Community Innovation: How Social Innovators Are Transforming America's Communities presents a comprehensive explanation of the overpowering forces that are radically disrupting the strategies for success for communities large and small, urban and rural. Drawing on scores of success stories across the nation, it shows how community leaders—from billionaires and bloggers to teachers and grassroots activists—are launching a new generation of "community innovations" that promise to transform life in communities. It signals to the national political community that the collective experiences of American communities are producing a nationwide phenomenon. And it offers a national agenda for stimulating community innovation in the 21st century.
The insights in Community Innovation are based on six years of extensive research and professional work. Peter Plastrik, co-author with David Osborne of two books about reinventing government, has consulted and partnered closely with many of the public, private, philanthropic, and nonprofit leaders who are leading the way in community innovation. Since 1995, Ted Staton has managed a community, East Lansing, Michigan, through a series of complex changes; he is a highly regarded reinventor of local government. Together, the two authors have synthesized the latest ideas about social and economic trends, community change, and social innovation along with their own conversations and experiences with hundreds of community leaders in dozens of communities including:
- the mega-sized metropolitan regions where most Americans live: New York City, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, the San Francisco Bay area, Greater Boston, and Arlington County, Virginia;
- mid- and small-size cities: Austin, Texas; Charleston, South Carolina; Lawrence and Worchester, Massachusetts; Sarasota, Florida; Grand Rapids and East Lansing, Michigan;
- vast rural regions: the Redwood Coast of northern California, the Sierra Nevada mountains, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, western Maine, and Ohio’s Appalachian Valley;
- sovereign Indian reservations, the Blackfeet Reservation in northern Montana and the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming;
- smaller rural communities, Tupelo, Mississippi; the North Country of New Hampshire; and Itaska County, Minnesota; and
- “no-man lands” at the edge of formally organized communities: the colonias along the U.S.-Mexican border and the unincorporated White Center district bordering Seattle.
 Community Innovation offers readers a national panorama of communities struggling to find their course in a radically changing world. It shows how large forces—economic globalization; local and global environmental threats; and growing cultural shifts and tensions—are disturbing life in American communities, creating uncertainty about what to do and demolishing the reliable answers of the 20th century.
This journalistic portrayal sets up the core theme of the book: the emergence, also nationally, of community leaders who are responding to change by launching an array of innovations that transform the way communities work. This little-noticed trend is revealed through dozens of stories from communities—among them, the Wall Street financier who raised $63 million from other financiers to start a fund to strengthen New York’s economy; the foreign language teacher in Worchester, Massachusetts who started a school in the poor neighborhood where she grew up and transformed failing students into college-bound successes; the civil rights activist in San Francisco who negotiated with banks and insurance companies to create the nation’s first “smart growth real estate fund” that invests tens of millions in restoring dilapidated urban neighborhoods while making money for its investors.
Community Innovation shapes these seemingly isolated events in separate communities into a set of new "innovation platforms" for community success—and dedicates a chapter to each of six platforms. Some of these have received attention in the media; others have not. Nowhere, however, have they been assembled into a coherent whole. And nowhere has the risky process of creating community innovations—providing the leadership, developing localized innovations with large-scale impact, managing the local politics—been discussed in the depth that nuPOLIS provides.
Finally, Community Innovation looks toward the horizon. It shows how individual communities can develop their own capacities for community innovation and link to resources across the country. And it challenges the national political community to help accelerate and spread the community innovations that are creating a bottom-up revolution indispensable for American success in the 21st century.
Community Innovation is being released chapter by chapter, with each one available for free download here.
The Table of Contents
Introduction: Connecting the Dots
Part I: Collapse of the Context
1. nuPOLIS: The Future of Place
2. The Disruption of Community Life: Intensifying Forces
Part II: Innovations for Community Success
3. Location Efficiency: Tapping the Power of Proximity
4. Green Services: Letting Nature Do the Work
5. Double Bottom Lines: Blending Profit and Benefit
6. Empowerment: Unleashing Self-Drive
7. Value Chains: Working Across the Lines
8. Community Engagement: Getting to Collective Yes
Part III: The Community Innovator’s Discipline
9. Designing Innovation: From Idea to Impact
10. Brokering Innovation: Community Capacities for Change
11. Scaling Innovation: Community Laboratories for the Nation
About the Authors
Peter Plastrik and Ted Staton have a combined 50 years of experience in community change—as government managers and consultants to community-based groups, local governments, and foundations in the U.S. and overseas, and as writers about and students of community change. They know, have worked with, and chronicled the stories of many of the community innovators in Innovation Communities.
Plastrik is co-author with David Osborne of two books about reinventing government: Banishing Bureaucracy (2000) and The Reinventor’s Fieldbook (2003). He has written about community and government innovations for The Washington Post magazine, the Brookings Institution’s online magazine, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. As a consultant and partner in Integral Assets Consulting, he has worked with community foundations, educators, community-based nonprofit organizations, and governments in more than 20 states. He is president of the Innovation Network for Communities, a new national nonprofit network that develops and supports innovations for transforming the performance of community systems. The network was launched with a $1.5 million grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
Staton has managed local governments for nearly 30 years, most recently as city manager of East Lansing, Michigan, where he led the transformation of every major government system and engineered a dramatic turnaround in the city’s fortunes. Staton has been honored an outstanding public administrator by the American Society of Public Administration , and in 2003, the Michigan Municipal League presented him with its Outstanding Service Award. The same year, East Lansing citizens gave the city its highest satisfaction ratings ever for policy-community relations, citizen trust in government, customer service, and overall satisfaction with city services. As assistant city manager of Dayton, Ohio, he helped the city obtain the prestigious designation as an All-American City. Staton is a graduate of the Program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. |
