From nuPOLIS: How Social Innovators are Transforming America's Communities:
Community innovations are not the "one-step-at-a-time" incremental changes or "everyone-gets-a-little-something" political compromises that typically occur in communities. Instead, community innovations are breakthrough new products, services, policies, or organizations and networks that generate eye-popping, measurable performance improvements in a community.
After Cory Booker became mayor of Newark in 2007, he quickly recognized the inadequacy of just making incremental progress in solving his community's problems. Curbing the city's soaring rates of murder and violent crime was his top priority, and it was a personal cause. At night he rode around the streets in an SUV with his Blackberry and security detail, responding to shootings. "Usually," he recalls, "I ministered to residents at the scenes. I'd say, 'This violence is not us. We will get through this.' I would apologize and tell them we'd work with them." Booker hired a new police chief and started dismantling the old habits of a police department in which two-thirds of the officers worked the day shift even though most crime was at night. He got nonprofit and community organizations involved in fighting crime. After a year of this extraordinary effort, Booker says, the Newark violent crime rate had dropped about 5 percent, one of the biggest reductions in the nation. "And I said that incremental change is not enough. We needed innovation."
A new school that, at no additional cost, cuts a community's high school dropout rate to nearly zero percent from 50-60 percent, now that's an innovation. So are new real estate development funds that amass hundreds of millions of dollars of private capital for projects that protect the environment and rebuild distressed neighborhoods while earning market-rate returns. A new collaborative of employers in a community that doubles the rate at which the welfare recipients the firms hire stay on their jobs instead of falling back onto public benefits is an innovation. When a community avoids spending $6 billion on a water-filtration plant by instead investing several hundred million dollars in an extensive watershed-and-reservoir system that "lets nature do the work," that's an innovation. As is a new non-profit, "car-sharing" organization that helps a community's residents cut 25 percent of their cost of transportation. And so is a new partnership between city government and community activists that boosts by 300 percent the community's use of a rundown 584-acre park.
Each of these examples is real: schools in Detroit and other inner cities; the "smart growth" real-estate funds in the San Francisco Bay Area; an employer collaborative known as The Source in Grand Rapids, Michigan; the watershed system serving New York City; I-Go, the car-sharing company in Chicago; a public-private partnership, the Prospect Park Alliance, restoring the largest park in Brooklyn.
Most community innovations start small, like experiments in a lab, but over time, often more than a decade, they expand to larger scale and impact. For instance, in 1995 the founders of the "Knowledge is Power Program" (KIPP) schools, serving mostly low-income African-American and Latino children, designed and tested their first school in Houston. By 2008 they had 57 schools across the country with more than 25,000 students. Nine of the schools with a total of about 5,000 students are in Houston, where KIPP aims to expand to 40 schools for 22,000 students.
In 1994, a group of architects, builders, engineers, and developers met to discuss "green building" design for new construction. Four years later, the idea took form as a set of technical standards, Leadership for Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) in buildings, and the U.S. Green Building Council was created to certify facilities. By 2008 use of the standards for new construction, existing buildings, commercial interiors, homes, and schools had spread into every state and 30 other countries, covering some 14,000 projects. New green standards had also been created for neighborhood development, while some communities adopted LEED as part of their building codes.
In some communities, innovators bring together an "ensemble" of innovations to transform an entire community system. In Miami/Dade County, for instance, a campaign in 2002 targeted the abysmal conditions in which many of the community's youngest children were growing up. Voters approved a property tax increase to provide roughly $100 million a year to a new, independent public entity with a five-year life and a mission to build the community's early childhood system (pre-natal to 8 years old). Drawing on innovations from around the world, the Children's Trust puts in place community wide access to health care providers and social workers in every elementary school; pre-kindergarten classes with special curriculum; a quality-rating system for day care centers; support for first-time and teenage mothers; and new professional development and a tuition-free masters-degree credential for early childhood teachers. It was a breath-taking, comprehensive approach that built critical mass for large-scale change in a community of 2.4 million people. Then, in August 2008, 86 percent of the region.s voters agreed to fund the Trust permanently.
Read more from nuPOLIS: How Social Innovators are Transforming America's Communities.
