When more than 350 nonprofits in poor neighborhoods and communities respond to a federal RFP that will provide "Promise Neighborhood" planning funds for only 20 of them, it's an opportunity for movement building and lessons learned. Maybe it's also an opportunity for innovation development.

In May/June I participated in development of three NGO/community responses to the USDOE RFP. Notable was how different they were, particularly given the RFP’s fairly tight specifications. The NGOs were all place-based, of course, but one was focused on children, another on older youth and economic development, and the third on welfare families. They all bought into a form of the “continuum of services,” but their ideas about school-change and neighborhood-change varied substantially in quality. (Almost nothing serious was said about neighborhood revitalization.) Their versions of what the planning process would be included data-driven analysis, but varied greatly in other ways, from a “plain vanilla” working group with consultants to an innovative model looking at demand- and supply-side planning and network building. And they had assembled sets of partners that varied greatly in their competencies and, probably, their reliability.

I don’t know if this degree of variation reflects broader trends in the hundreds of proposals that were generated. But it made me think that in addition to movement building and lessons learned/best practices another aftermath outcome could be generated from the proposal-writing efforts: innovative products and services. After all, there’s demonstrated demand: The 350 or so losing proposals will have brought perhaps $75 million of claimed local match to the table, not to mention a desire to create particular outcomes in targeted neighborhoods. The question that I am interested in answering is on the supply side: What can we learn from the proposals that suggests tools, products, or services—from, say, integrated planning and school design to family networking and “continuum” financing—that can be developed and then used in communities to address poverty, school failure, and neighborhood isolation/decay.

Knowing what network members want from each other and want to give to each other, and delivering on these "value propositions" makes or breaks a network. "If there's no value," says Bill Traynor, one of our favorite network builders, "people will start to exit. It's a self-regulating system." That's pretty straightforward, but actually understanding and monitoring the members' value propositions (VPs) is quite complicated. A member may embrace more than one proposition; different members may embrace different propositions; and what members care about may change over time. Given this complexity and dynamism, it's worthwhile to check in on a network's value propositions fairly regularly, not just when starting up the network.

One network we work with--the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN), with about 70 members, each in a different city in the U.S. and Canada--conducted a value proposition check earlier this year. It asked members about nine distinct value propositions (VPs) that had been previously identified by members during their annual meeting. First members were asked to select and rank their three most important value propositions for continuing participation in the network. Then they were asked to score how well the network had been doing in the past year on delivering on their top-priority value propositions.

The results were illuminating and significantly influenced the network's strategy for the next year.

• Of the nine VPs, 2 collected most of the #1 priority votes: "Getting to know many colleagues with similar jobs and with whom I can share" and "Having access to trusted information about issues and models." As the summary of findings reported: It's all about connecting to peers and quality information. Period. Nothing is in 3rd place even. And this result was consistent with what the members had said a year earlier--a good sign that the network was on the right track.
• When it came to those two top value propositions, majorities of the members reported that the network was "delivering very well for me." But nearly a third of members said the network's delivery "could be improved"--and that triggered alarm bells that led network organizers to focus on improving and increasing specific network activities.
• Looking at several of the lower priority value propositions, it was noticeable that sizeable minorities of the membership reported they saw opportunities for participation but were not using them. That finding also prompted a refocus on members who had not become very active in the variety of network activities. They were contacted to find out more about how the network could better meet their needs.

As a result of its survey of members, the network has solid baseline information about the VP drivers of the network--and was able to tweak some of its plans to boost the network's response to what its members value. It created a new service, the "small group discussion marketplace," because some members wanted more opportunities to interact in smaller groups. 

Monitoring changes in a network’s member-to-member connections is integral to network evaluation, especially when a network’s performance depends on its evolution (e.g., from low levels of connectivity to higher levels of connectivity, conversion of weak links to strong links, etc.). One way to display information about a network’s evolution is to create network maps  We use special mapping software to analyze and visually display the information that we gather about network connections and changes over time. We’ve found that network maps generated in this way reveal patterns that are hard to “see” in the raw data and that are difficult to summarize narratively. (Read more about netwotk structure/shape.)

Network mapping for evaluation purposes can be challenging, however. I was reminded of this recently when I set about mapping ties among homeless service providers in Massachusetts. In this case, pilot efforts to reduce rates of homelessness in the state are being implemented through ten new regional partnerships of many organizations. From the start, our evaluation envisaged the production of ten sets of “before” and “after” regional network maps to demonstrate and compare patterns of network change in relations among the partnering organizations.

