Smart Communities

Returns on Two Promises (and another on the way!)

As we've noted in previous blog entries there are now two cities in America whose high school students are guaranteed a free, in-state college education.  Both Kalamazoo, MI and El Dorado, AR have received a lot of attention and many educators and community development practitioners are holding their breath to see what sort of results these promises yield.

The early results are promising.  A recent survey of new families in the Kalamazoo area found that they relocated, in part, because of the Promise.  Property values are rising in the area and some have speculated that the Promise has helped this phenomenon as well.  School enrollments are the higher in the Kalamazoo school district than anywhere else in the state.  Chamber of Commerce officials are touting this as an economic development initiative that is helping keep companies in the area and may attract new companies in the future.  Overall, there is a great deal of excitement and anticipation by residents about the national and international attention that has been accorded the Kalamazoo Promise.

It can't be expected that results from these types of initiatives will be immediate.  In El Dorado less than half the high school senior class signed-up for their free college education in this, the first year of the El Dorado Promise.  The program's administrator told the Arkansas Times that he anticipated the program having greater participation as younger students begin to consider the possibility of college in their future.  This article also has an in-depth account of the El Dorado Promise and a comparison with the Kalamazoo Promise that is worth a read.

Not surprisingly, other areas are considering the Promise approach as well.  Muskegon, MI is the latest community considering a version of the initiative.  In the case of Muskegon there currently is no private donor who could provide funding so there is talk of a 1.5% tax increase to fund the program and a possibility that the program will be restricted to those residents who have lived in the community for all 12 years of their child's education.  Muskegon officials are hopeful that local donors will contribute enough to make a tax unnecessary -- or at least less than the proposed amount.

I am looking forward to hearing more about whether these Promises are helping fuel development in these communities and will keep you updated on the latest as we hear it.

One More LeadershipPlenty Highlight

A class of LeadershipPlenty graduates in Michigan has decided that it wants to create a more inclusive community and, yesterday, held a community forum at a local school that was attended by over 50 people of diverse backgrounds.  One director from that county's sustainability council told the local paper, "This is the first time I've seen Hispanics and African-Americans in this room together to have this conversation [about making the community more inclusive.]"  Looks like another class is making progress in bettering their community, kudos to the graduates in St. Joseph County, Michigan for their hard work and sense of community.  Keep at it!

You're probably wondering if this blog will turn into a 24 hour LeadershipPlenty news source -- don't worry, it won't.  This particular article appeared right after we posted the blog on Monday and it seemed like too good a story to pass up.

The Loft: A Smart Strategy for Engaging Young People

There are countless ways a community can work to keep kids engaged but one that was recently in the news in Belfast, Maine looks exceptionally promising and truly sustainable with a little community support.

When you were a young boy or girl wouldn't you have liked a clubhouse where you could go after school and play board games with other youths, interact with adults, and get help on homework if needed?  This is the mission of The Game Loft which offers a space for adolescent youths to release some of their boundless energy positively and in an "offline" environment allowing for social growth and interaction.  The Game Loft acknowledges that their program is not for all children, it's a niche program, but it is one that attracts schoolchildren aged 8-20 that might otherwise find trouble making friends.  Some of the games played by the youths, and some of the events sponsored by the group, actively incorporate school subjects like history and geography into the fun.

The Game Loft is run by community volunteers and has an annual budget of $55,000 which, according to an article in the Bangor Daily News, is cobbled-together from "state substance abuse prevention grants, donations from area towns, the Golden Rule Foundation, private donations and other fundraising efforts."  Open 363 days a year the Game Loft serves young people on weekdays and weekends alike.

This is a neat idea that's easily replicated in any other community and seems like it would provide great benefit to the children and the locality alike.  Kudos to founders Ray and Patricia Estabrook for a really grand idea.

Final Reminder: 2007 Civic Change Award

Just a final reminder that we will be removing the application for the 2007 Civic Change Award from our website at the end of this week.  If you are pressed for time then please get us the application by Friday, March 30th and we will allow supporting materials (but no further applications) in the first two weeks of April.  By the final week in April we likely will have confirmed a date for the meeting of our blue ribbon commission where the applications will be reviewed and a winner chosen.  Thank you to everyone who has submitted an application to date!

