Aldo Leopold and Urban Revitalization

Our best hope for restoring our urban cores -- and avoiding future catastrophes like what we are watching unfold in Ferguson, Mo. -- is to increase our appreciation of and demand for urban land. While Aldo Leopold's land ethic was originally framed around his appreciation for wilderness and his despair at man's "Abrahamic concept of land," his wisdom applies to our urban land, as well.

Leopold observed: "We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

We abused and abandoned our urban land with little regard for the consequences, and continued to do the same as we sprawled into agricultural land and woods with our strip malls and subdivisions.

Leopold said it long ago: "Our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy." As Jason Segedy so eloquently chronicles in his Notes from the Underground blog, this propensity to replicate our infrastructure is both unprecedented and unsustainable.

But maybe things are changing. Recent demographic trends indicate more people are discovering the shortcomings of living in commodity-like developments. They see in urban land a community to which they can belong. And while wilderness may be absent, inside the urban core they can readily access parks, rivers and even Great Lakes that they can love and respect.

This is why efforts like the Lake Link Trail supported by the Cleveland Foundation and others are so important. And visionaries like Rich Cochran and Jim Rokakis of the Western Land Conservancy and its Thriving Communities Initiative strive to increase the demand for and the value of our urban land.

They recognize that unless we heal the wounds we have caused our urban land we will continue to cause even more wounds across our entire region. They are helping build a land ethic for the 21st century. One that is focused on turning abandoned neighborhoods into parks; creating green corridors to connect neighborhoods; using green infrastructure to capture our rain water; and creating livable-walkable neighborhoods that meld commercial, industrial, residential and recreational uses.

Revitalizing our urban cores will both create more opportunities for the poor and disadvantaged living in our inner cities, and it will reduce the paving of our wild and working lands.

Leopold's call for a land ethic was revolutionary in the first half of the last century. It remains so today. And it's time to bring the revolution to our urban land.

High Tolerance for Inequity

A very wise woman once observed that civic change occurs when leaders jointly decide that they will no longer tolerate the inequities they see within the communities that they care about.

After reading articles like this one by Mark Naymik about long-term, troubled leadership at a critical nonprofit, I am reminded that some communities have a very high tolerance for inequity.

Regions, Community and Trust

Economies are regional; communities aren't. This is one reason why effective economic development strategies are so rare.

Economic activity concentrates within a geographic area that extends beyond the boundaries of any one city or county, and sometimes even a state. This is an "economic region." Within each region are a host of communities. The economic connections that bind a region together are generally much weaker than the civic connections that bind together a community. Those civic connections include what high school one attended, the neighborhood one lives in and what local elections one votes in. Communities share common values -- residents of a community feel a shared history and a shared future. Civic connections are at the core of the community. Economic connections alone cannot create community.

A community with strong civic connections is a community that is rich in trust. And trust is the most critical element to achieving change within messy, complex systems -- like those that shape a region's economy. Those systems include workforce, innovation, entrepreneurship, transportation, education etc. Complex systems are made up of diverse stakeholders from multiple sectors. The systems are beyond the control of any one or even a small group of stakeholders.

For example, how well the education system performs within a community depends on the interactions of students, teachers, parents, administrators, social workers, police, bus drivers and on and on and on...Messy and complex.

The performance of complex systems is dependent on how the stakeholders interact with each other. In natural systems, independent players (trees, grass, birds, rain, animals etc.) can interact to create beauty or they can interact to create landslides. Same deal in our civic systems.

How independent players interact with each other is a direct reflection of the level of trust within the system. If a stakeholder shares common values and trusts the others at the table then they will be more willing to assume shared responsibility for achieving a collective goal. In short, they are willing to collaborate.

The absence of community at a regional level can translate into an absence of trust among stakeholders. Community and trust can be built. Indeed, a regional philanthropic community rich in trust has been built by my employer, the Fund for Our Economic Future, over the last decade. Galvanizing leaders who shared common values -- if not area codes -- were able to overcome geographic distance and organized around a common goal: transforming the economy of Northeast Ohio. Members of the Fund have tried to help stakeholders from other sectors -- particularly corporate leaders and public officials -- develop their capacity to build stronger civic connections and trust. But the absence of a compelling common goal and other factors have limited their ability to develop a regional vehicle for trust building like the Fund.

Of course the level of trust within communities varies widely. Communities with a high degree of cross-sector, civic trust are more willing to take the risk of engaging in regional efforts than those that are fragmented. High-trust communities have learned the benefit of collaboration and are confident that even if the regional effort doesn't fulfill its promise they'll be able to extract some value from the process. Stakeholders from fragmented communities arrive at regional discussions focused on the risk and reward for their organization, not to their community. Suspicion and doubt retard the development of trust.

Intervening in a regional economy requires us to think, plan and act regionally and that means, as the Council on Competitiveness has noted, we must collaborate. Collaborations move at the speed of trust. Trust is built within communities.

To effectively intervene we need to help the communities that make up our respective regions become rich in trust, and we need to create safe places (like the Fund) where strong regional civic connections can be formed so that we increasingly recognize that our economic regions need to be a community, as well.

Fiduciary to Whom?

A chair of a nonprofit recently described the board's "fiduciary responsibility to our organization."

But does a nonprofit board have a legal duty to act solely in the interests of the organization? Wouldn't we be better served if a nonprofit board viewed its primary responsibility to be to the charitable purpose of the organization, not the organization itself?

One of the biggest challenges facing the nonprofit sector is accountability. In the business marketplace ineffective organizations will (eventually) be abandoned by their customers. In the nonprofit marketplace, there technically is nothing to stop funders from funding an ineffective organization forever.

