Dear Foundation Friends and Colleagues:
For the past six years, the Trustees and staff of The Orton Family Foundation have focused our efforts and resources on developing and disseminating a suite of innovative planning support and education tools meant to improve the way land use decisions are made in the service of sustainable communities. Through this first phase, we experimented with these tools and ways to deploy them at a national scale and, in the process, learned a great deal about where and how we can achieve the greatest mission impact.
For example, we’ve learned that tool development alone is not enough, but that achieving successful community change requires a focused application of tools paired with equally rigorous planning processes and strong institutional partnerships. It is with this and other key lessons in mind that the Trustees and I have made the decision to undertake a strategic reorganization of the Foundation.
Through this reorganization, we seek to become a more effective partner to small cities and towns in the Northeast and Rocky Mountain West grappling with rapid environmental, economic, and social change. In the process, we also seek to become a better learning organization, capable of analyzing, understanding, and communicating what works and what doesn’t in the land use planning system. We will accomplish these goals by engaging in a rich set of project activities aimed at improving actual land use planning situations underlying which are a host of critical trade-offs that put to the test the very idea of community planning, if not democracy itself.
In order to position the Foundation to best effect our new vision and strategy, we are making two primary changes. First, we are transitioning the functions that are no longer essential to the mission, strategy and operating model. Second, we are right-sizing the remaining organization to fit the mission and the long-term sustainable financing level.
Accordingly, we are shifting the operating model for our flagship program, CommunityViz – the GIS-based decision support and visualization tool – to a project-driven, philanthropic one. This means we are changing the way we distribute and apply CommunityViz to focus on mission impact and will no longer sell CommunityViz software. Instead, we will take a more comprehensive and tool-neutral approach, incorporating CommunityViz within a new, expanded, and potent Orton Tools program offering up a diverse suite of “best in class” planning tools. We will look for interesting project opportunities where we can customize and apply these tools on behalf of our partners and the communities they serve. Beyond these specific project applications, we are planning — as part of our commitment to changing the way land use planning decisions are made — to make CommunityViz widely available at little or no cost in the near future.
Additionally, we are no longer staffing the continued development and dissemination of our two other major programs, Community Mapping and Community Video (though we will support all current projects/contracts through completion). As a stand-alone program, Community Mapping has been successful in educating students about their places, but has not had the kind of direct impact on the land use planning system we seek to achieve under our new operating model. As a stand-alone program, Community Video has helped inspire civic dialogue, a core component of any good planning process, but requires a more focused and managed application to affect land use planning situations in a sustained, measurable way. As part of an expanded Orton tool program, however, both may be applicable to the kinds of project engagements our new model contemplates, and we will therefore look to use them strategically and in tandem with other “best in class” tools where appropriate.
We are currently undertaking an effort to identify organizations that would be interested in taking on responsibility (and staff needed) for disseminating both Community Video and Community Mapping as on-going national programs, beyond our own specific project applications. In the meantime, you can continue to purchase program materials through our website and can use these materials to implement the programs within your schools and communities.
We have begun the process of forging new partnerships and pursuing new project opportunities where critical land use planning issues are at stake and our resources can make a real difference. Look for announcements of some of these exciting developments as they unfold over the coming months as well as a newly designed website that will better present our new strategy, programs, and other important content. We appreciate your interest in the Foundation and look forward to continuing to work with you to advance our shared ends.
Sincerely,
William Shutkin
President & CEO