We started on the right foot. We added a set of “network connections” questions to an online Network Health Survey that was already in the pipeline (network mapping practice #1: don’t over-survey). We discussed the potential utility of the results with network coordinators – not just the value to the evaluation but also to network members who, we thought, might use the visually compelling network maps to publicize and promote their new ways of working (practice #2: establish salience).  We encouraged coordinators to publicize and promote the mapping project (practice #3: pre-notify and follow up with reminders). But, in the end, we were hampered by a low survey response rate from some networks.

In certain kinds of quantitative research, one can make do with a statistical sample. However network mapping of the kind we do requires close to a 100% response rate. We mapped “before” and “after” connections in 6 of the 10 networks and found some interesting patterns. In the other 4 networks, critical information was missing. Any story told in a graphic based on incomplete data would have been misleading.

What went wrong. We delivered our survey by email which has some advantages: people tend to provide longer open-ended responses to e-mail than to other types of surveys; research shows that responses to e-mail surveys tend to be more candid than responses to mail or phone surveys. In this case, however, many of our intended respondents were “fed up” to start with email and, as service providers, were already “over-surveyed” from other sources. (Turns out the problem is wider. The U.S. population as a whole is over-surveyed; response rates in the U.S. for all types and manner of survey are declining as a result). This is something we will pay closer attention to in the future.

A mayor draws a circle on a map of the city; inside the perimeter are 10 failing schools, so designated by the state and federal governments, containing roughly 5,000 children, most of them living in poverty. What should be done? What are the causes of the failure? What are the solutions—what will work? How much will it cost?

Nobody knows. There are many ideas, stimulated by experiments such as the Harlem Children’s Zone and a set of public schools designed for low-income students; movement-building efforts such as those led by Policy Link; and federal or philanthropic initiatives/competitions such as the U.S. Department of Education’s Promise Neighborhood RFP. But no solutions have been demonstrated to be reliable, feasible, scalable, and sustainable.

The ideas fall into several categories that form a blend of anti-poverty, education reform, and community development approaches, each with its own hypothesis about the causes of massive school failure. I’ve identified at least six categories:

(1) Continuum of Social Services. The assessment is that low-income families don’t provide their children with the skills, motivation, and supportive home environment to be successful learners that middle-class families provide. The answer is to train and serve low-income parents and children, from “cradle to college” in ways that mimic middle-class behavior and culture. This idea was the basis for the Harlem Children’s Zone experiment (the “conveyor belt” that would carry children to success) and the Promise Neighborhood RFP (“continuum of services”). It is a descendant of the point of view Lisbeth Schorr expressed in her 1998 book, Common Purpose: that the solutions—government and nonprofit programs, really—exist, but the will to use (and pay for) them does not.

(2) School District Reform. The assessment is that school districts with large percentages of low-income students in their enrollment lack the resources, capacities, and plans to improve performance substantially. The answer is to initiate district-wide changes in policies, activities, and training that over time will improve performance. The Broad Foundation has used an annual prize competition to identify districts that have undertaken this approach and achieved some success during 3-4 years, either higher performance or greater improvement than similar districts in their states. A book based on five of these success stories was published recently.[1] Unfortunately, the “success” in every case was fairly modest; it can be argued, perhaps, that the district is “”on the right path,” but in no case would the success be regarded as achieving a high standard of excellence. Nor does the path seem to produce impact at a speed commensurate with the urgency of the problem.

(3) Radically Redesigned Schools. The assessment is that the individual school (not the district) is the unit of high-leverage change and requires substantial redesign of school culture and practices. The school must be redesigned from top to bottom to engage and motivate students from home and neighborhood environments that do not encourage (and may actively discourage) academic learning success. There are many models for this design, though they share common characteristics such as small size (500 students or less) so no student falls between the cracks; personalized student learning plans; sustained personal relationships with caring, competent adults (teachers, mentors); and high expectations of every student (e.g., they are college bound). A growing number of these types of schools exist (particularly among some charter-school operators) and are demonstrating an ability to substantially reduce drop-out rates in urban schools and greatly increase post-secondary enrollment rates. But they are scaling up very slowly (one by one) and as a class have not yet increased academic performance enough.

