Smart Communities

Preserving Seattle's Monorail

Those who haven’t visited Seattle might not be familiar with their monorail.  Built in 1962 when the city hosted the world’s fair the monorail has enjoyed the favor of a public that appreciates the view from the elevated track as well as a light rider fare ($4 round trip) and profitability (annual profits of $750,000 are split between the operator and the city.)  In 1997 the city approved an initiative to expand the monorail, a second initiative provided funding towards the venture in 2000, and in 2002 the voting public approved funds to build a 16 mile-long monorail line running north-south through the city.  Three years and $100 million later the funding for monorail development was eliminated via the ballot box by a 2-1 margin as the Seattle public balked at a proposed 50-year plan to fully develop the line.  Recently the New York Times reported that a host of problems over the last year have threatened the future of the existing monorail.

I’m fairly sure there will an outcry to protect the monorail given the previous support for its expansion.  In terms of community development the monorail is a signature feature of Seattle that isn’t replaceable.  By our count there are only a few cities in the United States that operate a monorail for public transportation (as opposed, let’s say, to the monorail at Disney World) including Las Vegas, NV, Jacksonville, FL and Memphis, TN.  The monorail is a quiet form of transportation (it has rubber wheels rather than the metal ones found on traditional elevated rail systems), is environmentally sound (operating on electricity) and it has the eye-opening quality of operating at a profit in the public interest.

One of the most pleasant virtues of the Seattle monorail from the perspective of community development is the way it inspired some of Seattle’s citizens to fight for its expansion.  The internet is littered with any number of websites dedicated to the pleasure of riding Seattle’s monorail or the desperate attempts by some to expand it.  A group called 2045 Seattle put together a number of innovative initiatives to call attention to the project and added some description of them in the summary of their efforts:

“We staged a race between a dog, a runner, a car and the monorail. We joined with other groups to march the length of the green line. We marched around in wetsuits to remind people that West Seattle shouldn’t have to swim to get downtown.”

It’s hard to image San Francisco without the trolley, Venice without the gondola, and it should be tough to imagine Seattle without the monorail.

LeadershipPlenty® Classes Starting Soon

We’ve received a number of requests for information about the upcoming LeadershipPlenty® train-the-trainer sessions at the Hotel Roanoke & Conference Center. This is a great opportunity for individuals to be trained in a top-flight leadership development curriculum.  Graduates not only leave with all the tools they will need to begin recruiting participants when they return home but they will also have the support of an exclusive online resource center available only to LeadershipPlenty® graduates.  Here are the particulars:

What:  LeadershipPlenty® Institute (train-the-trainer sessions)
When:  November 6-8th
Where:  Hotel Roanoke & Conference Center
Cost:  $1800 (conference materials, instruction, certificate, meals and breaks)

Keep in mind that online registration ends on October 24th and you will be responsible for travel arrangements.  If you have questions about the LeadershipPlenty® curriculum then please visit the Institute’s main webpage.  Specific questions about the November training, including those related to registration, should be directed to the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center through their website or by phone at (540) 231-5182.

Education & Civic Engagement -- A Good Fit

The National Conference on Citizenship met in early September and released their annual report on the health of America’s civic engagement.  Some of the findings highlighted in the report relate to the correlation between education and civic engagement.  According to the report:

•    College-educated individuals are as much as 24 percent more engaged in their community than those who dropped out of high school.  The report indicated that, “The divide between college graduates and high school dropouts has been as great as 24 percentage points and was 15 points in 2004.”

•    “After the 1976 election, almost three quarters of college graduates said they had voted, compared to just under half of high school dropouts. By 2004, turnout among college graduates had slid 10 points, to 62 percent.  But turnout for high school dropouts had fallen 16 points, to 31% -- half the rate of their college educated counterparts.”

•    “According to the Current Population Survey’s data, from 2001 to 2004, college graduates were more than 4 times as likely to volunteer regularly as high school dropouts (43% to 10%).”

•    “College graduates dominate everyday American community life; high school dropouts are almost completely missing. Half of the Americans who attend club meetings -- and half of those who say they work on community projects -- are college graduates today. Only 3 percent of these active citizens are high-school dropouts.  Thirty years ago, the situation was very different. In 1975, only about one in five active participants was a college graduate, while more than one in ten was a high school dropout.”

