Working with The Harwood Institute: An overview of our intellectual capital and ways to interact
Monday, February 27, 2006
(The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation)The Harwood Institute has been working in
communities for almost 20 years. Through our
research and on-the-ground initiatives, we have
learned a great deal about what it takes to
make communities work and are constantly
searching for ways to spread this knowledge and
"scale up" our efforts in a way that's
sustainable but also lowers the barriers to
entry into our content so that organizations
large and small can benefit from
it.
Interactions with The Harwood
Institute can take a variety of forms:
- Workspaces - a series of multi-day
sessions (either in your community or at our
headquarters) over the course of 12-24 months
where the Institute will share our insights and
work with you to activate them in your own
organization and community. Ongoing support
from The Harwood Institute is available between
workspaces. The workspaces can be designed
around a variety of challenges, such as
developing meaningful engagement initiatives,
creating strategies that align with a
community's "stage of community life," and
measuring and building the public capital of a
community.
- Public Innovators Lab - We have
national Labs twice per year that bring people
together from across the country to gain
insight into our tools and frameworks to learn
how to accelerate change in their community.
These are 3 1/2-day events and are designed to
be both personally transformational and also
benefit your organization and community as a
whole. We have also customized the Lab for
specific communities as well.
- Public Life Retreats - These
day-and-a-half events are designed to give
people a chance to interact with Rich Harwood,
president and founder of The Harwood Institute,
and engage him on a variety of topics related
specifically to today's public life and
politics. Because of the limited ability in
these spaces to make a great deal of progress,
we typically are only interested in
co-sponsoring these retreats with organizations
who see it as a "first step" in a longer-term
relationship.
- Annual Public Innovators Summit -
This annual, invitation-only event for the
nation's leading edge public innovators is
taking place for the first time this summer.
Our goal is to bring together, dialogue with,
and learn from the best and brightest in public
life.
- Smaller workshops and training sessions - We occassionally conduct sessions at conferences and for individual organizations on specific Harwood frameworks.