As I look around the country at the challenges communities face, it’s impossible to ignore the impact of the global economic decline. The realities of decreased revenues, slashed budgets, reduced staff and other painful consequences are seen daily in the press and closer to home among family and friends in our communities. Yet when you look beyond the headlines, inspirational stories can be found; our spring issue explores a few.

While the sharp drop in development in small cities and towns can result in reduced property and sales taxes and job losses, it also creates an almost once-in-a-generation opportunity for communities to proactively plan their futures. Instead of reacting to relentless growth and an onslaught of permit applications, town staff and citizens can take stock of existing development patterns, look out 10 to 20 years and decide to perpetuate or change those patterns and the culture of decision-making. In her moving essay, Patty Limerick talks of the personal (and communal) benefits she’s enjoyed as a direct result of actions taken in Boulder 40 years ago to protect threatened open space.  

Citizen actions and accomplishments in Boulder that seemed novel at the time and have continued to reward Patty and her community over the decades inspire our work. The Foundation’s “Heart and Soul Community Planning” promotes and facilitates proactive engagement and land use planning, and roots decisions in what citizens deeply value about their places. We recognize the difficulties of changing or enhancing a town’s existing growth patterns, decision-making culture or levels of citizen participation, particularly when controversy is not stirring up interest and focusing attention. The need for innovative, more creative, relevant and accessible processes becomes especially important during economic slowdowns when some of the growth pressure is off.  

We’ve brought storytelling and art into the early stages of five community projects, and we encourage you to read more about them and their remarkable citizen involvement in our “On the Ground” feature about Victor, Idaho and on our new and greatly improved website. Sojourn Theatre is another shining example of creativity that sparks action, as you’ll learn from our fascinating interview with Sojourn founder Michael Rohd.

Creativity is only one ingredient needed to make typically mind-deadening public meetings more exciting and relevant. Not only do citizens need to be reached where they work and play and be given back the power to influence and make decisions, but cities and towns also need to understand how to hold effective discussions. Theories of cognitive development and why decisions are effective (or not) have been popularized and rendered more easily understood in books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. In this issue, we’ve reviewed another book that every public official and planner could learn from: Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. And James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, which we covered in our Winter 2007 Scenarios, is also required reading. Finally, you might enjoy a piece that looks very specifically at cognitive theory and practice in public meetings produced for the Foundation by the Consensus Building Institute and found on our website: Cognitive Barriers in the Land Use Planning Process.

We’d love to hear your examples of innovative and effective meetings and proactive engagement and decision-making. I also encourage you to take some risks at returning power to the people who live in and love your place…the rewards will last far into the future.

Good luck with your important work,

William Roper
President and CEO