National Civic Review articles from September 1999

National Civic Review archives from September 1999

NOTE FROM THE PRESIDENT.
September 22, 1999... LOOKING BACK over the past ten years, the practice of consensus building and collaborative problem solving has undergone significant transition and change. Specific methods for addressing public and private conflicts, including facilitation,...

Building an Infrastructure of Community Collaboration.
September 22, 1999... When the Program for Community Problem Solving was envisioned by a cohort of facilitative leaders in 1987, many wanted to be collaborative, but few wanted to be collaborators. Echoes of World War II laced the rhetoric of collaboration with an...

Celebrating Ten Years of Leadership: The Promise of the Program for Community Problem Solving.
September 22, 1999... Most futurists and forecasters say that to understand the future, we need to study our present and our past. This article celebrates the success of the Program on Community Problem Solving (PCPS) and forecasts a vibrant future. I am unabashedly...

Exploring the Elements of Civic Capital.
September 22, 1999... Even in communities that face a host of social and economic troubles, it's difficult not to find a neighborhood landscape dotted with success stories. Sometimes it's a vibrant Healthy Start collaborative that unites service providers and...

Collaboration, Complexity,and Chaos.
September 22, 1999... I am not sure that we have ever really been able to explain why collaboration works. Many of us who are practitioners and believers in collaboration explain the consequences of collaboration as a result of a number of "principles": Engage all...

Let's Reinvent "Mediating Institutions".
September 22, 1999... "Think globally, act locally" was a slogan of the 1960s. It seems even more true today as society struggles with the changes that have occurred over the past several decades. It has become obvious that solving most problems really requires...

Community Problem Solving and the Challenge of American Democracy.
September 22, 1999... American society is facing many challenges at the close of the twentieth century. Most have been years in the making. And most will take years to resolve. It is difficult to say which we should put at the top of the list. We could look at...

The Transformative Power of Governance.
September 22, 1999... Redefining Governance for Neighborhood Transformation Today, disenfranchised and disinvested communities face an array of interwoven challenges. These include inadequate physical infrastructure, depleted local economies, and social networks...

Public Participation in Federal Agencies' Decision Making in the 1990s.
September 22, 1999... Federal agencies have been conducting public participation processes since the 1960s. Over the decades, our understanding of public participation has grown and the procedures for involving the public have been refined. This article provides an...