Stitching together the fabric of communities

Source: The National Civic League's All-America City Quilt Tour

Question: What could be more American than a quilt?
Answer: an “All-America City Quilt.”

Each year, dozens of finalists in the All-America City Awards are asked to submit quilt squares representing something special about their communities. The squares are stitched together into a quilt, which tours the country visiting each finalist town, city, county or region.

I have the quilt from 2007 on my office wall and looking at it reminds me of the communities that participated that year—Somerville, Massachusetts; Richmond, Indiana; and Rancho Cordova, California, among others. The quilt tells a story about that event, the communities that participated and how they view themselves.

First stop on this year’s quilt tour was Kenai, Alaska, population 7115, a finalist and winner in the 2011 All-America City Quilt Tour. Among other things, Kenai’s award winning application focused on a community-wide effort to cleanup a local salmon fishery. Not surprisingly, the town’s quilt square illustrates a salmon leaping out of the river.

Torrance, California, number five on the quilt tour, features a beach scene on its patch. Ann Arbor, Michigan, sports jig saw puzzle pieces fitting together to symbolize diverse groups coming together as a community.

Fort Worth, Texas, has an image of a longhorn skull and a heart. Fort Worth is a cow town, but it has done some great things about dealing with homelessness and mental illness. Downey has a picture of the Space Shuttle (used to be the main production facility for NASA). Lakeview, Oregon, has the image of the sun, symbolizing the town’s commitment to alternative energy sources.)

The patchwork varies from intricate designs—some communities enlist the efforts of accomplished quilters—to very simple and basic cut and paste shapes. Craft and technique, however, are less important than the sentiment and community pride.

It could be the town seal, for example, or an official city motto. It could be a local landmark, a scenic view or words expressing local values and goals, or a combination of any of the above. The patch-makers are encouraged to use their creativity.

The quilt has been a tradition at the National Civic League since Gloria Rubio-Cortés, a quilter herself, became president of the Civic League a few years ago. The original idea was to inject a little fun\and folksiness into the annual award. But the quilt tour also gives the finalist communities an opportunity revisit their successes and to celebrate their great community work.

The quilts are displayed in town halls, libraries, art galleries, schools, recreation centers and municipal office buildings. In some communities, the quilt tour generates a surprising amount of media buzz.

The City of Lakewood, Colorado, for instance, rolled out the red carpet this week to welcome the 2011 All-America City Quilt to town. In fact, there was a police escort and a report in the local TV news. Gloria was there along with Lakewood Mayor Bob Murphy and other local community leaders.

You can link here to see the video from a 9 News report. Lakewood’s quilt patch has the city logo and the word, Lakewood, “We’re a city that collaborates.” Lakewood has done a lot of public process work around revitalizing neighborhoods and older commercial districts.

Last stop on the quilt’s 17-state, 24 city tour will be Beloit, Wisconsin. It has a lovely patch. I’m not sure what the symbol in the middle means.

Along the way it will visit Tupelo, Mississippi; Seaside, Oregon; and Fayetteville, North Carolina, among other locales. The tour is being paid for with support from Southwest Airlines, the official airline of the All-America City Award.

Learn more about the award program and follow events leading up to annual event the All-America City blog at www.allamericacityaward.com. The 2012 All-America City Awards will be held in Denver, Colorado, June 30-July 2 and will have a special focus on communities that mobilize to improve reading scores for low income students.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

They say that it isn’t your successes in life that matter. It’s how to rebound from setbacks. The same truism could be applied to communities. Towns, cities, counties, regions—all communities face tough challenges. The thing that makes an “All-America City” is the ability to bounce back when challenges arise.

Downey, California, a finalist in the 2011 All-America City Awards, boasts of being the home of the first Taco Bell and the oldest existing McDonald’s. It was also, for several decades, the home of NASA’s main production plant for the Apollo, Skylab and Space Shuttle Programs. In its heyday, the NASA site employed more than 20,000 people, many earning higher than average salaries. In 1999, the federal government declared the plant a “surplus” site.

Downey is a city of about 110,000 in south east LA County. It prides itself on being a diverse community that, despite being in the heart of a huge metropolitan region, retains an air of small town friendliness. But the 1990s were tough times for many Southern California communities whose economies were based on the military or on the aerospace industry.

