Flying Tapmaster at the Detroit Jazz Festival

People from Detroit call their hometown the “D.” The reason at first appears obvious—Detroit, the letter D—it’s straightforward.  But below the surface, that single letter represents so much more.  Walking around the city center, it’s impossible to miss the Diverse city culture.  Artists and foodies intermingle with suits rushing from one meeting to the next.  White faces intermingle with black.  From Dawn until Dusk, the business district is a melting pot of culture and creed.  But as evening approaches, faces grow darker, not for lack of light, but because 8-5 Detroit has gone home for the day, leaving 24-7 Detroit to its reality.

Harsh Reality
Beyond the gleaming high rises and art-deco sky scrapers, is the real city center.   Detroit, which was home to over 1 million-souls just 20 years ago (and close to 2 million 40 years ago) will be lucky in the next census to reach 800,000.  The aftermath of this Decline includes 30,000 homes that must be raised in just the next few years; 10,000 school children who leave the school district every year in search of a quality education; the collapse of median home values from $50-60,000 just five years ago to $7,500 today; and a population where over 1/3 live in poverty.

Detroit Moxie
Despite this reality, Detroiters are proud, professing their moxie and facing challenge like home-town hero Joe Louis, chin set and fists flying.  Thousands of homes lost? We’ll develop green space and explore urban farming.  School children lost? We’ll build a robust charter school system that outshines the old. Adults left behind? We’ll promote broadband access and help thousands cross the digital divide to promote access to learning and information.  National media reports negative views of our city?  We’ll launch Declare Detroit, Detroit Yes, Model D, and an array of grassroots community and media efforts to organize, provide a balanced view, convey hope, and clean up our act.

Detroit takes punch after punch and keeps on rolling, but if the city is to move forward it must do more than endure. Various transformation efforts underway in the City have become points of pride that drive passion and hope.  A recent Knight Foundation/Gallup study shows that strong passion for community is highly correlated with economic growth.  The question is how to best help these transformation efforts not just stay on track but maximize their capacity to yield a brighter future.

Transformative Engagement
A 2004 MIT book, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown, looked to two struggling manufacturing communities in Pennsylvania (Youngstown and Allentown) and found that, despite sharing very similar economic histories, the two took very different transformation paths.  The critical success factor for Allentown over Youngstown was the mobilization of key organizational actors around desired outcomes.

Both communities had prevalent and strong social networks and relationships, but in Youngstown social ties among the community’s leadership tended to reinforce civic relationships among actors who were already well-connected.  In Allentown civic ties tended to bring together more diverse actors who were not traditionally well connected and emphasized idea-sharing and alignment.  The book concludes that, an important element of Allentown’s relative success was its broader, more interactive civic-engagement approach.

Communities that emphasize the development of smart social networks, and that cultivate those networks around a common vision and goals, experience more inward investment, innovative thinking, and ownership and action-taking. It is a positive outcome that numerous stakeholders are organizing to take on Detroit’s many challenges and are harnessing passion to build a new community future.  But understanding how to harness the strength of social networks and to maximize the power of well-conceived civic engagement could accelerate positive momentum and shift efforts to a higher playing field.

Winning Team
Communities are made up of complex webs of systems and networks that emerge and recede depending on the moment’s need.  If those systems and networks fail, communities can fail, regardless of the passion people have toward an alternative outcome.  Detroiters are not willing or ready to admit defeat, despite unprecedented socio-economic and other challenges.  In fact, many Detroiters are struggling against all odds to repurpose and rebuild.  In the midst of the scramble, we can give these efforts a significant boost by helping them align with and engage key players that can help them innovate, connect resources, and succeed in moving their implementation strategies forward.

In these unusual times, we must look beyond the usual suspects to cultivate innovation and commitment that can turn the tides for the city.  Moxie counts, but it’s the people who are in your corner who can help you lose or win the fight.  Being deliberate about engagement and collaboration can make world of Difference in the D.

