing the project’s feasibility in great detail for decision makers, one speaking to the public about its benefits, one setting out the financing (for decision makers and funders), and one describing the design (if it’s a physical project). There will likely be internal documents that serve as a kind of project flow chart, laying out the approval process and decision points, and what each approval will require, so you can marshal the right supporters. Finally, your project may need interim funding, to print materials, commission studies and seek expert advice. You’ll need a plan for getting that funding along the way.

As I said earlier, this isn’t glamorous work; it’s a slog. The amount of detailed work and its complexity will test civic leaders’ commitment and attention spans. There will be victories along the way, and it’s important to broadcast them to keep your supporters’ spirits high. “One of the keys to the High Line’s success,” Hammond writes, “was in always showing progress, even if it was a really small step.” And sometimes there are big steps, like the day in late 2004 when Josh David opened an envelope and found a check for $1 million inside, from a donor he and Hammond had courted.

But make no mistake: This is the period when obstacles are met and overcome—or not. Do the planning phase right, and the next one, the decision phase, will be a triumph. Do it poorly and your chances of success are about as good as winning the lottery: theoretically possible . . . but practically impossible.

Photo of the High Line by Katy Silberger licensed under Creative Commons.

Discussion Phase: How Need, Relationships, and Ideas Begin the Change Process

October 21, 2011 By Otis White

In a series of postings, we’re exploring how conscious change happens in communities. If you haven’t read the first posting in this series, please take a moment to do so.

Let’s start at the top of the map, with the discussion phase. This is where change begins, with a leader recognizing a need and using her relationships, a set of ideas and a series of discussions to find a workable solution. But don’t let the casual-sounding name fool you. The discussion phase isn’t chit-chat; it’s a structured process involving different types of conversations with different groups, each a critical step in the change process. This phase ends with a decision about the solution to take forward.

You begin with the need—the community problem or opportunity that’s the reason for the change process. This sounds so commonsensical that I’d hesitate to mention it were it not for the fact that most community change efforts (and virtually all failed ones) begin with something else: a solution.

Look at the ideas floating around your city. If it’s anything like mine, you’ll find proposals for streetcars, parks, bike trails, changes in taxes, water conservation, redevelopment finance, road improvements, zoning regulations, and on and on. What do most of these ideas have in common? They’re solutions without context. Their proponents serve them up without first establishing the problem they’re intended to solve. As a result, they create a ripple of interest . . . before sinking out of sight.

Business consultant William Bridges knows why this doesn’t work. As he warns corporate executives:

Most managers and leaders put 10 percent of their energy into selling the problem and 90 percent into selling the solution to the problem. People aren’t in the market for solutions to problems they don’t see, acknowledge, and understand. They might even come up with a better solution than yours, and then you won’t have to sell it—it will be theirs.

Right on both points: If people don’t believe a problem exists, they’re not going to buy its solution. And when they do accept the need, they’ll often come up with good solutions on their own—which ends not with your leading people but marching with them. And that’s exactly where you want to be.

The keys to introducing a successful change process, then, are to convince citizens and decision makers of the need for change and, in time, facilitate a group of people who’ll arrive at a solution. Let’s take these in turn.

Begin with the need. It can be a problem (vacant properties in a neighborhood, say, or a declining local economy) or an opportunity (a local university that could have closer ties to the community). It can be a short-term problem (say, a spike in crime) or a long-term problem (domestic violence). You might start out with a solution in mind. Let’s say you’re concerned about obesity, and it seems to you that more sidewalks and playgrounds could go a long way toward solving it. If so, put aside your solution and concentrate on the problem.

This is harder than it seems. We were all rewarded in school for having the right answers, but in leading a change process it’s better to be the quiet kid in the back of the room than the one in the front row with his hand up. Why? Because many people eye change suspiciously. You may think you’re offering helpful ideas when you volunteer solutions, but some will see a hidden agenda. It’s better to say you don’t know the answer yet—and politely ask people for their thoughts.

