Institute partners with national foundation to help them accelerate their change work
Monday, February 27, 2006
(The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation)To be successful at innovating in public life,
organizations must pursue highly strategic
initiatives that add up to more than merely a
collection of good civic actions, but actually
lead to real, lasting change. This is certainly
not easy in our society, where people have
retreated from public life, but this retreat is
precisely why we need public innovation -
because people need new pathways for stepping
back into the public square.
The Harwood
Institute is working with the Annie. E. Casey
Foundation to help them think more deeply
about how community change occurs, so that they
can more effectively develop the kinds of
interventions that will build these new
pathways, ignite a sense of possibility and
hope in citizens, and begin to build a more
vibrant public life.
As part of the
partnership, we will be conducting a Harwood
workspace for 20-25 Casey Foundation staff
and neighborhood partners from their Atlanta
Civic Site, one of four such communities across
the country that have significant meaning to
the foundation. The others are Baltimore;
Washington, D.C.; and New Haven,
Conn.
The workspace will be designed to
share some of the Institute's core frameworks
on making communities work and authentically
engaging citizens to help the foundation design
even more effective strategies to achieve their
goals in Atlanta and elsewhere.
For more
information on this initiative, contact Salin
Geevarghese, Harwood Institute project manager,
at 301-656-3669 or sgeevarghese@theharwoodinstitute.org.