(4) Family Empowerment. The assessment is that poor families have the capacity, with the right support, to act on their own to change their situation, but that government and nonprofit programs to help them constrain their “natural” actions by telling them and paying for what experts think they need and should do. Programs foster a dependence and lack of resourcefulness—while putting most of the financial resources dedicated for the poor into the hands and pockets of professionals. Funding should be repurposed to support strategies developed by the families and to incentivize asset-building or household cost-reducing behaviors much as policies do for the middle class (e.g., investing in education, home ownership, savings, and retirement). Families in some cases become the drivers of changes in student behaviors that emphasize aspiration for learning and success in school. There are a number of successful experiments with these empowerment and asset-building approaches, but they have not yet reached much scale.

(5) Social Capital/Network Development. The assessment is that poor families have limited opportunity to build strong ties that support each other (the way middle-class families do) through the exchange of resources and that their networks tend to have little “reach” into networks of people such as college-educated professionals; do not aggregate into effective sources of demand for services/products they need; and do not generate civic engagement and leadership. This affects schools in a number of ways: Low-income families are not a strong source of demand for higher quality and they don’t have the connections to support their children through various “out of school” resources. Some prominent efforts to build place-based networks have shown promise, but replication/spreading has been slow to emerge.

(6) Neighborhood Revitalization. The assessment is that low-income neighborhoods and communities can break the “cycle of poverty” by adopting a combination of approaches (affordable housing, retail development, etc.) along with an education-success approach that gets children in the neighborhood into college and, subsequently, into jobs and careers. Various efforts at neighborhood planning and capacity building are underway around the country and there is a new analytic tool, the Dynamic Neighborhood Taxonomy, helps to understand the differences between neighborhoods; their evolutionary paths; and strategies they can use. For low-income residential neighborhoods, this necessarily involves improving the performance of schools, an important asset for attracting families to the neighborhood. The Kalamazoo Promise, a college-scholarship fund, was designed to enhance the attractiveness of housing in Kalamazoo, because residents can obtain full college scholarships for their children (potential value of as much as $60,000 per child). But even this financial value has very limited appeal if the school’s performance is considered to be weak.

There are many ideas, but no single idea has demonstrated impressive success at scale or even the reliable repeatability of its success in other contexts. This is not an indictment; it’s a recognition that we are still in the early experimental (or prototyping) stage of developing innovations to solve the problem of massive school failure for low-income, minority kids.

What’s a mayor who needs solutions to do?

One answer: Pick a solution or a combination of several solutions and go with them at large scale. But it’s essential that the “solution set” includes a radical approach to changing what the schools are doing. School-change is at the core; if all you do is add programs around that core, you won’t get much better results. A risk of betting big on one or several strategies is that after making ambitious and public claims about the success that will be produced, the strategies don’t deliver; you end up with visible public failure.

An alternative answer: Build a portfolio of experiments at smaller scale that allows many plausible approaches to be tested in a highly disciplined way and to be scaled up as their success is demonstrated and understood. In this “innovation laboratory” model, the city would be explicit about the lack of any known large-scale solutions, identify the types of solutions it would like to support experimentally, and invite players from around the country to propose the experiment they want to initiate (or continue) in the designated area.

As part of “opening up” the innovation possibilities, the city would also obtain waivers from the state and federal governments of rules/regulations that might constrain innovation approaches. Think: a charter zone, rather than just a charter school.

Finally, the city should be clear that “innovation approaches” are not limited to “programs.” A program is one mental model for what can be done; it is part of the helping-professions model for categorical services delivered by people with special knowledge, expertise, about what poor people need. There are other mental models with legitimacy, including networks of social capital; markets of value exchange; institution building; organizing for policy change; and place- and identity-based cultural change. In an innovation laboratory where no model is certified as best, there should be room for more than program-oriented solutions.

We're often asked to help an existing network to plan its future. ""What should we do next?"--to strengthen or expand or sustain the network. Helping networks answer the question--devise their strategies--depends on developing an understanding of the network's condition. Here are some of the basic questions we ask the network (by interviewing its coordinators and stewards and surveying its members).

