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?
Revisiting Our Community Agility Ecosystem
What’s Community Agility?
Two years ago – when we launched the Community Initiatives Team – agility was on ours minds. Pre-recession, we were hearing flat, but seeing spiky. Our team members live and work in regions as diverse as Portland (OR), Tucson (AZ), Charlotte (NC), and all over Michigan. So while the U.S. economy at the time was widely perceived as booming, our communities were still smarting from the steep downturn a few year before. Yet, we were also bearing witnesses to infinitely creative responses to new challenges, and the beginnings of new kind of economy.
In our work, we were confronting significant structural challenges:
At the same time, we saw opportunities for collaboration (on and offline) and reinvention everywhere. We focused on building agility.
Developing Methods for Change
With the aim of helping communities find opportunities to thrive while also managing through downturns, 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:
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 regions (Southeast MI, Mid MI, Southern AZ, Kansas City, and the Piedmont Triad NC partnership) and two BRAC regions (Ft. Bragg NC and Southwest OK), and a host of other communities in transition.
Checking In
Last week, our team met in person 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 a few we’re pretty excited about.
Social Innovation
The people who identify with “social innovation” are a wildly diverse, eclectic and exciting bunch, ranging from the academically-inclined Stanford Social Innovation Review crowd to the entrepreneurial community that is 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. 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.
Video 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. This week’s Gov2.0 Summit brings together public servants and technologists and advocates and organizers, many of whom are already working together to build the next generation of public intelligence systems and platforms for participation.
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.
People are helping communities become more resilient outside the U.S. as well – parallel efforts exists in Australia, and a more locally-driven approach launched in England.
Smart Communities
Firms like Cisco are promoting smart cities from a data-connectivity point of view, and IBM is advancing its “internet of things” agenda. 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. John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison’s Big Shift 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.