Regional Collaboratives: The ARS Approach

Regional Collaboratives: The ARS Approach

The Alliance for Regional Stewardship (ARS) promotes and advocates working together in new ways to serve people by forging regional collaboration across existing geographic and political boundaries and institutional barriers. This new model of civic stewardship is called a “regional collaborative” (RC).

RCs are multi-sector, multi-jurisdictional efforts that work on interdependent public policy issues ranging from neighborhood revitalization to educational improvement and smart growth. They are composed of volunteersstewardsincluding activists, corporate CEOs, local government officials, college and university presidents, social service providers, regional council leaders, and more.

Collaboratives bring together a diverse group of constituents and leadersgrassroots and grasstops. They are run by practitioner-professionals who are skilled in the art of effectively blending government, business and nonprofit resources. RCs create goals for the region, and then design strategies that implement collective, effective, measurable results.

RCs build a strong foundation of credibility and trust because they are built on the principles of stewardship and social inclusion, and because they play an honest broker role in their regions. Their viability and effectiveness depend upon these essential attributes and values.

A full range of stakeholder perspectives is critical for discussion and resolution of important issues in objective forums. The rich diversity of backgrounds, expertise and opinions of participants inevitably produces spirited dialogue and highly motivating challenges.

The one common denominator in these dialoguesthe quality that ultimately wins the dayis participants’ shared concern for their communities. Their sense of pride and ownership leads them to make ongoing investments of time and resources to protect the quality of life where they live.

Form Follows Function

Many RCs are alliances of leading government and nongovernment organizations, which provide direct access to and through the regions’ civic and community resources. The alliances are not a “one size fits all” proposition; they take forms that are appropriate to their regions.

For example, in California, the San Diego Dialogue, which works in the San Diego-Tijuana bi-national region, is structured differently from the Sierra Business Council, an organization that works across a dozen mountain range counties. By contrast, the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Communities, representing 110 organizations and jurisdictions of the San Francisco Bay Area, has created yet another distinctly different organizational model.

Chicago’s Metropolis 2020 emerged from its beginnings in the business community, and now works closely with labor and the Metropolitan Mayors Council. The St. Louis Metropolitan Forum is led by board members of the regional growth association, council of governments and citizens’ league.

Regional Collaboratives work in a variety of formslocally; as a single organization; together with other collaboratives in issue-based clusters; or as part of a coordinated statewide network, e.g. California Center for Regional Leadership. Flexibility is essential to success because programs, issues and initiatives vary greatly from region to region, and require a sense of appropriate scope and scale. Importantly, the collaboratives can initiate communication and dialogue at all levels of governancestate, regional, county, municipal, and neighborhood levels.