LeadershipPlenty in Action

From time to time we get questions about what LeadershipPlenty (the Pew Partnership's leadership development curriculum) can do for a community, what happens in trainings, what do people do after they are trained?  While the institute website has lots of information that answers these questions there are also a fair number of news stories about LeadershipPlenty trainings going-on across the country throughout the year.  These stories vary in their ability to truly capture what's happening during the three-day training sessions but one recent example is out of Minot, North Dakota captured nicely the experience of residents gearing-up for civic action.  In Minot they have already found that sometimes just a little attention to a challenge can yield positive results.  A less recent example demonstrates what can happen when citizens are brought together to try and achieve racial reconciliation.

As mentioned earlier in the week, there are LeadershipPlenty classes that will be offered through the Hotel Roanoke & Conference Center in May 2007.  Visit the Tech website for lodging and registration information.  Note that while the class will be held from May 21-23 the registration and payment for the class must be received two weeks in advance (May 7th.)  There's only a little more than a month left before signup so those interested will have to work fast!

Building Your Community's Wikipedia Entry

Most communities are interested in some form of branding, marketing, or promotion on the web.  To my mind there is potentially a way to make an impact that is free and will give your community broad exposure to a large, interested audience -- Wikipedia.

I mention this because if you Google your community's name and state you'll likely see a Wikipedia entry on it in on the first page of search results.  When I Googled "Jacksonville, Florida" and "Shreveport, Louisiana" the Wikipedia entry for each appeared as the third link from the top in the search results.  The results were similar for other popular search engines including Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL.

This is a great opportunity for interested community residents to contribute what they know and love about their locale to a website that gets scads of web traffic.  Literally anyone can contribute to Wikipedia although you may want to take a thorough look at the site's "About" page and learn some rules of etiquette before diving-in.  At the same time, it is unlikely that some fastidious Wiki editor will delete your contribution -- it is more likely that they will edit it, move it somewhere different on the page, or ask for a citation to support a fact.

Wikipedia is increasingly used as a source for information by folks of all walks of life.  Despite occasional vandalism the fact-checking abilities of the avid Wikipedia users are extraordinary and the site has gained a reputation for the validity of its information.  There is a wealth of speculation about the people who write Wikipedia entries but no final conclusions have been drawn, for some insight on the phenomenon check out this blog entry from late last year.

The entries for cities and towns in this country vary considerably by size and type of information contained in the article.  You may want to take a look at what sorts of things have been mentioned for other cities to get an idea of what is possible and what looks and sounds best.  Wikipedia allows for all sorts of links and multimedia options so don't feel restricted to just leaving a written textual entry or editing an existing one.  This is a great opportunity to describe your community, and everything it offers, in a very appealing way.  Good luck and drop us a line if you try it out!

Maine's Development on Display

So far this year we've covered smart property initiatives in Alaska and solutions to homelessness in Hawaii.  In an effort to explore the furthest geographic reaches of this country we're travelling to Maine today to take a look at the competing visions of Maine's development that have emerged in the last six months.

In early March of this year the Maine Development Foundation (MDF) issued its annual "Measures of Growth" report on the status of that state's development and the results, on a broad variety of issues, were not terribly positive.  The state was recognized for its efforts to ensure healthcare coverage for its residents as well as work done to ensure the sustainability of Maine's forests.  Poor marks were distributed, though, for areas such as transportation infrastructure, research and development, and the rising cost of taxes.  The MDF created 23 benchmarks for economic progress and compared Maine's performance in relation to these benchmarks; in case you're interested in their benchmarking process, the MDF website links to the data used to generate their benchmarks.

We should note that many in Maine were pressing to make some headway on some of these indicators before the report was ever released.  According to a number of news articles the issue of updating the transportation infrastructure has been discussed for some time and may receive some attention soon.  Almost everyone quoted with regard to the report noted that its conclusions are not dire, they are just reminders of what that state needs to improve.  The report itself seems to have done a good job of keeping development issues salient.

Back in October 2006, before this report was released, the Brookings Institution released its own detailed report on Maine's development titled "Charting Maine's Future".  This report emphasizes the strengths that Maine has and how it might build on these as it plans its economic development.  Certainly recreation and tourism top the charts of what Maine has to offer but there is also a growing biotechnology sector in the state and a recent influx of new residents may lead to economic expansion in other areas as well.  Maine has met some challenges squarely, such as increasing the overall percentage of residents with a higher education degree, but other challenges like an aging workforce and suburban sprawl may prove tougher to overcome.  "Charting Maine's Future" is a large, very detailed report available in multiple PDFs on the Brookings website.