I expect it is exceptionally rare for a nonprofit to be sustained by board members despite long-term failure. But as Mario Morino points out in his book Leap of Reason (and the invaluable web site LeapofReason.org), the percentage of high performing nonprofits is relatively small.

Mario says this is the case because nonprofit leaders and their boards fail to ask the question all good businesses ask before they launch an initiative, "To what end?" The answer should be found somewhere in the charitable purpose of the organization; it should not be found in the interests of the organization itself.

Get Out on the Ledge & Enjoy the View

Every so often I get a sign that I'm not just talking to myself. Last week I got a voice mail from the head of a foundation that I've been working with for the last few years. She was excited to share that her board had committed to a multi-year grant to accelerate systems change.

Since her foundation is a traditional, programmatic grant maker a grant designed to improve the performance of a key civic system was a departure from the norm and therefore a significant risk. The board had acknowledged the risk in approving the grant. This both pleased the head of the foundation and made her nervous. She said she felt like she was out on a ledge and was hoping I could talk her off. I called back and declined her request. Instead, I congratulated her on persuading her board to make and acknowledge a risky grant. And I encouraged her to enjoy the view from the ledge. Because she was definitely on one. And I said she should make sure her board comes out on the ledge with her.

Indeed, we should all be willing to get out on the ledge more often and we definitely need to enjoy the view when we are out there. The only way we're going to achieve sustained positive change is to support efforts to advance systems change and that means taking more risks. Granted, theses efforts won't always work as planned. That's to be expected. We'll be more willing to go back out on the ledge again if we at least enjoy the view while we are out there.

2 Types of Leaders Required for Collective Impact

One of the many paradoxes of complex civic systems is that even though they are beyond the control of any single individual or organization, achieving change within those systems is still dependent on outstanding leadership. Without leadership the diverse stakeholders within the system will pursue their individual interests and fail to develop the capacity to collaborate.

Within the civic arena two distinct types of collaborative leaders are required to achieve sustained positive change. The two types of leaders are dramatically different in character and experience. One reason collaborations fail is the first kind of leader fails to recognize the need for the second kind.

The first kind of leader is the "galvanizing leader." This leader helps create what John Kania of FSG refers to as the preconditions of Collective Impact. Those preconditions are:

1. An Influential Champion - An individual or small group who command the respect necessary to bring CEO-level cross-sector leaders together and keep them actively engaged over time
2. Adequate Financial Resourcing -  Adequate financial resources to last at least two to three years and generally involving at least one anchor funder to support needed infrastructure and planning
3. A Sense of Urgency for Change - A new opportunity or crisis that convinces people that a particular issue must be acted upon now and/or that a new approach is needed

I refer to these preconditions as the "climate for collaboration." Galvanizing leaders are able to change the climate within a community -- to create the sense of urgency; to secure the resources and to provide the public face for a new way of operating.

Ironically, these leaders often fail to translate their galvanizing efforts into effective collaboration because they don't value the second kind of leader critical to successful civic collaboration. I call this kind of leader the "coordinating leader."

Usually the galvanizing leader runs an organization -- they are charismatic CEOs, politicians and nonprofit leaders able to unite other leaders for a greater cause. When it comes to finding a leader of that cause they often look for a leader who looks like them -- an organizational leader. However, as Chrislip and Larson (and many others) have made clear, the leadership techniques and skills needed to foster collaboration are dramatically different than those learned by most organizational leaders.

Leaders of a collaboration need to focus on creating value for the stakeholders, not on building up an organization. Coordinating leaders exhibit what Robert Greenleaf identified as the principles of a servant leader. The listening, empathy and trust-building skills of a servant leader are often under appreciated by an organizational leader, but they are essential to foster collaboration.

Put an organizational leader at the helm of a collaboration and soon the entity formed to foster collaboration (what FSG calls a "backbone") looks like just another organization competing for funding and credit within the complex system. That is a recipe for coblaboration, not Collective Impact.

Organizations and Outcomes

I like to oversimplify if only because it is much easier to remember two or three things than it is a dozen or more. So at the risk of oversimplification, civic change efforts focus on either organizations or outcomes.

And while change occurs when we focus on outcomes, we spend most of our civic effort focused on organizations. Why? Again at the risk of oversimplification, here are three reasons:

1. We know organizations much better than we understand complex systems; after all we all work for organizations. Organizational structures are very familiar to us and we are comfortable with their design and redesign. The structure of a complex system is much harder to draw, let alone reshape.

2. We can control organizations. Control in the civic space is highly valued. Control plays out in many ways, not the least of which is budgets. About a decade ago a civic leader remarked how excited he was for a pending redesign of his community's civic infrastructure. "I can't wait to get my hands on that checkbook," he said. This desire for control is understandable and appropriate. We've all seen under-performing organizations and there is is great value in making them high performers. But we also know that high-performing organizations acting in isolation cannot transform a community.

3. We'd rather not be held accountable for things we cannot control. Achieving community-level change is about shared responsibility. We all have a part to play in holding each other accountable for the performance of a complex system. This is much more difficult than the relatively simple (but all too rare) job of being a fiduciary for an organization.

It is so easy (and understandable) to focus on organizational change over systems change. The best way for communities to stay focused on outcomes is to have a very clear and compelling goal that has the power to hold our attention -- or to at least pull us away from the temptation of focusing too much on a single organization.

If we are focused on the goal, the structure of individual organizations becomes secondary. Taking credit becomes secondary. Control becomes secondary. The only thing that matters is how are we doing toward achieving our goal.

Of course, that is an oversimplification.