Skip to main content

Sustainable Cities and Creative Nonprofit Planning


This post is the first of a series devoted to the Washington DC Sustainable City initiative. In July 2011, Mayor Vincent Grey initiated an effort to make DC the greenest, healthiest and most livable city in the country. The mayor's approach to this challenge is outlined on the Sustainable DC Web site.
Elsewhere on this blog I have outlined a process for “scientific activism” and enumerated some principles that underlie the steps in the process. To summarize, here is what the process looks like:

1. Study the social environment, including looking at challenges and opportunities

2. Plan your efforts in light of #1, among other considerations

3. Decide what counts as a good idea

4. Steal ideas

5. Design or create new ideas

6. Evaluate your ideas

7. Implement your ideas

The principles that should be used where applicable  
  • Target innovation
  • Find leverage
  • Think marketing
  • Use facts
  • By systematic
Now, the rest of this post and the next seven or eight will be a sort of primer on how to use those steps and principles in actual social change efforts. Along the way, you will learn more about how to be a scientific activist. And I will have a chance to refine my ideas and come up with a better name.

Now, before you attempt to solve any social problem you need to take some time to study the situation. This step and planning will involve some back-and-forth. You may have a general plan or just a goal like the Sustainable DC goal. A scan of the challenges and opportunities in the social environment suggests changes to whatever rough plan you had constructed. You get new ideas for what could be done or you see new problems that require new thinking.
A brief scan of my own experience suggests several issues that need to be addressed in the district:

1. Traffic congestion – A recent survey named the Metro area the worst in the nation!

2. Air pollution – Smog remains a problem in DC

3. River pollution – Cleaning the Anacostia and Potomac rivers and keeping them clean are two ongoing challenges for the District

4. Jobs – Unemployment remains high in the poorer parts of the city. Social sustainability cannot be achieved unless something is done about this.

5. Affordable housing – Same as #4. Social sustainability is undermined by a shortage of shortage of affordable housing.

The Sustainability DC plan has several goals listed, though not the same as above our two lists overlap. Those goals and the list of issues I provided suggest that achieving the mayor’s vision requires a plan to increase employment, improve air and water quality, creating jobs, supporting local businesses, and improve access to both healthcare and fresh food.  How to do that? The detailed planning will come next, and will have to be informed by a look at challenges and opportunities relevant to the vision.

That search will be the subject of the next post.

 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Web Strategy That Works

I was reading a Chronicle of Philanthropy article about online strategies that work in a bad economy. The article presented four different strategies and a nonprofit that used it successfully. This post is about the strategy of using specialized Web sites. Put up a site just for a certain crisis, event, issue, project or program. The Chronicle details how Partners in Health did this for Haiti earthquake relief. Any issue, whether a crisis or not, whether global or local is a potential candidate for replicating the Partners in Health approach. Events of global and local significance are fine subjects for a site. You are probably already familiar with World AIDS Day or World Water Day. Those global events and many others are the subject of special Web sites and advertising campaigns both online and in print. Local events from the mundane, like the beginning of a new school year, to the momentous. A crisis is another good reason to put up a specialized Web site. The epic flooding in...
Post a Comment
Read more

Brainstorming for Fundraising Success

Looking for opportunities to raise more money or just to use your fundraising resources more efficiently? This post is another of a series on brainstorming and fundraising. You need three things to think creatively about fundraising. Openness to new ways of thinking is a requirement. Attitude matters in creative thinking, so you need to be positive and nonjudgmental. You also need to be familiar with one or more brainstorming tools. In recent posts I’ve described some brainstorming tools created by Edward De Bono and described in various books of his. In those posts I referred to using random ideas or objects to spark new ideas. In this post I will rely on a fantasy question, a provocation in De Bono’s terms, as a starting point. Consider this fantasy question: What if every donor supported 1000 charities? That question can potentially spark new ideas, if examined in the right way. De Bono writes about several ways of creating movement from a provocation like that question. I’ll qui...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fundraising Ideas

Raising money is a perennial challenge for nonprofits. The Great Recession has made things tougher for some and nearly impossible for others. Your nonprofit may be working hard to deal with fundraising challenges. Traditional thinking about fundraising might lead to thinking like this - “We need to raise $600,000 more money third year. What do we need to do to make this happen?” A discussion of grant writers, fundraising consultants and mailing lists follows. There is nothing wrong with this approach. At least some of that discussion needs to happen. But, new thinking might also be needed. Lateral thinking may help you get better results. Lateral thinking is (from Wikipedia) “solving problems through an indirect and creative approach.” The point of lateral thinking is to move “sideways” to new ideas and different ways of thinking. The point of this little essay is to point out another way of approaching the subject of fundraising. Lateral thinking itself suggests a broader approach to ...
Post a Comment
Read more