A paper documenting our evolving thinking on agility and resilience.

1. September
2009S
September
2009
Reflections
on
Community
Agility1
What
is
Community
Agility?
Two
years
ago
–
when
we
launched
the
Community
Initiatives
Team
–
agility
was
on
ours
minds.
Pre-­‐recession,
we
were
hearing
flat,2
but
seeing
spiky.3
Our
team
members
live
and
work
in
regions
as
diverse
as
Portland
(OR),
Tucson
(AZ),
Charlotte
(NC),
and
Southeast
Michigan.
While
the
U.S.
economy
was
widely
perceived
as
booming4,
our
communities
were
still
smarting
from
the
steep
downturn
a
few
years
before.
Yet,
we
were
also
bearing
witnesses
to
infinitely
creative
responses
to
change,
and
the
beginnings
of
new
kind
of
economy.
In
our
work,
we
were
confronting
significant
structural
challenges:
 Decreasing
overall
economic
security
for
families
despite
job
growth
 Industry-­‐wide
transitions
changing
job
and
skill
requirements
for
large
numbers
of
workers
 Lack
of
access
to
investment
capital
where
entrepreneurs
seemed
to
need
it
most
 Chronic
budget
shortfalls
compromising
basic
public
services
in
our
communities,
and
 Institutions,
agencies,
and
organizations
with
clearly
shared
missions
acting
in
isolation.
Opportunities
for
collaboration
(on
and
offline)
and
reinvention
everywhere.
We
focused
on
building
agility.
Developing
a
Methodology
for
Change
With
the
aim
of
helping
communities
find
opportunities
to
thrive,
and
with
partners
including
the
U.S.
Department
of
Labor,
the
Council
on
Competitiveness,
and
the
Charles
Stewart
Mott
Foundation,
we
developed
methods
and
approaches
for
cultivating
agility:
 Developing
shared
intelligence,
by
collecting
and
making
meaning
out
of
data
that
matters
to
multiple
community
organizations
and
agencies.
 Promoting
network
weaving,5
based
on
the
theory
that
a
whole
host
of
benefits
derive
from
well-­‐networked
communities
(we
had
been
studying
networks
for
1
Based
on
one
of
our
recent
blog
posts,
see
http://startgrowtransform.org/2009/09/revisiting-­‐our-­‐
community-­‐agility-­‐ecosystem/
2
A
reference
to
Thomas
Friedman’s
The
World
is
Flat:
A
Brief
History
of
the
21st
Century,
first
published
in
2005.
3
A
reference
to
Richard
Florida’s
competing
hypothesis,
“The
World
is
Spiky,”
first
presented
in
The
Atlantic
Monthly
in
October
2005
http://www.theatlantic.com/images/issues/200510/world-­‐is-­‐
spiky.pdf.
4
News
reports
like
this
one
were
quite
prevalent
at
the
time
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=1901270.
5
A
deliberate
approach
to
community
building
first
popularized
in
the
non-­‐profit
sector
by
June
Holley
and
Valdis
Krebs
http://www.orgnet.com/BuildingNetworks.pdf.

2. some
time,
but
found
Sean
Safford’s
early
work
at
MIT
–
subsequently
published
in
book
form6
–
very
compelling).
Later
we
partnered
with
June
Holley
to
learn
techniques
for
social
network
analysis.
 Facilitating
collaboration
across
“silos”,
so
that
people
from
across
disciplines,
departments,
agencies,
programs,
organizations,
and
institutions
could
find
common
ground
and
begin
to
share
ideas,
talent,
and
resources
in
ways
that
maximize
wider
community
benefits.
 Encouraging
public
engagement,
since
real
change
happens
in
firms,
schools,
and
neighborhoods,
not
just
boardrooms.
 Advancing
an
entrepreneurship
agenda
that
emphasizes
not
just
new
ventures,
but
entrepreneurial
culture
itself.
These
methods
emphasize
the
building
of
capacity
–
to
collaborate
and
to
innovate
–
so
that
communities
can
reinvent
themselves
over
and
over,
not
just
build
the
next
new
thing.
We
worked
with
(and
learned
from)
community
leaders
and
project
partners
from
five
U.S.