A tip of the cap to blog reader Sandy Maxey who brought the Brookings report to our attention.  Thanks Sandy, it might not seem like it at times but we do read the comments left here carefully :-)

Turning Vacant Properties into Thriving Communities

The top story of this week's LISC e-news was about the efforts in Indianapolis to combat vacant properties across the city.  This is a really interesting initiative that started with the use of new technologies nearly four years ago as students literally mapped the location of vacant properties using geographic locators, this information was used to develop maps of the area based on properties and their needs.  Richmond, VA has taken a slightly different approach to creating their Vacant Property Registry.  Richmond's Building Commissioner told the Times-Dispatch that there were checks to see if a building had an active utility acccount as well as visual inspections to determine whether it was abandoned or occupied.

Whether you're interested in creating a registry, or moving beyond establishing an inventory and taking action to develop vacant property as Pittsburgh is doing, then the National Vacant Properties Campaign can help.  The campaign has a website with a great resources page and information on the first-ever national conference to address the issue of vacant properties (to be held in Pittsburgh.)  For more information on a related topic, downtown revitalization, visit the Solutions for America webpage devoted to that topic.

Registration Now Open for May 2007 LeadershipPLENTY® Class

A typical LeadershipPLENTY® Institute travels to a community and trains 25-30 people.  This year we're trying something a little different.  Through a partnership with Virginia Tech, the Pew Partnership for Civic Change will be offering a LeadershipPLENTY® train-the-trainer certification class at the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center from Monday, May 21 through Wednesday, May 23, 2007.

This means individuals and small groups from across the country who are committed to broad-based civic leadership can gain certification as LeadershipPLENTY® trainers in just three days.  When they return home they can immediately begin implementing the program in their community.  For many organizations this is an opportunity to gain a small number of new trainers who can help significantly expand leadership capacity in their community.

Virginia Tech is hosting the website that has information on housing and registration.  If you're not already familiar with LeadershipPLENTY® then you may want to take a look at the curriculum, further questions about the program itself can be directed to the Pew Partnership for Civic Change.  Virginia Tech staff will answer all questions about registration.

We're telling everyone to register as soon as possible.  For a variety of reasons we have had a significant demand for this class before the registration website at Tech was activated this morning.  There are currently no plans for another training at Tech this year but depending on the volume of inquiries there may be.  We'll keep you updated from here so stay tuned.

Bad News/Good News on Volunteerism

The bad news about volunteerism is two-fold.  First, the absolute number of Americans who volunteered their time last year decreased by roughly four million people; this was the first drop measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics since they started tracking this number in 2002.  Additionally, while Baby Boomers are volunteering in record numbers they are also exhibiting a 30% rate of attrition.  A tip of the cap to Philanthropy Journal for sending these newsbits to our mailbox.

Now the good news, there are over 61 million Americans who continue to volunteer in myriad ways in their communities.  Here are some ways volunteers worldwide are giving back to their communities:

*  In Carlsbad, CA volunteers are helping with adult literacy efforts
*  Volunteers from all sectors of one Washington community are tutoring elementary school students in reading
*  One volunteer in Colorado has found their niche working with Hospice
*  Another started later than some, in her 70s, but is learning new skills while volunteering at the hospital
*  For almost 20 years this gentleman has volunteered to provide farm safety courses through his local extension
*  Minehead, England is looking for a new lifeboat volunteer for the first time in 60 (!) years
*  In a truly international venture, volunteers from Europe are helping preserve the environment in New Zealand

With a nod to the last bulleted point above, if you like to travel but are also interested in giving of your time and effort then you might want to consider a volunteer vacation.  The United Way and CheapTickets.com have just paired-up to create a website where people can search for volunteer vacation opportunities across the U.S. and then purchase tickets to visit and volunteer.  They are not the only website for locating volunteer vacations, Charity Guide runs another and there are many more with volunteer opportunities organized by geographic location or charitable cause.  A single caveat, these are not paid vacations and plane tickets are not free, but this may be a great way to make friends on another coast, learn more about a community from people who live there, and have a more authentic "local" experience by grace of helping improve the community.