And then there’s what William Bridges said: If you’re successful at getting people to accept the problem and think about it, they may come up with better solutions than you had anyway. So for both reasons—it lessens resistance and opens the door to other, perhaps more creative, ideas—it’s far better to sell the problem at first than to push a solution.

But how do you sell a problem effectively? I’ll write more about this in the future, but in general leaders must do four things to move people from awareness to action. They have to convince them that:

The problem is a community problem; it’s not just a personal issue.
It’s an important need, one that affects the community’s future.
It is urgent; things will grow worse with delay.
It’s possible do something about it; the community has the ability to solve the problem or significantly reduce it. It’s not hopeless or beyond reach.

When you convince people—decision makers and citizens—of these four things, something wonderful happens: People and resources are drawn to you. If offering solutions builds resistance, convincing people of needs does the opposite: It smooths the path of acceptance. Again, the trick is to build confidence that a solution can be found while not offering up a specific one.

The next step is to gather a group of people to talk about the need, discuss a range of possible solutions and agree on one to take forward. Who should be in this group? If you’ve done a good job of talking about the need—in small meetings with decision makers, in larger forums with citizens, perhaps through the news media and social media—then you know some who should be included. These are people who’ve responded to your call for action with support and resources. If you’ve spent time building relationships in the community (see “What Glengarry Glen Ross Teaches Us about Change“), you’ll know others who should be involved.

But you should also be strategic. You are assembling what John Kotter, the Harvard business professor and expert on corporate change, calls the “guiding coalition” for the change process. The coalition will change somewhat as you move through the planning and decision phases, but basically it is the group that will be the brains and muscle behind your initiative, the strategists and doers.

And who makes up a strong guiding coalition? Kotter suggests four types (which I’ve modified slightly for community change projects):

People with expertise in the issue.
Those with power in this area.
People with credibility in the community.
Leaders who’ve shown they can get things done.

For a change effort about obesity, then, the experts might be public health officials and perhaps those who run youth sports programs. Those with power might include school system officials, city parks officials and public-works officials. The other two types are harder to suggest, but you almost certainly know those in your community with a track record of getting things done and those whose judgment is respected. For the latter type, you might want to consider leaders in your city’s ethnic communities: If there are special problems with obesity among African-American or Latino youths, who can speak credibly for, and to, these families?

When you bring the coalition together, the initial goal to arrive at a workable solution (see “What Makes a Solution Workable?“). How do you manage such a thing? Well, there’s a great deal to learn about group facilitation—far more than I can cover in this posting—but three guidelines will serve you well:

Be patient. You will almost certainly introduce people to one another, so allow time for members to talk and listen. Good decisions require trust and candor. You won’t get them in a single meeting or probably in several sessions . . . but you can in time.
Start with the need and return to it frequently. The best way to begin a group’s work is with the need: a thorough discussion of what makes the problem a community concern, why it’s important and urgent, and why members believe it can be solved. As the group gets bogged down debating solutions, bring it back to the need. It will remind members of the importance of their work and encourage them to stick with it.
Keep an eye on group dynamics. One dynamic to watch for is a rush to judgment by the experts or those with power. This shouldn’t be surprising. These are people who’ve been thinking about this problem for years. They may even have solutions they’ve promoted in the past that they’d like the group to endorse. You’ll need the others—those with credibility and leadership ability—to slow things down by asking questions, gently challenging assumptions and pushing for new answers. This is an important role but one that some are uncomfortable playing. So before the first meeting, you may want to ask one or two of the most confident leaders to be the questioners of assumptions.

One way to improve the group’s work is with some “market tests” along the way. With the group’s permission, take its tentative ideas and assumptions to decision makers and citizens, through private meetings, op-ed articles and forums. This has an obvious benefit: Before committing to a solution, the group needs to know what decision makers think, how citizens respond, and where the likely obstacles lay. Yes, it will slow the process, but that’s not necessarily bad. It will prevent a rush to judgment and allow members time to know each other better.