These statistics demonstrate in stark fashion the strong correlation between education and engagement in a community.  In part these numbers really jump off the paper because they compare high school dropouts (defined for the report as those over age 20 without a high school diploma) with college graduates.  The numbers would probably not look as dramatic if the comparison was between high school dropouts and those with a high school degree but, then again, the definition of “dropout” used for this report also excluded a large number of youths who fit the typical dropout profile.

There is a PDF of the full report on the NCOC website.  The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), which did the data analysis for NCOC, has a large amount of information on youth voting and other forms of civic engagement on their website.

Knight Foundation to Reward News Experiments

The Knight Foundation has announced that it is offering big money - $5 million – for innovative new ideas that link citizens with their communities.  There are several categories including a pilot project and field test category, one for leadership, another for commercial products and investment, and an “open” category for ideas that don’t fit elsewhere but which fit with the spirit of the award.

There is a summary press release on PNN Online, one of our favorite websites for nonprofit news, and naturally the Knight Foundation has created a website with complete information on the award and an online application form.  The application serves as a letter of inquiry and carries a December 1st deadline.

Be sure to look carefully through the Knight Foundation’s FAQ and the information on the application page before submitting.  Good luck!

More on Food Deserts

Recent research examines the “Food Balance Effect”, a phenomenon where areas have no grocery stores to provide healthy dietary options – this phenomenon is often exacerbated by the presence of fast food restaurants.  The research has been compiled in a report, “Examining the Impact of Food Deserts on Public Health in Chicago” (PDF), that outlines a number of important aspects of the problem.

Not surprisingly, the report finds that African-Americans are more likely to reside near a fast food restaurant than a grocery store.  This simple demographic fact has serious consequences for African-Americans in Chicago.  Specifically, as the report notes, “Communities that have no or distant grocery stores, or have an imbalance of healthy food options, will likely have increased premature death and chronic health conditions.”

The authors of the report spend some time discussing the impact of health problems on communities, particularly with regard to costs, but there is also a quality of life issue here that is less quantifiable.  For those interested in getting involved and changing a “food desert” into an oasis in your community, check out this Smart Communities blog entry from August 2006 that details how Nashville residents and one Vanderbilt doctoral student worked together to provide more nutritious food to area residents.

New Frontiers in Poverty

Last November I had the honor of sharing my thoughts on community economic development and poverty alleviation with a distinguished panel of guests at a University of North Carolina summit on poverty.  The deliberations of the panel were published in the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal (Vol. 10, Number 1/2006) and are not available in text on the web but they were also videotaped and made available on the web.  All panels can be viewed by clicking on the appropriate links under the listing for the Wednesday, November 9, 2005 summit.  My presentation starts at about the 27th minute of this video (direct link to RealPlayer video); this particular description won’t make much sense until you actually click on the link to the summits and see how they are organized.

Model for Change - South Brooklyn Community High School

Since the turn of the year we have written extensively about the dropout rate in the U.S., it’s costs, some of the solutions, where it is worst, etc.  Last week we received word of one school that is working to solve the problem by helping only those students who had dropped-out or were at risk of dropping-out.  That school, South Brooklyn Community High School, may serve as the model for a whole new generation of schools geared to contend with the dropout problem.

The South Brooklyn Community High School was created in 2002 with a grant from New Visions for Public Schools (a collaborative effort including, among others, the Soros Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation); the intention was to give at-risk teens every opportunity to get a high school diploma.  The school employs known dropout solutions like small classroom sizes (there are only 150 total students at the school), strong relationships between students and advocate counselors, and opportunities to demonstrate leadership skills.  As a result, South Brooklyn Community High School is achieving better results than other transfer high schools in New York.  It also has attracted additional attention from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which has pledged more money to expand New York City’s capacity to implement additional schools on the South Brooklyn model.

Thanks and a tip of the cap to the Leader-to-Leader Institute weekly e-newsletter for calling this innovative solution to our attention.

