A story of public innovation in Orlando, Florida
Monday, March 20, 2006
(The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation)Nancy Peed, executive director
of the Foundation for Orange County Public
Schools, is The Harwood Institute's featured
public innovator this week.
Nancy's
organization has been working with the
Institute to create and implement an authentic
community engagement process to help
fundamentally change the relationship between
the Orange County, Florida, community (which
includes Orlando) and its public school
system.
Through its partnership
with the Foundation, The Harwood Institute is
seeking more than simply to execute an
effective engagement initiative. We are helping
to create the norms, reflexes, and habits
within the community itself to make civic
engagement a part of the way the Foundation
does business and to position them as a
catalytic organization in the
community.
Below is a brief Q&A
between Nancy and Mike Wood of The Harwood
Institute.
Q: How would you describe the current partnership between the Foundation for Orange County Schools and The Harwood Institute?Information on The Foundation for Orange County Public Schools can be found here. If you are interested in learning more about how your organization can become catalytic and authentically engage your community, find out more here.
A: The foundation asked The Harwood Institute to come down to Orlando to help us create an engagement initiative that would help reconnect the citizens of Orange County and their public schools. Right now, our schools and our citizens aren't working together like we believe they can, and engagement is the way to make that happen. We wanted to partner with Harwood because we knew from our conversations with others around the country that their process worked. It was more than a process; it's a different way of doing business. Harwood is not down here running our engagement work, but they are working with us as we go through the process to guide us and to help us make sense of what we are hearing. And early on, they trained us in their approach, which we've used with fantastic results.
Q: You mentioned the process is more than a process. How is it different?
A: As part of our partnership, Harwood did provide us with a civic engagement process we could use. But what makes the process so unique is that it is rooted in a set of principles for what makes engagement meaningful and how it is that people actually create public knowledge in a very natural way. This process is based on how real people talk. We don't put people in a room who have never met or talked about these issues together and ask them to choose between Option A or B. We let the conversation unfold naturally, and we make sure to give people room to talk about their aspirations, which are so important but usually get left out of these kinds of conversations.
Q: How has this work helped the foundation?
A: What's great is that we now recognize the power of this kind of engagement as a way to bring people together to solve tough public problems. It has changed the way we do our work. We are better known in the community now as an authentic voice for public schools, and this process has energized a new group of community members to become active citizens around the issue of schools. We're now much better positioned to act on the community-wide agreement that residents, along with our steering committee, developed through this engagement process.