Community rhythms: A framework for helping you innovate in public life
Monday, March 6, 2006
(The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation)As Rich pointed out in his blog series last
week, we need public innovation to create new
pathways in public life, but public innovation
cannot exist without two essential ingredients:
public innovators to drive it, and
civic-minded, catalytic organizations to house
it, incubate it, and spread it.
Part of
the success of both public innovators and
catalytic organizations can be measured by
their ability to hold a deep understanding of
the context of their communities, and to act in
a way that aligns with that context.
Through its on-the-ground work, The
Harwood Institute has developed a framework for
understanding a community's context we call
"community rhythms." What we've found is that
the reason an initiative my sail in one
community but fall flat in another is because
all communities have different rhythms, which
we've organized into Harwood's Five Stages of Community
Life.
Most civic initiatives are
designed for communities in the growth stage,
but the reality is that most communities are at
an earlier stage. These stages are based on the
fundamental norms, networks, relationships, and
structures that exist in the community. The
Harwood Institute calls this collection of
characteristics "public capital."
A
community can appear to be in the growth stage
on the surface, but in terms of public capital,
it could very well be in the waiting place or
at impasse. Gauging your community's Stage of
Community Life is important for designing
initiatives that will work and actually
accelerate the community's progress through
these stages.
In order to be effective
public innovators and build new pathways for
people to engage in politics and public life,
we must have a deeper understanding of our
community's rhythms.