Tens of thousands of jobs were lost in what most of us viewed as a peace dividend from the ending of the Cold War. But some cities were better than others of rebounding from the economic transition and finding new ways of bringing in jobs. Downey was one of those.

Instead of waiting for the federal government to clean up the site and auction it off to some commercial real estate developer, the city decided to buy the land itself and expedite the process of turning a potential liability into an economic magnet.

The question was: what to do next? The City of Downey was now the proud owner of a 160 acre empty space with a serious problem of contaminated soil and groundwater thanks to its long time industrial use.

The city partnered with the federal General Services Administration and a private environmental remediation company to cleanup the site. The partners took an innovative approach. The city was allowed to take the sales proceeds paid for the property toward cleaning it up. Putting together an approved clean-up plan for the site was instrumental in getting state sign-off on an early approval of the transfer of the site from federal to city hands.

The expedited clean-up process allowed the city to start finding business to open up shop at the old NASA site. The first was Kaiser Permanente, which bought 30 acres for a new state of the art hospital, a medical center that now employs about 3,000 people. Next was a partnership with a media group to create an 80 acre-production facility, Downey Studios. Some of the films produced there were Terminator III and the Ironman movies. Another 30 acres went for a commercial/ retail development.

In 2007, Downey won a Phoenix Award from the EPA, an award given to groups and individuals who do an exemplary job of environmental clean-up, reuse and redevelopment of an environmentally damaged site.

In 2009, the Columbia Memorial Space Center opened its doors and became a regular stop for school field trips to teach students and others who want to learn more about the space program and Downey’s historic role in it.

The NASA site reuse deal was one of three community projects listed by Downey in its application for an All-America City Award. The other two projects were the “GOOD” program (Gangs Out of Downey) and the Keep Downey Beautiful initiative, an effort by the city public works department to enlist young residents in efforts to clean-up litter, eliminate graffiti, pull weeds and learn about the local environment and how to keep the water supply clean.

You probably know of other communities that have lost a major employer and found innovative ways of replacing the lost jobs. What did they do to overcome the tough times and bring in new jobs and economic activity? Fill in the box below to let us know about those examples.

Happy holidays!

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

State of the Re:Union conveys some more gems of wisdom regarding five basic resources to make community better – a part of Abundant Community’s “Capacity Building Beyond Community Services” series by John McKnight.

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You can watch the video of John McKnight clicking here or read the transcript below. Afterwards, we would love to hear any additional resources you consider to be valuable assets to bettering communities. Use the comment box below to tell us about your gems of wisdom.

We could tell from reading those stories that the people used five basic resources whenever they made things better. There were five things there that…that needs finders didn’t know about, right? And those five things were first that in the stories of how things were better, always the principal resource was the local residents, and their gifts and their skills and their capacities, not their deficits, problems, and needs.

And then the second resource was and is the local clubs, groups, organizations, and associations, the smaller face-to-face groups where the members do the work and they’re not paid, although they may have a paid member like a pastor or an organizer or a secretary, but basically they’re local people who come together to do things and they do all kinds of things from form choirs to block clubs to veterans organizations. There are just hundreds of local, we call them associations. And these are groups of individuals. These associations multiply their gifts and capacities.

And the third resource that’s there is some local institutions, some businesses, some not for profits, and some government institutions. There’s usually a school or a park or a library, or maybe even a police station.

The fifth [sic] resource is the land of the neighborhood, because that physical space, everything on top of it, everything under it, the land itself. Those are all resources that people often use. A vacant lot can become a community garden.

Ah, and then the last resource is the fact that people were constantly sharing things, bartering, trading, exchanging and buying and selling things locally.

So those five resources we called assets and said that it is basic to understand that community building starts with the use of those five assets. And if you start by saying what we know is what’s wrong, what’s missing, then you won’t be community building. What you’ll be is injecting neighborhoods with professionals, social workers, outsiders, university researchers.