And, who knows? Someone you talk with might offer a better solution than the ones the group was considering.

Photo by Jason Diceman licensed under Creative Commons.

A Map of Community Change

August 22, 2011 By Otis White

I have been haunted by a question for the past four years. After my company worked on a visioning project in a community not far from Atlanta, a business leader turned to me and asked, “So what do we do now?”

If I do say so, the year-long visioning project had gone well. More than 800 citizens participated in 12 visioning sessions, collectively generating more than 4,000 ideas and images of what they would like their community to be. Working with a planning group drawn from those who participated in the visioning sessions, we boiled down those ideas into 14 strategic objectives, 27 specific recommendations and 173 action steps. It was the greatest act of citizen engagement and planning the community had ever undertaken, and its sponsors were delighted with the results, which were ambitious, affirming and specific.

So I was happy to go back afterward to talk with one of the sponsors, a business executive with wide community and political experience who had immersed herself in the project. “So what do we do now,” she asked me. “How do we implement these ideas?”

I fumbled for an answer, saying something about creating groups to take charge of the most promising ideas, but I had two thoughts in the back of my mind. The first was that I was in the visioning business, not the implementing business. Thankfully, I didn’t say that. My second thought was one of surprise: You mean even smart and experienced community leaders don’t know how to get things done? Thankfully, I didn’t say that either.

It hit me as I drove back to Atlanta that I needed—and she needed—a theory of community change, one simple enough to fit on a sheet of paper but which fully describes the way complicated and diverse communities make up their minds to do something different—and get it done.

In the years since, I’ve sketched and resketched multiple versions of that theory. I tried first expressing it as a formula, kind of like E=MC². Then I tried doing it as a step-by-step process. (I had been influenced by John Kotter’s eight-step process for corporate change.) Then I tried various ways of drawing flow charts. The problem, I quickly realized, wasn’t in how I represented the process; the problem was that it was hard to capture all the elements of community change and still keep it simple enough to be useful.

At long last, though, I have a version of what I’m calling a “map of community change.” (Click below to see it.) It’s a simplified flow chart (no diamond-shaped boxes indicating decision points, no concurrency symbols). Its value, I hope, is that it will help leaders figure out where they are in their own change efforts and where they need to go next. Which, of course, is why I’m calling it a “map.”

In the next few postings, I’ll explain different parts of the map. For the time being, though, take a look at the three horizontal “phases”—discussion, planning and decision. Community leaders, I think, concentrate too much on the first and third phases (the blue and green areas) and not nearly enough on the gray area in the middle. And it was this area that the business leader was asking about: How do we use an engaged group of citizens to prepare challenging ideas for public acceptance and government action?

Again, I’ll talk about the phases in detail in the coming weeks, but let me offer three general thoughts about the map: First, the most successful mayors, chamber executives and community leaders I’ve ever known carried a map like this around in their heads. They knew how long it took to travel from realizing a need to making a decision (and even longer to implementing the decision), and they knew that most ideas didn’t survive that journey. But for those that did, this was the road they traveled.

Second, the area where ideas succeed or fail is usually in the gray zone, the planning phase. It’s here that advocates assemble the elements of success (which I call, simply, “the plan”) or they don’t. (Bear with me; I’ll explain the elements in future postings.)

Finally, there’s something very big that’s not represented on the map: luck. Communities are conservative places; they don’t accept change readily. Responsibility is diffuse, interests entrenched, and power hard to bring together. And, as Barney Frank, the U.S. representative from Massachusetts, once explained, opponents start with a great advantage over supporters: “It’s easier to get everybody together on ‘no,’ ” he said, “You all have to have the same reason for ‘yes.’ You don’t have to have the same reason for ‘no.’ ”

For that reason, every big idea that succeeds in a community requires some amount of luck: things happening at the right moments to confirm—to the public, elected leaders and bureaucrats—that this is the right decision. I can’t think of how to picture it, but as you look at this map imagine that, at various points, there’s an invisible force at work that helps advocates overcome obstacles. I could probably think up a fancier name, but for the moment let’s just call it “luck.”

