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 The John W. Gardner Academy for Regional Stewardship provides technical assistance to regions that want to connect regional leaders to national best practices. While Academies are designed to address specific regional issues, they follow a process focused on diagnosing challenges and opportunities, identifying appropriate best practices, and developing a collaborative regional strategy by working with a regional stewardship team. ARS currently is involved in supporting three Academies: Long Island, Oklahoma City and New Orleans, and Florida.
On Thursday, September 9th, Oklahoma City held a regional summit on investing in human capital and diversity as part of an economic development strategy the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce has dubbed Project Next. Building upon the Creative Class concept popularized by Richard Florida, the program will focus on quality-of-life improvements that emphasize arts, culture and diversity, and convenient mobility rather than industrial recruitment based on tax breaks and giveaways. The idea is to attract more of the creative professionals - estimated to constitute one-third of the U.S. workforce - who make their living through brain power rather than muscle.
Through the Gardner Academy, the Oklahoma City region has spent several months studying its quality of life through focus groups and facilitated regional meetings. The results of this work were presented to an audience of citizens gathered at Oklahoma City's Cox Convention Center on September 9th, and participants were invited to comment and submit their own ideas for ways to cultivate diversity and attract talent.
Among the changes suggested on September 9th were enhancing the Oklahoma City region's religious and life-style tolerance, investing in a mass-transit system and establishing top-notch arts programs in the region's public schools. Creative people, participants noted, crave inviting, high-amenity communities with strong educational and cultural resources. With respect to life-style diversity, Drew Dugan, workforce development director for the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce, affirmed that, Employers need to be able to employ everybody. If they're smart and do a good job at what they do, we want them. That's the bottom line.
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 (please include a reference to the Gardner Academy for Regional Stewardship in the subject line).
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