Unleashed

Richard Harwood

Description

How can we unleash the innate potential of people, institutions and groups in communities to address our common challenges? And how can we do this by creating a civic culture in which people come together to shape their own lives and gain real hope? In Unleashed, Richard C. Harwood draws on his 30 years of experience working with communities to answer these two critical questions. Harwood shows us that: -Change ripples out in communities through an interaction of highly intentional actions and serendipity. -The change then cascades and spreads through a chain of events over time. -These interactions often occur in unexpected ways, in unimaginable combinations of people and partners, and with unforeseen results. -This chain reaction can be proactively catalyzed and nurtured. -Through these interactions, people can restore a belief that we can get things done together.Americans yearn to create a society that reflects the best of us, the best in us. In Unleashed, Harwood helps us see how we can create a more equitable, fair, inclusive and hopeful path forward.About Kettering FoundationThe Kettering Foundation is a nonpartisan, nonprofit operating foundation rooted in the American tradition of cooperative research. Kettering's primary research question is: What does it take to make democracy work as it should? Kettering's research is distinctive because it is conducted from the perspective of citizens and focuses on what people can do collectively to address problems affecting their lives, their communities, and their nation. For more information about Kettering research and publications, see the Kettering Foundation's website at www.kettering.org.

Informations

• Publié par: Kettering Foundation Press
• Date de parution: 24 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781945577536
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 16 Mo