This is the first of a series of postings about mapping community change.

Photo by Mark Deckers licensed under Creative Commons.

The Greatest Book About Cities Not Written by Jane Jacobs

July 13, 2011 By Otis White

This is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a book that many urban thinkers consider the greatest ever written about cities. It’s Jane Jacobs’ “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” and it is, indeed, an important work. Among other things, it showed us how to look at cities—particularly the interactions of street life—with greater appreciation.

“Death and Life,” then, is a great book. I recommend it highly. But I’d like to offer up another great book about cities, one published in 1993 with a bright green cover and cartoon illustrations. It was by a pair of Chicago academics and community organizers, John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight, with a title only an academic or a community organizer could love, “Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets.”

In 376 pages, Kretzmann and McKnight introduce us to a set of ideas as challenging to the conventional wisdom of community development as Jacobs’ critique was to city planning. Their premise: that every neighborhood and every community—even the most impoverished—is filled with human, organizational and institutional assets that should be inventoried and harnessed before seeking outside help.

I’ll explain more about their ideas shortly, but first let me tell you how I was introduced to this book. In 1995, I wrote an article for Florida Trend, a business magazine, about a city in South Florida called Delray Beach. My assignment was to find the place in Florida with the most committed and effective group of local leaders. I found it in south Palm Beach County, which was a bit surprising because that part of the state wasn’t known as civic minded. But a much greater surprise came when I got to Delray Beach. Leadership worked in Delray, I learned, in ways differently than any place I’d ever visited.

You can read the entire article on the Civic Strategies web site, but here’s the five-second summary: Delray Beach city government insisted that, before it responded to citizen complaints, citizens closest to the problem had to organize themselves, study the problem and assume part of the responsibility for solutions. This bracing attitude—you do your part before we do ours—was so contrary to how local governments worked, I struggled to find ways of describing it. I finally hit on calling it Delray Beach’s “responsibility revolution.”

A year later, I got a second surprise when I was researching a study of leadership in Los Angeles and dropped by the offices of an organization called RLA. RLA had been created four years earlier as Rebuild L.A. and was the political and civic communities’ reaction to the 1992 Rodney King riots. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley asked Peter Ueberroth, the organizational mastermind behind the 1984 Summer Olympics, to head the group, giving it the vague mandate of raising a lot of money and improving the riot-torn areas of South-Central Los Angeles. In short order, Rebuild L.A. became a political disaster, a high-profile piggybank with a 30-member board that served the interests of everybody but the people in the neighborhoods. (To see of how bad things were, read Time magazine’s article about the early problems of Rebuild L.A.)

By the time I visited RLA, Ueberroth was gone and so was the 30-member board. In their place was a quiet, confident Latina named Linda Griego who had been asked to clean up the mess at Rebuild L.A. and do something to improve the area. Griego wasn’t interested in high-profile fund-raisers or big-ego politics. She renamed the organization and focused on the community’s strengths. What she discovered as her organization inventoried South-Central block by block was that there was a lot more to the area than outsiders thought. She found dozens of promising but underserved retail locations and hundreds of small employers. Maybe the greatest surprise: South-Central was a honeycomb of small manufacturers, from print shops to metal-working establishments.

Griego organized these small businesses so they could support one another and negotiate with big businesses and city hall. And she produced corporate-style market studies, pinpointing places that a drug store, supermarket or discount retailer could thrive. She took these studies to chain stores that had never given places like South-Central L.A. a second thought and already had successes to show for her work.

In the space of a couple of years, then, I had seen examples from opposite ends of the United States of how to look at neighborhoods, including very poor areas, in a totally new way: not as hopeless victims but as places with assets—communities with the leadership and some of the resources needed to turn themselves around . . . if outsiders let locals take the lead. And once again, words failed me. I couldn’t come up with the right term to describe what Linda Griego was doing. I called it “grassroots networking.”