• What's the purpose of the network? Yes, the same question you'd ask if you were working with an organization: Vision, Mission. Some networks have multiple purposes. A network's purpose may evolve rapidly as its members come to know each other and realize what the potential value may be. If a network says its purpose is peer exchange/learning among members, it's worth considering that as the network matures this value proposition may by superceded others. When you know the purpose, you can also consider whether the network's structure (shape of connectivity) is the best one for the purpose. 
• What type of network is it? It's useful to classify a network as either being a connectivity or alignment or production network. (Learn more about these distinctions in Net Gains.) These different types provide different value for members and require different "enabling infrastructure" to support members' activities.   
• What stage of network evolution has the network reached? We have two ways of thinking about the "life cycle" of a network. One is a cycle of birth-to-growth, growth-to-stabilization, stabilization-to-turbulence, and turbulence-to-either-decline-or-transformation. Start-up networks have different needs and potential from mature, stable networks. Our second framework goes back to the connectivity-alignment-production model. All networks have a foundation of connectivity, but some of the evolve into alignment networks, and some alignment networks evolve into production networks. (Learn more about this model of network evolution.) An alignment network that is expanding requires a different set of strategies than a production network that is in turbulence.
• What are its members most important value propositions? How good do they feel about the value they are getting from participating in the network? It's essential to be clear about members' value propositions--the motivating forces behind the network's energy--and to know how members feel their VPs are being addressed. (Read more about identifying and measuring value propositions.) 
• What degree of connectivity do its members share? And what is the "shape" of the connectivity? Connectivity is the lifeblood of a network. But connections among members will vary. Some members will connect frequently with each other. others will connect infrequently. Some will connect with many other members, some with just a few. The patterns of connectivity can be mapped and analyzed, and this becomes the basis for strategies to strengthen connectivity. With one network, we asked members if they had talked with, met with, or collaborated on a project with other members--different intensities of connection. This allowed us to map not just who linked to who, but also some of the quality of the connectivity.     
• What is being transacted (what flows) between members? When you know what the network's members are doing with each other--whether it's a network-sponsored activity or something some members just decided to do, the network can decide whether it wants to dedicate resources to enabling others to participate. If, for instance, a national network finds that some of its members are working on creating local networks of the same sort, it can decide to help them and others do this, or it can decide not to. Members' transactions reveal opportunities for the network to provide more value.

To help networks do some of this planning work on their own we developed a self-assessment tool, the Network Health Assessment, which can be used by network members to provide feedback and generate a where-do-we-stand conversation within the network.

The 2010 International Cities of Migration Conference

Migration to Integration: An Opportunity Agenda For Cities

The Hague (Netherlands), October 3-4, 2010

Cities of Migration showcases innovative integration practices from global cities using a fresh storytelling approach and a compelling message: integration is a critical dimension of urban prosperity and growth.

Join us on October 3rd-4th in The Hague (Netherlands) for the first International Cities of Migration Conference will  be convened to address the theme “Migration to Integration: An Opportunity Agenda for Cities."  This dynamic two-day event will engage international city leaders, migration experts and local practitioners in a practical dialogue and exchange of ideas on this important agenda for the future of cities.

Debates, plenaries, a market place of leading ideas and a town-hall promise to make the conference an exciting, inter-active and hands-on learning event that will inspire renewed urban leadership and new thinking on migration.

You will find the conference program and description here: http://conference.citiesofmigration.ca/.

About Cities of Migration

Launched in December 2008, Cities of Migration http://citiesofmigration.ca  was the first international initiative to connect global cities around shared issues of migration and immigrant integration.  In September, Cities of Migration was recognized at a High Level Roundtable of the UN Alliance of Civilizations at UN HQ in New York on the "Inter-Ethnic City."

Cities of Migration is led by the Maytree Foundation in Canada, with partners in Germany (Bertelsmann Stiftung), the UK (Barrow Cadbury Trust), Spain (Fundación Bertelsmann) and New Zealand (Tindall Foundation).

The 2010 Cities of Migration Conference is convened in association with the Municipality of The Hague and the 15^th International Metropolis.

When I ask the latter question to audiences during my talks on sustainability, almost invariably no one raises a hand. On the rare occasion when someone does, I ask to meet with him or her after the talk to find out what they know.

I’m still waiting. . .

The reason nobody’s seen a sustainable community is not simply the fact that no American city and town since the founding of the republic was designed with sustainability in mind. It’s also because what really makes a community sustainable is hard to see, at least from a drive-by.

Alongside people’s attitudes and consciousness – their belief systems and deeply held values, their hearts and minds – the key to creating sustainable places, contrary to popular wisdom, is not green buildings or electric vehicles or roof top solar arrays. It is rules, written down in codes and ordinances, that not only give rise to the application of these technologies, but reinforce the culture and practice of sustainability over time.

And it appears we might be witnessing the birth of the country’s first truly sustainable community in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake Mayor Ralph Becker and the City Council recently undertook a major overhaul of the city’s land use policy regime. With guidance from Chris Duerksen of the planning firm Clarion Associates, and use of the model Sustainable Community Development Code, a research product of the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute (of which Chris is chair and co-founder and I am the incoming Executive Director), the city is considering dozens of updates to its zoning code and related planning rules. These would not only remove obstacles to promoting green development such as restrictions on accessory dwelling units in residential areas, solar panels on historic buildings and community gardens, but would create robust incentives to encourage local food production, waste reduction and alternative transportation.