From Corporations to Community Service

We’ve seen this type of story before wherein nonprofits lure corporate professionals into the third sector with the enticement of more meaningful work.  There is much to consider when making that leap – both from the perspective of the nonprofit and the corporate employee making the change.  While it might seem, on its face, that most nonprofits would welcome labor with private sector experience there is definitely a difference in values and focus.  More importantly, as Nonprofit Quarterly’s editor Ruth McCambridge told the Memphis-based Commercial Appeal, other aspects like knowledge of the organization, understanding of local needs, or personal qualities make a huge difference in hiring.

According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, one of the biggest transitions is from a for-profit environment that is metric and measurement-oriented to a non-profit world that is much more mission-based and which finds measuring influence on communities and individuals to be more an art than a science.  The other big transition is the one felt in the wallet, one example from the Chronicle:

“Tim Schultz had been a trust director at Norwest/Wells Fargo before he took a position creating a planned-giving department at the United Way of Phoenix. “At the bank, my compensation was about $300,000 a year," he says. "The United Way was paying about $63,000 a year. But I'd made the decision that I'd done all the 'go, go go' stuff.”

That’s a serious pay cut.  There are some corporations, though, that are beginning to change in a way that allows employees to have their cake and eat it too.  Global business consulting firm Bain & Company reportedly allows senior associates with two or more years working at the firm to take a leave of absence from Bain, work 3-6 months for a nonprofit organization, then return to Bain.  While I’m sure this is the exception, rather than the rule, when it comes to corporate community-mindedness it is still a great idea and a terrific case of leading by example.

How Higher Education Can Change the World

This title is really the subtext of a conference I have been attending this week at Oxford University. The Oxford Conclave on Global Ethics has gathered representatives from higher education--administrators, faculty and students, business people, and nonprofit executives to discuss ethics that should be taught and practiced as part of higher education. As you might imagine this is not an easy issue to resolve even in the erudite confines of Oxford University. What was clear, though, is that the time is now and higher education is critical in addressing the major problems of the day. It is not just what is taught or how--although both important-- but also higher education's power to convene and to encourage dialogue on the big, thorny issues is critical.

Speakers from yours truly to Howard Gardner, Frances Hesselbine,and Ray Anderson spoke to the urgency of our times and the need to have higher education collectively and singularly to step up and step out. A 1990 Kellogg Foundation report said clearly and forcefully that the big issues of our global world cannot be solved without higher education at the table. So what do we do and where do we start? For now let me give one suggestion: as institutions we begin to inform our constituencies on the big issues in public forums and then we must begin to identify the expertise on our campuses and in our communities that we can contribute to the solution of those big issues. This one step alone will help us see how we can begin the process of a paradigm shift. This work is not for the faint-hearted.

Natural Resources and Economic Development

A recent story in the New York Times called attention to another innovative idea for economic development utilizing assets bestowed by nature.  In this case those assets are a series of lakes and rivers that have been linked from Old Forge, NY (central New York, north of Utica, NY and located just within the Adirondack Park) north to Northport, Maine.  The total trail is 740 miles in length and, according to the Northern Forest Canoe Trail website, was only fully traversed once prior to this summer.  Back in 2000 it reportedly took Donnie Mullen 55 days to paddle the length of the trail in a canoe he fashioned himself from canvas and wood.  (Note to readers – this is not recommended for the novice.)

There’s a lot to be excited about with regard to the trail.  First, it was born of an attempt to recreate some of the region’s history.  The trail follows the path forged by Iroquois and other Native Americans of the region who used the waterways but also portaged their canoes from one body of water to the next.  Second, this is not a project that was created with a single funding source – it was started with some National Parks Service grants and has expanded its funding base since then.  According to the Northern Forest website the funding for the project is now derived from “state-level and foundation grants, corporate contributions, individual contributions, memberships, maps sales and royalties.”  This is a diverse funding stream (excuse the pun) and speaks to the longevity of the project as well as a distinct interest from locals.

The Times noted the importance of this development to the region in noting, “it may be the most important thing to happen to the northern eco-tourism trade since the invention of gorp.” (“Gorp” is what most Americans deem “trail mix” and what Britons call “scroggin”)  It doesn’t hurt that the folks at Northern Forest have produced a website with a detailed map, links to more information on sections of the trail, and information on purchasing more detailed maps for use in travel through each section.  Bravo to the folks at Northern Forest for creating what seems like a great outdoors experience and a wonderful opportunity for communities along the trail.