Department
of
Labor
WIRED
regions7
(Southeast
MI,
Mid
MI,
Southern
AZ,
Kansas
City,
and
the
Piedmont
Triad
NC
partnership),
two
communities
with
economies
undergoing
structural
changes
because
of
military
base
realignment8
(Ft.
Bragg
NC
and
Southwest
OK),
and
a
host
of
other
communities
in
transition.
Checking
In
Recently,
our
team
met
to
review
progress,
and
take
a
look
at
the
current
(and
growing)
ecosystem
around
community
agility
(now
increasingly
called
resilience).
New
Trends
While
we’d
been
paying
attention
to
the
emergence
of
new
conversations
and
community
innovation
spaces
individually,
sharing
this
information
helped
all
of
us
see
that
we
are
now
in
the
company
of
more
(and
more
diverse)
people
advancing
some
of
the
same
goals.
Here
are
some
key
developments
we’re
pretty
excited
about.
Social
Innovation
The
“social
innovation”
community
comprises
a
wildly
diverse,
eclectic
and
exciting
bunch,
ranging
from
academically-­‐inclined
Stanford
Social
Innovation
Review
writers
and
readers
to
the
entrepreneurial
thinkers
and
doers
affiliated
with
Social
Edge
(Skoll
Foundation)
to
the
activists,
organizers,
and
media
mavens
who
see
new
ways
to
make
change
through
the
social
web.
The
new
White
House
Office
of
Social
Innovation
will
certainly
accelerate
interest
in
the
field,
which
is
now
beginning
to
map
itself,
through
a
recent
Social
Actions
initiative.9
6
See
Why
the
Garden
Club
Couldn’t
Save
Youngstown:
The
Transformation
of
the
Rustbelt
(Harvard
University
Press,
2009)
http://www.amazon.com/Garden-­‐Club-­‐Couldnt-­‐Save-­‐
Youngstown/dp/0674031768.
7
Information
about
this
initiative
and
access
to
projects
and
tools
can
be
found
on
the
U.S.
Department
of
Labor
website
http://www.doleta.gov/wired/.
8
For
more
information
about
the
Base
Realignment
and
Closure
program,
see
http://www.brac.gov/.
9
Major
actors
in
the
social
entrepreneurship
space
have
pooled
their
data
about
social
innovators/entrepreneurs
and,
with
the
support
of
the
Peery
Foundation,
made
it
available
through
the
Social
Entrepreneur
API
effort
http://www.socialactions.com/social-­‐entrepreneur-­‐api.
2

3. And
interest
in
social
innovation
is
appropriately
global.
The
Young
Foundation,
SIX,
and
the
Skoll
World
Forum,
together
with
institutions
like
Ashoka
and
the
Aspen
Institute
have
nurtured
social
innovation
networks
around
the
globe
for
years.
More
recently,
the
John
S.
and
James
L.
Knight
Foundation
has
sponsored
a
host
of
initiatives
designed
to
help
innovators
of
all
ages
and
stations
leverage
the
power
of
social
media
and
the
web.
New
platforms
like
YouTube
and
Twitter
have
helped
make
much
of
this
activity
accessible
and
transparent.
Last
week,
900
people
gathered
at
SoCap09
in
San
Francisco
to
figure
out
how
to
fund
it.
Gov2.0
Government
(at
all
levels)
is
also
beginning
to
reimagine
itself.
The
Obama
campaign
demonstrated
the
power
of
technology
to
enable
self-­‐organization
in
a
campaign
context,
now
we’re
working
through
the
implications
of
this
kind
of
mass
connectivity
on
governing
itself.
Catalyzed
by
Tim
O’Reilly’s
advocacy
of
“Government
as
Platform,”
gov2.0
has
become
a
rallying
cry
for
transparency,
participation,
and
just
better,
smarter,
government
–
among
people
inside
government
and
out.
The
recent
Gov2.0
Summit10
brought
together
public
servants
and
technologists
but
also
advocates
and
organizers,
many
of
whom
are
already
working
together
to
build
the
next
generation
of
public
intelligence
systems
and
platforms
for
participation.11
The
Resilience
Movement
The
resilient
communities
movement
stems
from
two
different
though
related
sets
of
ideas:
one
relating
to
security,
and
the
other
to
sustainability
more
broadly.
 The
U.S.