Though not as powerful a symbol as green buildings or solar panels, rules are arguably our nation’s highest technology. They are the operating system and enabling platform for creating sustainable places at scale, beyond individual buildings or solar installations, and are evidence of an entire community’s desire to change, to evolve. Whether it’s the U.S. Constitution or Salt Lake’s sustainability ordinance, rules are our starting point for social innovation.

Perhaps the next American Revolution is underway, with the Wasatch Range, not Concord’s North Bridge, its new birthplace.

"Community transformation" is becoming a new buzzword for place-based social change, especially for those of us working in failing cities and neighborhoods. Is it different from--better than--"community development" or "community building"? That depends on what it means.

Check out, for instance, what leaders at the Kellogg Foundation had to say on the topic in their latest annual report:

Joe Stewart, chair of Kellogg board: “We must engage communities—bottom-up and top-down—in shaping their own futures… help people in communities channel their motivation and intense desire for transformative change.”

Sterling Speirn, president & CEO: “Real change begins with individuals and communities—and depends on their hopes and passions to envision a better future for their children. It also requires the ability to bring people together… And real change requires learning from our past, leveraging our strengths and working with a common purpose.”

Statements of high aspiration certainly, but what does "community transformation" mean as a concrete goal? How is it achieved? How would you know it has happened? Most important, what is it that is to be transformed?

In one community we work with, a group of local leaders decided to develop their answer to these questions. They focused on changing the underlying culture of the community and envisioned change as unfolding across a number of stages over the years/decades. Here's what they came up with:

The change we seek is fundamental: The very culture of the community—the mindset, social bonds, habits, expectations, caring, and competencies of residents, the ―way we do things around here‖—must change dramatically to meet the realities of a globalized knowledge economy and highly inter-connected society and, just as importantly, to constructively confront the "brutal facts" of the community’s persistent failure to prepare all of its children for success, especially those living in poverty. What’s needed is the development of a culture of learning, of active curiosity and exposure to all kinds of ideas, people, and experiences, and this culture must develop throughout the region—because people with more education earn more money and are less likely to lose their jobs, and engage more in civil society.

Stage 1 of our community's transformation was marked by a renewed enthusiasm for education and increased community engagement in helping students reach a goal of becoming college ready. It has seen many individuals and organizations step forward to help students realize the benefits of post-secondary education. While these efforts are impressive and the results evident in improved attitudes toward education and performance, the community quickly recognized a lack of alignment along these efforts and the lack of resources to help everyone who needed additional assistance. Thus, Stage 1 culminated with the development of an alignment Framework and prepared the ground for a new stage. Stage 2 will be a major, sustained investment in a wide range of efforts to spread and refine the overarching vision and goals for the community; broaden, deepen, intensify, and sustain community engagement; improve the performance of selected systems; and, ultimately, greatly boost civic momentum to develop the next stage.

Our theory of change aims to seed and grow this new culture of learning. We believe that--

When…

• a new vision and measurable goals for our future as a community are articulated; and
• residents from all walks of life, races, neighborhoods and communities come together in sustained dialogue about how they can help to achieve the vision; and
• key systems that educate and support children, sustain families economically, and invigorate community life, continuously innovate and show improvement in their performance—   

Then... 

• a new and widely shared community identity—new beliefs, expectations, ideas, relationships, capabilities, and energy—will emerge, driving new collaborations for systemic improvement and reaching a ―tipping point‖ of sufficient civic will and performance to accelerate change.

Our theory of change starts with the articulation of a new vision for the community that will support the emergence of a new community culture.

This word just in: "Net Gains: A Handbook for Network Builders Seeking Social Change" has been selected as a "top resource" by the Social Planning and Research Council of British Columbia and the Canadian Cancer Society’s Community Capacity Building Strategy, which have developed a community development resource website for British Columbia.  The Community Development & Capacity Building Resources website will be a centralized, online, interactive repository of excellent community development resources. The selection process involved consultation with a CCBS Advisory Committee and participants of the Community Developers’ Conference:  Training and Support for the BC Community Development Movement that was held in Vancouver in May 2010. "Net Gains" was identified to be a top resource by the selection process participants.

To view SPARC BC’s current website, please visit www.sparc.bc.ca.