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 The John W. Gardner Academy for Regional Stewardship engages in a collaborative process that involves an Academy Team working with a Regional Team to identify opportunities for strategic action located at the intersection of four interdependent worlds. These worlds represented by the overlapping spheres in the ARS Venn diagram logo are summarized as innovative economy, livable community, social inclusion, and collaborative governance. Each sphere itself represents complex challenges, and their point of intersection constitutes a creative space where regional stewards can meet to solve problems in more effective ways.
Business, community, education and government leaders often start with a problem definition that focuses on a specific issue related to one or more of these four domains, such as economic development, education and training, housing, or transportation and land use. However, underlying these issues are typically more fundamental regional tensionsthe product of competing values and other root causes. Leaders in every region face similar challenges in finding effective ways to resolve these tensions. The Gardner Academy process requires a strong fact base, insights into best practices from other regions, and structured dialogue to build the trust necessary to achieve real breakthroughs in crafting collaborative regional solutions.
The purpose of the Academy Process is to help regional leaders understand these tensions and their root causes, identify promising strategies based in part on the similar experiences of other regions, and choose the best approach to promote regional stewardship. The Alliance offers a national peer network of regional stewards who can help in this Academy Process, as well as experienced navigators who can help match the needs of the region with relevant practices from other regions as well as focused research on core lessons learned in resolving fundamental tensions in regions across the country.
The overarching goal of the Academy is to combine local knowledge with national experience to enlarge the creative space that connects the four domains, expands the number of regional stewards involved, and sets the region on a course toward a tipping point at which regional stewardship becomes the preferred approach for addressing complex challenges from economic and workforce development to transportation and land use.
When engaged by a region, an Academy Team will work with project proponents in a three-stage process that involves (1) diagnosing their regional situation and discovering useful practices from other regions; (2) deciding upon the most promising pathway to regional stewardship and designing a customized regional stewardship strategy, and (3) driving toward a tipping point at which constructive action may be sustained.
For more information on the Gardner Academy for Regional Stewardship, or if you are interested in initiating a project, contact either Doug Henton, Academy Coordinator, at or John Parr, President and CEO of the Alliance for Regional Stewardship, at .
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