And so that idea that there are local assets has spread over the last twenty years since we published the initial book. The initial book we published is called Building Communities from the Inside Out. That’s not to say there isn’t a place for outside resources, but you have to start with what you have and then move to an understanding of what you need after you know what you have. So that’s the ABCD Asset-Based Community Development story in brief.

One of the things about outside resources is that the people who are providing them aren’t going to stay, but equally, if not the more important thing, is they do a needs survey, they say what’s wrong with the neighborhood, they go to government, they go to foundations, they go to United Way. They get paid, they’re not from the neighborhood, to do something, hopefully, that will make things better, and then they leave with the money.

Well, the main thing, if there is something that people are short on in these neighborhoods it’s money. But the needs… the needs process, produces money for people who aren’t there. And the unusual thing is that if funders wanted to know what’s the main thing you could do to help along these neighborhoods, if we call them low-income neighborhoods, is focus on income, not services, not interventions in individuals’ lives, but supportive economy.

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John McKnight is an expert on communities. An Ohio native who currently lives near Chicago, he has spent decades organizing communities and researching them, primarily in the Windy City itself. In the course of his career, he mobilized neighborhoods during the civil rights movement, wrote several books about community development, created a center for urban affairs at Northwestern University, and even taught the current President a thing or two about advocacy. (Yes, it’s true: way back when, a young and eager Barack Obama interned at McKnight’s training program for community organizers in southeast Chicago). If that’s not enough, he recently co-authored a book called “The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods.”

State of the Re:Union will be featuring pieces from John McKnight and Peter Block of Abundant Community every other Monday.

It’s the end of the year, so I’m taking some time to do a little inventory of the projects highlighted by the finalist communities in the All-American City Award. The award is given to communities for outstanding civic accomplishments. Each finalist community gives a description of three projects in their applications. Counting and categorizing the different projects gives me a unique perspective on the issues that are reoccupying American communities in any given year.

Obviously, it’s not a scientific survey, and there are certain factors that may skew the results. For instance, most of these projects are at least five years old, so it may reflect a lag effect. Also, we have to factor in the not-always-so-subtle clues the National Civic League gives to communities based on our organizational priorities in a given year.

In 2011, the third year of a serious economic crisis, one might expect the finalist communities to be focused laser-like on job creation and economic development. Indeed, there were a large number of community projects in this year’s competition related to jobs and the economy, there always are, but surprisingly the largest number of any category among the 2011 finalists was environmental sustainability, of which there were 14 projects.

In fact, one community, Kenai, Alaska, focused all of its projects on the environment. Lakeview, Oregon, had two projects in the alternative energy area. This focus on the environment may reflect the National Civic League’s recent emphasis on environmental sustainability as a community engagement goal, or it could reflect the fact that communities feel they may have more control over their local environments these days than over jobs and the economy - very much influenced these days by national and even global trends. The emphasis on environmental sustainability at the local levels seems to be a long-term trend that bodes well for the health of the planet.

The next highest number of projects was in the area of neighborhood and commercial revitalization. This is always a popular area among All-America Cities. Revitalizing a once neglected neighborhood or commercial area is a tangible way of improving the quality of life in communities, and it is something for which city councils and city managers are held accountable. There were eight of these projects. (Admittedly, the commercial revitalization projects in most instances could have fallen into the jobs and economic development area).

There were seven community projects to improve educational outcomes, a number that probably reflects NCL’s instruction in the applications form to list at least one project that is youth led or youth serving. But it is also increasingly clear to local officials and civic activists that entire communities should take a more active role in improving educational outcomes, not just parents, students, teachers and school districts.

There were six projects related to jobs and the economy or economic development. Again, my only surprise there was that were not more of them. The surprise—or trend—that I see is that there were also six projects related to health and wellness, a growing area of activity by many communities.

More and more local officials and civic groups are seeing the health of community members as an indicator of the desirability and strength of the community. I’ve already blogged about Ann Arbor’s standout farmers’ market and its efforts to get low income residents and food stamps recipients to eat healthier. Another interesting project is in Beloit, Wisconsin.

Rock County Youth2Youth is an initiative consisting of 200 seventh to twelfth grade students who get training on the harmful effects of tobacco and go around to schools and city leaders to give presentations. According to the Beloit All-America City applications, there was a 38 percent reduction in the number of Rock County high school smokers in eight years, a 53 percent reduction in middle school smokers, a 19 percent reduction in adult smokers, and a 12 percent drop in cigarette sales.