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Kim Didier is from Newton, Iowa, a little town of 15,000 that rests smack-dab in the middle of the state.   In my imagination she regularly belts out would-be top-40 hits in the shower, but only when she’s not on tour with her entourage and counting the millions she’s made from going platinum.  In reality, Kim’s—well—totally normal.  She’s friendly, inquisitive, entirely approachable, and generally nice to be around.  She has a professional haircut and sports business casual with the best of ‘em.  So, what makes her so undeniably cool?

Regional Economic Crisis
In 2001, Maytag Corporation, which had been headquartered in Newton for 113 years and employed 4,000 people at its peak, announced it would reduce the local labor pool by moving to new facilities in Mexico.  On October 25, 2007, Maytag ceased operations in Newton for good, with closure of both a production facility and corporate offices.  That day, a final 1,800 Maytag employees lost their jobs.

Townsfolk began going through the seven stages of grief, starting with shock and denial, pain and guilt, anger and bargaining, and depression.   People might have gotten stuck there but, rather than wallowing in their sorrow, the common loss brought the community together.  Community leaders, including Kim Didier, pounced on the opportunity to shift negative energy focused on confusion, grief, and anger to more constructive purposes.

Taking Action
Like any good counselor, Kim called on community residents to do a little role playing.  The process started off with something called “The Futures Game.”  An Australian “gent” from rural Australia, David Beurle, led the exercise, which helps people understand how, when faced with tough futures about growth and development, different choices at critical points in time can lead to drastically different community outcomes.  This process led to development of a community vision, steeped in the understanding that if people stray from the decision or don’t make collaborative, mission-driven choices, the community’s future outcomes could be sharply affected.  Salt brines or development

In addition, Kim prodded the community to participate in a process called “network weaving.” This entails understanding how strongly connected community leaders are to one another, where their passions and expertise intertwine, and how they view one another as collaborators, innovators, and trusted partners.  U.S. national intelligence agencies use the process to understand the effectiveness of terrorist networks, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has employed the technique to control deadly infections in hospitals.  Kim Didier and her peers employed the process to understand how to most effectively move their community forward.

Did these hokey processes really make a difference for Newton?  The answer is an irrefutable “yes.”    These processes helped the community establish common desired outcomes and rallied leadership around it—fully leveraging the full strengths of the communities assets and building trust relationships that have allowed the community to move forward.  Today, Newton isn’t “formerly the home of Maytag.” They are at the center of innovation, becoming a manufacturing and design hub for state-of-the art wind turbines and, with just one employer, home to 400 new, related jobs.

Recovery
Slowly but surely, the town is moving through its phases of grief: the upward turn, reconstruction, and acceptance and hope in abundance.   This transition was possible because some folks dared to do the unthinkable—to step back, create a vision, create safe spaces to build trust, and understand how to focus community leaders’ energy at the right places at the right time.

What do you call someone who recognizes the need for this kind of process and gets the buy-in to make it happen? Yep–that’s a “Rock Star” in my book.

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Beets in Detroit by ellievanhoutte

Unemployment in Macomb County

I recently met with a Macomb county commissioner whose district is embedded in the metro Detroit region of roughly 5 million people. The commissioner was concerned because, despite state unemployment in excess of 15%, county unemployment exceeded 16%, and pockets in her district face rates as high as 25%. “We’re heading toward a brick wall,” she noted.  ”We just don’t know when we’ll hit.”

What New Jobs?

The commissioner voiced concern about moving forward job training strategies when, really, the potential for new job creation has no hope of matching—even remotely—the rate of job loss. “I  sometimes actually wonder if we should do what New Orleans did and offer to help people relocate to places with more opportunity.”

Exclusive Collaboration?

This commissioner, like so many public officials, economic and workforce developers, community organizers, and even citizens, is overwhelmed by the immensity of the employment challenge in Michigan and daunted by a lack of public resources to make a difference. “I know there’s the Recovery Act—I just don’t know what we’re getting out of it.”

Moreover, she expressed confusion over facing these challenges in a large geographic region where, certainly, people are working overtime to shift economic gears, but the results are dispersed, and her constituents are her neighbors who don’t see a direct or immediate benefit.

