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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.

 
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