The Smoke-Free Air project engaged 400-500 young people who worked closely with Beloit over eight years to make the city smoke-free. They petitioned and talked to community and city council members about the advantage of being a smoke-free city. Four yeasts ago, Beloit became one of thirty-seven cities in Wisconsin to go smoke-free thanks to the partnership between Y2Y, city council, and the city staff of Beloit.

Going back over these projects reminds me what an impressive groups of finalist communities we had in 2011. The jury of civic experts who selected the ten winners had a tough time eliminating some of these contenders from the final ten. Maybe we should come up with an official All-America City calendar with big glossy photos of award-winning community projects. Something to consider for New Year’s resolutions in 2012.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

Political Surprises: The Good Kind

State of the Re:Union’s contributor Rich Harwood of the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation is away hosting a Forum for the betterment of public innovation. This week, Carlton Sears – a Harwood Institute coach and guest writer – offers the following post telling of his recent experience resulting in a pleasant surprise. It speaks to the work and change that the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation is striving to achieve for – and in – American communities. (To read the original full text, click here.)

Every so often you get an email that stops you in your tracks. We all get them – unexpected words of encouragement, insights that provide clarity at times of uncertainty, a gentle reminder that causes us to reconsider.

It came from an elected leader. But not just any elected leader. It was from an elected official who’s been coached in the Harwood frameworks this past year. He’s a person who decided there is a better way to govern. He was writing to share how Turning Outward is helping him to do it. But this isn’t what gave me pause. It was what he had to say about aspirations.

I met him a year ago when he attended a Harwood Public Innovators Lab. When he returned home from the lab, he was encouraged to engage people in conversations that began with aspirations. Here’s what he said:

An enormous amount of what we are hearing in our Harwood community conversations is highly emotional, personal, and significant. If I had to identify the single most unifying thing I’ve heard, it’s that people want to start caring about each other again.

He shared that he’s heard people’s fears that we don’t know how to make this happen.  And he’s heard their hope that we can.

His message went on to say that as an elected leader and a person deeply involved with the Harwood Institute’s tools, his passions are now fired. Now, finally, he can clearly see the frustrations, and finally understand the aspirations of the people he serves.

It’s like a light bulb went off. I suddenly see the overlap between my work and my role as an elected policy maker.

He now sees how all the pieces of civic change fit together. He sees that he has the ability to influence the movement of those pieces that will result in the kind of change for which people yearn … Let’s work together to make sure that next year at this time we’ll have even more for which to give thanks.

Taking the community and the people it serves into account is the epitome of what civic engagement should be. The betterment of our towns, neighborhoods and lives does not solely rest upon the leaders of our communities; that possibility resides within each member of the community. It is through the act of coming together to find solutions that we become unified and find that resolve is reinforced. We are the ultimate force behind the hope in public change.

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A dynamic public speaker, Rich Harwood is a frequent keynote for foundations and national organizations. He is an expert contributor on national and syndicated media outlets including MSNBC, NPR, The Christian Science Monitor, CNN’s Inside Politics, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Special Report with Brit Hume, C-SPAN, and many others. He is also the author of Hope Unraveled: The people\’92s retreat and our way back (2005), Make Hope Real: How we can accelerate change for the public good (2008) and numerous studies, articles and essays chronicling vital issues of our time. His most recent written work, Why We\’92re Here: The Powerful Impact of Public Broadcasters When They Turn Outward, is being published and distributed in Spring 2011. You can follow him on twitter @RichHarwood and facebook.com/richharwood.

You can read Rich’s posts every Tuesday on State of the Re:Union’s website.