Department
of
Homeland
Security
(DHS)
is
exploring
Community
Preparedness
and
Resilience
in
a
variety
of
ways
–
the
Community
and
Regional
Resilience
Initiative
(CARRI),
for
example,
reflects
a
partnership
between
DHS,
the
Department
of
Energy’s
Oak
Ridge
National
Lab,
and
a
handful
of
communities
in
the
Southestern
U.S.
 The
Institute
of
Urban
and
Regional
Development
at
the
University
of
California
Berkeley
(supported
by
the
MacArthur
Foundation)
has
established
a
Building
Regional
Resilience
Network,
which
has
published
a
variety
of
papers
on
different
dimensions
of
resilience
(environmental,
social,
economic).
 The
Council
on
Competitiveness
made
the
materials
used
in
its
Risk
and
Resilience
workshop
available
to
the
public.
People
are
helping
communities
become
more
resilient
outside
the
U.S.
as
well
–
parallel
efforts
exist
in
Australia,12
and
more
locally-­‐driven
approaches
have
launched
in
England13
and
spread
beyond.
10
Summit
agenda,
materials,
and
media
will
be
available
at
http://www.gov2summit.com/.
11
The
Sunlight
Foundation,
for
example,
has
been
at
the
forefront
of
these
efforts
http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/,
funding,
promoting
and
championing
innovations
like
Apps
for
Democracy
http://www.appsfordemocracy.org
and
Apps
for
America
http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/apps-­‐america-­‐winners/.
12
The
University
of
Southern
Queensland’s
Center
for
Rural
and
Remote
Health
has
published
a
Building
Resilience
in
Regional
Communities
Toolkit
http://www.usq.edu.au/crrah/publications/2008publications/resiliencetoolkit.htm.
3

4.
Smart
Communities
Firms
like
Cisco
are
promoting
smart
communities
from
a
data-­‐connectivity
point
of
view,14
and
IBM
is
advancing
its
“internet
of
things”
agenda.15
But
people
and
processes
matter
just
as
much.
The
stakes
are
high,
the
promise,
great,
and
the
need,
urgent.
Brookings
is
tracking
the
impact
of
the
American
Reinvestment
and
Recovery
Act
(ARRA)
on
cities
and
regions
seeking
to
advance
innovation
or
leverage
structural
change.
Rosabeth
Moss
Kanter
and
Stanley
Litow
offer
a
manifesto
for
smarter,
more
connected
communities.16
John
Hagel,
John
Seely
Brown
and
Lang
Davison’s
Big
Shift17
focuses
on
change
dynamics
in
firms,
but
their
analysis
offers
insight
relevant
to
communities,
too.
Going
Forward?
We’re
taking
a
good
look
at
this
context
in
an
effort
to
learn
from
others,
and
focus
our
efforts
in
ways
that
maximize
impact.
We
believe
in
the
power
of
not
just
tinkering,
but
“unbundling
and
reconstituting”18
–
in
search
of
whole
new
ways
of
being
and
doing,
sustainably.
13
The
Transition-­‐Town
movement
–
aimed
at
addressing
climate
change
and
peak
oil
–
started
in
the
UK,
and
has
since
spread
across
parts
of
Europe
and
into
the
U.S.
http://transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork/TransitionNetwork.
14
Cisco
is
launching
something
called
the
Smart
+
Connected
Communities
http://www.slideshare.net/connectedurbandev/wim-­‐elfrink-­‐cisco-­‐smartconnected-­‐communities.
15
ReadWriteWeb
reported
on
this
effort
in
July
2009.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ibm_internet_of_things.php
16
See
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6238.html.
17
See
Harvard
Business
Review’s
The
Big
Shift:
Measuring
the
Forces
of
Change
http://custom.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/implicit/p.jhtml?login=DELO062909S&pid=R0907Q
18
A
reference
to
Don
Tapscott’s
observation
in
one
of
our
favorite
clips
from
one
of
our
favorite
documentaries,
UsNow
http://www.usnowfilm.com/
Kristin
Wolff,
Director
of
Community
Initiatives,
CSW
kwolff@skilledwork.org
4
Lisa
Katz,
Senior
Policy
Associate,
CSW
lkatz@skilledwork.org
www.skilledwork.org