March 2006
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| ARS LETTER TO YOU |
Developing 'The Responsibles' to Keep our Communities Working
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Chris Chadwick
Executive Director, FOCUS St. Louis
Member, ARS Board of Directors
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 Editor’s Note: Three metro Atlanta organizationsthe Metro Group, Research Atlanta , and the Regional Leadership Forumin December 2005 merged to create their region’s first true civic league. The Regional Atlanta Civic League will be a new vehicle for engaging the public in the development of broad-based solutions to regional challenges. (See this month’s Regional Files for more ) Former ARS chair and current ARS board member Chris ChadwickExecutive Director of FOCUS St. Louis, a regional civic organization also formed by a mergeraddressed Atlanta’s regional leaders on January 20th about St. Louis’s experience and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for Atlanta.
Ten years ago this July, FOCUS St. Louis was formed with a mission to create a thriving, cooperative region by engaging citizens to participate in active leadership roles and to influence positive community change. Since then, we have become an effective force for positive change in our region. We have worked hard to improve conditions in each of our four policy priority areas: Good Governance, Racial Equality and Social Justice, Quality Educational Opportunities, and Sustainable Infrastructure.
[FULL ARTICLE]
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| THE REGIONAL FILES |
Three Atlanta Organizations Combine to Provide Regional Solutions
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The leadership of the new Regional Atlanta Civic League (RACL) believes it will become the “go-to” resource on regional issues of consequence. Part of their optimism stems from the fact that while the RACL may be a new organization, it was formed by the merger of three highly respected regional groups.
The oldest of those was Research Atlanta, a think tank founded by Atlanta business and community leaders in 1971 to provide the city’s elected officials with information that would lead to better decision-making. As metro Atlanta grew over the decades, Research Atlanta’s scope of interests expanded to serve the ten counties that comprised the region. Its areas of focus have included municipal services, air quality, public service delivery, governance, public finance, education, housing, and poverty.
The Atlanta Metro Group was created in 1991 to provide research, evaluation, help and advice to the governments in the metro Atlanta area. Its trustees were prominent citizens including CEO’s, former CEO’s, and former public office holders. Among its clients and projects were the Atlanta Public Schools, Atlanta Airport expansion plans, City of Atlanta financial management and pension funds, DeKalb County government, ethics, metro area public health, water privatization & wastewater issues, and metro area traffic and transportation.
[FULL ARTICLE]
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| INNOVATIVE IDEAS |
How State Universities and Colleges Can Become Regional Stewards
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 State colleges and universities offer tremendous potential as regional stewards. But embedding a regional orientation into daily campus life represents a significant challenge for even the most committed institution, especially when existing incentive structures and funding models place engagement and stewardship at the margins. What’s more, the absence of a supportive public policy environment can hinder campus efforts to build a more systematic focus on regional stewardship.
ARS, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) and the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS) have collaboratively launched a two-year initiative dedicated to advancing state colleges and universities as regional stewards. Called “Making Place Matter,” the initiative is designed to provide tools and practical insights to regional and campus leaders as they seek to build and deepen their relationships to create more vital and viable places. This collaboration builds on the framework established by ARS through its monograph series and leadership academies, the work done by AASCU’s task force on public engagement, and NCHEMS’s work in the realm of public policy assessments and audits.
[FULL ARTICLE]
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Bush Administration Launches Regional Workforce Development Initiative
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The Bush Administration in February announced a new, $195 million initiative to transform regional economies. The Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development (WIRED) initiative will provide 13 different regions with $15 million in funding and on-going expertise from leading innovation organizations over a three-year period to produce long-term strategic plans that prepare their workers for high-skill, high wage opportunities.
"We are launching the WIRED initiative to encourage regional communities to partner together and leverage their collective public and private sector assets and resources to develop a more highly skilled workforce that can act as the linchpin to attract new economic development and employers,” said Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao.
[FULL ARTICLE]
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| INNOVATIVE IDEAS |
New Monograph Offers Roadmap to Regional Collaborative Governance
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Most of the challenges facing regions today cannot be addressed by one organization or even one sector alone. ARS’s newest monograph, Regional Stewardship and Collaborative Governance, identifies implementation strategies that work for these complicated, multi-sector challenges .
Written by Doug Henton and John Melville of Collaborative Economics and ARS CEO John Parr, and sponsored by the Morgan Family Foundation, this monograph describes what regional collaborative governance looks like and how it departs from traditional approaches to public policy problem-solving. Under regional collaborative governance, the role of government changes from command and control to contribute and collaborate; the focus of leadership shifts from the jurisdiction to the region; and the framework for collaboration expands to include new purposes, participants, and processes with new roles for the public, private and civic sectors.
[FULL ARTICLE]
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| ARS ACTIVITIES |
Share Your Region's Story on RegionLink
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 Does your region have advice and experience to share with others about its journey toward regional stewardship? Consider submitting them for publication on RegionLink (www.regionlink.org), the interactive, online community for regional practitioners.
RegionLink is hosted by the Alliance for Regional Stewardship and is accessible to ARS members. RegionLink’s database contains hundreds of documents, including case studies and regional best practices for practitioners to learn from, profiles of regions with successful stewardship activities, and reports and presentations from ARS conferencesall of which are searchable by topics such as transportation, economic development, housing, security, and leadership.
ARS would like you to consider RegionLink as your region’s online library. To submit materials to share on RegionLink, just send an email to with a summary of the document and ARS will follow up.
[FULL ARTICLE]
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| ARS ACTIVITIES |
Register for the 13th ARS National Forum
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The next ARS National Forum on Regional Stewardship will be held in Chicago , Illinois , May 4-5, 2006, at the Hotel Allegro. The theme of this spring's Forum is "Creating Competitive Regions."
Session Descriptions
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Strategies to Make Regions Competitive: What are the new strategies to make regions competitive, who participates in their development and implementation, and what are these efforts actually accomplishing? Leaders of new regional competitiveness effortssuch as Bob Drewel with Seattle ’s Prosperity Partnership, and Ashley Swearengin of Fresno ’s San Joaquin Valley Partnershipwill share case studies from their regions and the talk about the promise offered by these approaches.
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Building Successful Regions: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is funding new research to analyze and illuminate how regions can be resilient in the face of economic and demographic change. Members of MacArthur’s inter-disciplinary research team will describe their approach to understanding the components of regional success, who governs at the regional scale, and why it matters. A discussion panel moderated by Erika Poethig of the MacArthur Foundation will feature research team members Margaret Weir of the University of California-Berkeley, Manuel Pastor of the University of California-Santa Cruz, Kathryn Foster at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and others.
[FULL ARTICLE]
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New Books Says Conventional Wisdom Driving Today's Politics and Public Life is Dead Wrong
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 We have been told that we are a nation divided along lines of red and blue, religious and secular, urban and rural. But Richard C. Harwood’s new book, Hope Unraveled: The People’s Retreat and Our Way Back, discovers something different: a nation struggling with growing consumerism, distorted realities, and false divisions that cut across cultural, political and media landscapes.
Harwood, founder and president of The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, has chronicled 15 years of conversations with ordinary Americans as part of major research initiatives funded by some of the largest foundations in the country. What he has found is that because political leaders and the news media (at the national and local levels) fail to reflect the reality of our daily lives in their words and deedsand often distort those realities for short-term gainpeople have felt no choice but to retreat from politics and public life into their close-knit circles of family and friends. They abhor and deeply lament this retreat but are lost about what to do about it.
[FULL ARTICLE]
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Contact Information
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