It wasn’t until the following year, when I was visiting the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio, that I found the words I’d been looking for in a homely guidebook in the foundation’s library. It was Kretzmann and McKnight’s book, and the term they used was “asset-based community development.”

In an 11-page introduction to the book, Kretzmann and McKnight explained that the traditional approach to low-income neighborhoods was understandable but wrong. As outsiders, we view these places as the sum of their problems: “crime and violence, of joblessness and welfare dependency, of gangs and drugs and homelessness, of vacant and abandoned land and buildings.” This causes us to conclude they are essentially hopeless: “needy and problematic and deficient neighborhoods populated by needy and problematic and deficient people.”

One result, they continued, is that we throw the residents a lifeline in the form of welfare and a mixture of social programs. These programs don’t solve the residents’ or their neighborhood’s problems; they “guarantee only survival and can never led to serious change or community development.”

What’s needed for change—for altering the fate of neighborhoods and the lives of people and not just easing their pain—is a new way of thinking about these communities, not as a collection of needs but as a wealth of assets that haven’t yet been identified, organized and made productive. What assets? They are “the capacities, skills and assets” of the residents and the neighborhood itself. And you find these assets in three forms, Kretzmann and McKnight say: in individuals, associations (formal and informal groups of various kinds) and institutions (from churches, businesses and schools to police stations and neighborhood parks). Most of the book is given over to showing how to find these assets and what to do with them once they’re found.

I knew instantly what Kretzmann and McKnight were talking about. Their notion of asset-based community development was the same as Linda Griego’s belief that South-Central L.A. teemed with productive businesses and potential markets, and what was needed were ways of harnessing this productivity and unleashing the potential. But there was also in the asset-based approach the wisdom of Delray Beach: that real change can’t happen until the community is a full-fledged partner in its own development—and not a supplicant. As Kretzmann and McKnight write:

. . . All the historic evidence indicates that significant community development takes place only when local community people are committed to investing themselves and their resources in the effort. This observation explains why communities are never built from the top down or from the outside in.

Yes, Kretzmann and McKnight are careful to add, outside resources are almost always needed, but these resources are effective only when requested by local leaders and matched by local efforts:

. . . Outside resources will be much more effectively used if the local community is itself fully mobilized and invested, and if it can define the agendas for which additional resources must be obtained.

OK, this isn’t great writing. In fact, at one point Kretzmann and McKnight caution that their book “is not a novel.” It’s meant to be read as a handbook, skipping from section to section as needed. But for community developers or others who care about cities, there’s as much wisdom here about the human assets of cities as you’ll find in Jane Jacobs’ descriptions of the physical assets.

There’s one more thing: The greatest obstacle to effective action in cities is the complexity of communities. People are frozen because they don’t know where to start. “Building Communities from the Inside Out” tells us not only how to make sense of places but where to begin our efforts to improve them. Literally. One of its final chapters outlines a five-step process: Map the assets, build relationships, mobilize for economic development and information sharing, convene the community to develop a vision and plan, and (only then) seek outside help.

If you want inspiring prose and a dead-on analysis of the physical assets and street life of cities, turn to Jane Jacobs, who probably did write the greatest book ever about cities. But if your tasks involve changing attitudes, peeling back layers of cynicism and apathy, and rallying groups to improve the places they live, then Kretzmann and McKnight have written the book for you. And by anyone’s measure, it’s a great one.

Photo of Jane Jacobs book ad by Pdxcityscape licensed under Creative Commons.

Planning Phase: The Slog of Civic Projects, and Why It’s Critical

Discussion Phase: How Need, Relationships, and Ideas Begin the Change Process

A Map of Community Change

The Greatest Book About Cities Not Written by Jane Jacobs

About Otis White

The Great Project

Follow Us on Mastodon