A high school teacher named Henry Littlefield once wrote an essay in the American Quarterly called “The Wizard of Oz: A Parable on Populism.” According Littlefield’s interpretation, L. Frank Baum’s immortal children’s book was full of thinly disguised allusions to the reform politics of the late nineteenth century. The Tin Man (whose joints needed constant oiling to function) represented the industrial worker. The intellectually insecure Scarecrow embodied the American farmer. The Cowardly Lion represented, the Populist-Democratic presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, an avowed pacifist. The yellow brick road symbolized the gold standard, and Dorothy’s magic shoes, which silver in the book, not ruby red as in the Hollywood film version, stood for the free coinage of silver, the main demand of the Populists. Others have added new interpretations over time. “Oz,” after all, was the abbreviation for ounces, the measure of silver and gold. Dorothy’s dog, Toto, represented the temperance movement, and so on.

Sadly, Littlefield’s theory has been thoroughly debunked by a succession of academic killjoys, professional historians who note that, among other things, author Baum was not in fact a Bryan Democrat, as Littlefield suggested, but rather a supporter of boring old William McKinley. One historian of consumer culture interpreted the Wizard of Oz, not as a critique of the Gilded Age but a celebration of consumer capitalism. Noting that Baum was a Theosophist who had once worked as window-dresser, this historian found the book to be an “optimistic, therapeutic text.” The Emerald City, in this interpretation did not represent Washington, but the 1894 Chicago World Exposition with its dazzling and Oz-like array of new products and inventions.

With its flying monkeys, witches and munchkins, the book and even more famous movie are clearly rich subjects for a variety of interpretations. Last summer, I witnessed an entirely new re-imagining of the Wizard of Oz, Dublin, California’s presentation at the All-America City Awards competition in Kansas City. (To be clear, it was KC, Missouri, not Kansas, but close enough). In this 10 minute tour of the city, Dorothy—who sang a mean version of Over the Rainbow, was taken on a tour of the Emerald City of Dublin. In this version, the Scarecrow represented the wisdom of city officials in implementing one of the most progressive and inclusionary housing policies in the state of California. Dublin being a mostly affluent Bay Area community, housing prices are intimidating to say the least.

Concerned that local teachers, firefighters, police and others wouldn’t be able to afford housing in the city where they worked, city council members enacted a comprehensive affordable housing policy. Over the last 10 years, the city’s programs have created nearly 1000 “below market” rental and owner occupied housing units, about seven percent of the city’s overall housing stock. Programs include Dublin’s Below Market Rate Home Program, which provides a supply of deed-restricted below market rate units, and a First Time Homebuyer Loan Program with down payment assistance and financial advice. Developers who cannot build the number of below market rate units required by ordinance can contribute to the Inclusionary In-Lieu Fee Fund, which the city uses to support non-profit developers in the construction of below market rate senior and multi-family rental developments.

Heart: The Tin Man represented the city’s heart in providing a home for the School of Imagination, an innovative and inclusive school readiness/early intervention program that partners typically developing kids with those afflicted with developmental disabilities. More than 300 children weekly participate in the programs they offer and they have served more than 3,000 children with speech delays, developmental delays and autism from throughout the region.

Courage:  The Cowardly Lion represented the city’s courage in making efforts to preserve its past and secure its future with environmental programs. The city formed a partnership to develop a historic park to be a living monument to the community’s agricultural past. To increase sustainability education, the city hosts a community volunteer event called Dublin Pride Week. As part of Dublin Pride Week, the city sponsors a Volunteer Day where residents engage the community in a variety of projects, including school beautification projects, clean water projects, and environmental program outreach.

In his essay, Henry Littlefield said he’d developed his Oz theory to make the forgotten world of the 1890s comprehensible to his students. “Consider the fun,” he wrote, “in picturing turn-of-the-century American, a difficult time at best, using ready-made symbols provided by Baum.” It furnished a teaching mechanism, he suggested, “guaranteed to reach any level of student.”

The same could be said of the Dublin presentation, which was corny, but also effective. Heart, head and courage—contemporary communities need of all those qualities they can get. It’s worth taking a look at thee archived video of Dublin’s Presentation. (link here.)

Granted, this unique approach might not work for all communities in addressing critical needs for its members, but it certainly accomplished its goal. There are a multitude of city, towns and parishes in need of bringing attention to an issue greatly affecting the community. Do you know of additional ways in which a community has brought awareness to a critical problem resulting in change? What was that change and how did it impact the community? We would love to know, so, please, fill the box below with your community’s story of success.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.