Home-grown Efforts

She knows about a host of home-grown efforts, including the New Economy Initiative (NEI), Road to Renaissance, and others, she just don’t know anyone who is part of these efforts. How can she connect? She can’t be everywhere at once. How can she learn whether and where her county benefits from these efforts?  Is it enough for community “big dogs” to drive community change, and can they do so successfully—or at least meaningfully—without bringing other community stakeholders on board?

Resilient Outcomes and Communities

Having a resilient community means recognizing the importance of social capital and having an engaged and informed community, both organizationally and individually. People at all levels need to feel they are contributing to solutions or, at the very least, feel in touch with them, and there are many ways to do this:

• IdeaMinnesota is an effort of the state community foundation, which has asked community residents to share their ideas to address community problems and has agreed to fund the best ones.
• “My Region” in central Florida has asked community members, “How shall we grow?”  Roughly 20,000 people have responded through surveys, videos and other means, and many have invested out-of-pocket in the effort, which has driven several community-change initiatives.

Michigan’s Defining Moment has engaged 2,000 people in outreach efforts to express their views on Michigan’s future. And One D’s online scorecard allows organizations to show how their efforts are moving forward key community indicators. How can these efforts be channeled to engage regional community stakeholders in thinking about solutions for the region’s future but in conjunction with stakeholders like NEI that are investing resources in solutions to improve it?

Solutions-driven engagement

Some fear that community engagement may open the door to unwarranted critique and judgment, but the alternative could remain the sense of disconectedness and concern like that expressed by our county commissioner.  And, yes, community engagement is time intensive and difficult, but investing in it is questionable only if viewed as an end in itself.  The ultimate goal in engagement should be to connect real people to the development of real outcomes and solutions and, ideally, investment in them.  This will give participation true meaning and foster a sense of pride and ownership in the outcome.

After all, is innovation really game changing if only some people feel part of it?

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Students, educators and others can access syllabi, lecture notes, audio and video for almost every MIT course offered today, and over 50 million have done so. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of education has done a meta-analysis that shows that students who take all or part of their classes online generally perform better than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction (results are statistically significant).

The Web Makes it Possible to Support Learning and Work in New Ways

The way society thinks and learns is changing faster than, well, the speed of digital transmission. This opens doors to new ways of helping students and workers meet education and training demands in the midst of constant innovation and increasingly tough competition for jobs.  But there are still
those who cannot imagine the extent modern technology foretells for work and learning.  They point to social media tools like FaceBook and Twitter and oddly-named collaboration tools like wikis and blogs and wonder about, if not challenge, their relevance in today’s talent landscape.

The Web Helps People Help Themselves and Each Other

Yet 85% of college students use FaceBook – 3.85 million users.  Of these, 60% log in every day, 85% at least once per week, and 93% at least once per month. These figures will pale with recent new accessibility for high schoolers.  And while much of the usage is social, it also includes tracking and collaborating homework assignments, arranging study groups, and more.  Adults are also heavy internet users: According to the Pew Internet and American Life project, over 1/3 of adults have participated on online social networking, and 69% of all Americans have used the internet to cope with the recession, including finding jobs and ways to upgrade their skills. (This includes using social networks to land employment, an increasing phenomenon in today’s economic climate.)

It’s Not About The Tools Alone, But the Tools Accelerate Broader Social Change

The truth is, like the Commodor 64 and Atari, some – if not all – of these social networking and collaborative platforms are likely to be replaced by more powerful, agile, and ubiquitous versions themselves. But their legacy will remain, meeting demand for transparency, collaboration, and the ability to teach and learn any time, any place, on any subject imaginable, at increasing speed and diminishing cost to the end beneficiary.

We’re Only At the Beginning

There likely will always be a place for traditional work and learning systems, but not without integration of online tools, resources, and even social networking platforms that add to the richness of the educational experience through easier-maintained relationships with educators and peers.  The future of work and learning is today, it includes online tools, content, and networks, and there is no going back.

Lisa Baragar Katz
@katz_lisa

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