Extrait

A PROVEN WAY COMMUNITIES CAN SPREAD CHANGE AND MAKE HOPE REAL FOR ALL
UNLEASHED
RICHARD C. HARWOOD
Unleashed: A Proven Way Communities Can Spread Change and Make Hope Real for All is published by the Kettering Foundation Press. The interpretations and conclusions in this book represent the views of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, its directors, or its officers.
© 2021 by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to:
Permissions Kettering Foundation Press 200 Commons Road Dayton, Ohio 45459
First Edition, 2021
Printed in Canada
Illustrations by Yo-Yo Lin
Design by Justin Kemerling
ISBN: 978-1-945577-51-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021935521
To my cherished friend and mentor, Gil Thelen, who throughout his life has always found ways to unleash people’s innate potential and hope .
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Backstory
Introduction
The Nine Community Stories
Oak Park, Illinois
Winchester and Clark County, Kentucky
Spokane County, Washington
Youngstown, Ohio
Red Hook, New York
Las Vegas, Nevada
Flint, Michigan
Mobile County, Alabama
Battle Creek, Michigan
Key Characteristics of Unleashing a Community’s Potential
How You Can Do It
The Story Moving Forward
Selected Sources
About the Author
UNLEASHED
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has been a labor of love. It has been an opportunity to uncover and write about what’s possible when people step forward and unleash their own innate capabilities and the potential of their communities.
But I couldn’t have done this alone. Indeed, it took a community of people to make this book about community happen.
I want to thank Grady Lenkin and Miranda Klugesherz, two of my former special assistants. Grady helped me develop and launch the idea for this research and develop its framework. Miranda tirelessly managed the community research that forms the basis for the book (and even undertook parts of the research herself); she was incredibly persistent and vigilant in all her efforts.
Serving with Miranda was a team of researchers from The Harwood Institute’s Studio on Community; they included Marla Crockett, Rickkay King, Janice Lam, and John Andrew Ouligian. They looked high and low for sources of information and background and history in each of the nine communities that I write about in this book. I am indebted to them for their rigor and perseverance.
Yo-Yo Lin created the wonderful illustrations that you will see following each of the nine community stories. Yo-Yo was a sheer delight to work with. And thanks go to Martha Ransohoff Adler for editing the preliminary report that formed the basis for this longer and expanded book.
Other Harwood Institute staff members also played a key role in helping to bring this book to fruition. Alfred Delena, Max Hoversten, and Colleen Bowman offered important suggestions and edits on various drafts of the book. Colleen managed the design and production of the book; as always, she has done a terrific job.
There are the institute coaches, who walked beside each of these communities, supporting them. I want to thank each of them for their unyielding commitment to the institute and to those they worked with in each community.
Then there are the people in the nine communities who actually produced the changes that you will read about. There are too many to mention here; they know who they are, and they know how much I respect and admire their efforts in stepping forward to strengthen their communities and make hope real for all those who live there.
Finally, I wish to thank four individuals at the Kettering Foundation. Kettering president and CEO David Mathews, as usual, had the foresight to imagine the power of this research and to support the writing of this book. John Dedrick, executive vice president and chief operating officer, lent his support and encouragement as he has done on so many of our previous partnerships with the foundation. I appreciate Alice Diebel’s comments on the final manuscript. And I would like to extend my deep gratitude to Brad Rourke, program officer, who joined me for long walks and extensive phone conversations, always offering keen insights as he managed this effort on behalf of the foundation.
BACKSTORY
This story begins where you might expect it to — in a local community. More specifically, it was in a local bar.
I was visiting Lebanon, Pennsylvania, to give a keynote speech to community leaders about how they could further catalyze and grow change in their region. The community was experiencing challenges similar to those facing some of the communities you will read about in this book: long-term economic decline, deep racial and ethnic divisions, persistent poverty and unaffordable housing, the exclusion of many residents’ voices, and civic and political fragmentation.
The community lacked hope.
The night before the speech, my special assistant Grady Lenkin and I went to dinner at a local bar downtown. It was nearly empty. During our meal, I picked up on a conversation that Grady and I had been having for some months: How could we best depict the change and progress that people have unleashed in countless communities where they’ve used The Harwood Institute’s approach over the past 30 years? How could we capture that change?
The topic had bedeviled me for years. The institute had received funding from many of the largest foundations and nonprofit organizations in the nation. Through these relationships, our work with communities had been evaluated many times by third parties. We ourselves had collected masses of data and stories over the years in different communities and published numerous publicly available reports.
But like many efforts that seek to help communities shape their own futures, it can be difficult to clearly show results, to demonstrate concretely the change that actually happens and how it happens. Such change can take a long time. It can be hard to measure. Many standards for measuring such change miss the actual important progress that is taking place.
At the bar, the conversation turned to the question of how sports agents negotiate on behalf of their clients. In baseball, for instance, agents will pull together numerous binders of data about the players they represent and how those players compare to similar competitors. They will collect statistics about how their players performed in different situations, against different pitchers and teams, and in different stadiums.
That night, I said to Grady, “Why don’t we create our own binders about our work in communities?” And so began this idea. Sitting in the bar over a few beers, we began to furiously scribble out notes on paper napkins about how we could go about putting together such binders. We were fortunate that our waitress repeatedly stopped by to fortify the supply of clean napkins we needed to capture our ever-expanding thinking.
The idea for what is now contained in this book took further shape when Grady and I reached out to a variety of individuals with deep knowledge and experience about how to learn from communities about the changes they undergo and people’s role in it. Then, there was a pivotal conversation I had with David Mathews, president and CEO of the Kettering Foundation. He had been keenly interested in what he called “the chain of events” that could be revealed about how people in communities come together and make choices in reaching collective decisions and taking action. David and the foundation came to support our work, for which I am deeply grateful.
The effort soon took form and became an initiative of the Studio on Community, an internal entity at the institute that I had created a few years earlier to explore special topics and questions and develop new applied ideas and solutions — a kind of Skunk Works endeavor. Each year, new studio associates join us, typically spending 12 months at the institute. They come from all walks of life, from all parts of the country, and from all sorts of professions; what they all hold in common is a deep desire to explore issues of community and public life, and to learn about the institute’s approaches so they can take this knowledge back home with them and use it. The studio is one of the most rewarding initiatives I’ve launched at the institute.
So, we set out on what would ultimately become a long and intense journey. Over a two-year period — working with various studio associates, full-time institute staff, and some of the institute’s certified coaches who support the communities we work with — we forged a framework to study how communities unleash their potential, looking at nine communities the institute had worked with over the past 30 years.
The initial framework put us on course to gather more insights and knowledge about each community than we ever thought we would have, and not all of those findings are in this book. We now have, on the shelves of our office in Bethesda, Maryland, our own large sets of binders for numerous communities. And so the work continues. This book is our down payment — representing the core of what’s in some of our binders.
It is no surprise to me that the origin of this effort began on the road, in a local community. After all, that is where much of the work in our society gets done — and needs to get done moving forward. It is in our local communities where people can turn outward toward one another, see and hear each other, afford one another dignity, and restore their belief that we can get things done together.
It is in our local communities where people can shape their individual and shared lives — and where we can, together, make hope real for all those who live there.
INTRODUCTION
My family often jokes that on vacations the first thing I do when we visit a new place is to make a beeline for the local public libr