Innovation

Why wait?

Everyone knows it.

We need to discover a radically different approach to attacking, beating back and at least managing poverty and its frightening growth in Dallas.

We don't need more data--data plays a key role, but we have more than enough for today. 

As Todd Williams noted at this week's COMMIT! Partnership festival, "we're not here to admire the size of the problem". . .  we know we have a problem already! 

What we need are solutions, hope and a plan to act. 

While our problems confront us with daunting complexities, pervasive affects and little sign of real progress (check this news report--listen past the weather update!), we must not back away from the challenge.  And, we must not settle for more talking, analyzing and reporting. 

The time has come for action.

So today, I'm in a "what if" mood as I consider the more than rapid growth of poverty in my hometown.

What if. . .

. . .we decided as a city to get dead serious about poverty in Dallas? You know, the kind of "serious" that puts poverty reduction on the agenda of every single Dallas City Council meeting and in the economic development strategy of the City Manager?  The level of commitment that served as a formula for settling disputes at City Hall about where to allocate limited resources? 

. . .we identified one public elementary school, possibly with a focus on one grade/class within that school? Or, if we could muster the courage, take on all the families represented by students on the target campus?

. . .we enrolled a cohort of families to participate in our 3-5 year process?

. . .we laid out cohort requirements in a membership contract for parents to sign on to (things like regular meetings, coaching, financial literacy, Safe Conversations about marriage and family, health and wellness screenings, life plan development, imagination trips/tours, etc.)?

. . .we recruited another cohort of resource partners who would sign on to target our family cohort with benefits and savings (I'm thinking of the principal and staff at the chosen DISD elementary school, folks from Health and Human Services, staff and leaders at the City of Dallas, major corporations, all public utilities, at least one serious bank partner, Dallas County, Parkland Health and Hospital System, expert but wide-ranging non-profit organizations, faith communities and others)?

. . .we located as many resources for the cohort as possible inside the target public school, transforming the school into a beehive-active community center?  Included would be mentors, reading partners and many other expressions of the smart, effective volunteer activities that have proven beneficial to schools, communities, families and children.

. . .we cut down on as much cash "outflow" as possible via free or near-free Internet/Wi-Fi access complete with computers or tablets, reducing all utility rates for the target cohort households, planning a monthly diet building exercise that would focus on both health and cost containment (via food pantries and the North Texas Food Bank, and lots of other creative cost reduction strategies we could begin to imagine together.

. . .we went to work providing aggressive, unrelenting counsel and action to increase cash and non-cash benefit flow into all of those who agree to join the cohort?  Here I have in mind a long list of resources that need to be obtained systematically as a part of enrolling in school and joining our cohort:  all HHS benefits, SNAP, CHIP, WIC, SSI/SSDI, Medicaid/Medicare/ACA, EITC, child care, child care tax credits, workforce training, AmeriCorps membership for some, home improvement subsidies/incentives, "school success" backpacks that took advantage of purchasing in bulk/coop style (uniforms, supplies, books, etc.).  This essential component would call for an up-front investment to staff the target school with the financial advisors/counselors needed to handle the enrollment and sustainability of the discovered resources.

. . .during or staged across the process, we invested a direct cash benefit into a savings/bank account for cohort members--parents and children (possibly with an Individual Development Account type asset) with the agreement that we could study the impact of this direct, hard investment on family stability, academic performance and overall well-being?

. . .we marshalled and focused the city's code enforcement assets to ensure that the area around the target school provided a clean, safe and livable environment, complete with well-maintained parks, sidewalks, streets and private properties?

. . .we informed and involved the Dallas Police Department in the project with community policing, "beat cops" and even mounted officers who were long on teaching children about equestrian skills, appreciating horses and even visiting the community's horse park? 

. . .we engaged a research partner to measure impact, document outcomes and advise us on program modifications for rolling out our successful pilot effort to another target school/neighborhood? 

. . .we proved to the inevitable naysayers the depth of our commitment by finding, raising and appropriating the on-going funds needed to achieve our objectives?

What if?

Overcoming poverty, or at least working together to see good people climb out of its depths, calls for hard-nosed, economic choices. 

Here's my hypothesis:  the cost to engage families in a "dispelling poverty cohort" will turn out to be an incredibly wise, smart and effective investment. 

Forget about our community values or the moral/ethical considerations. 

The effective ROI for the city, its neighborhoods, its schools and its social fabric would be beyond enormous.

In my view the successes realized in one neighborhood could lead to program expansion, as the early adopters of the approach actually could end up paying for the next steps in the effort.   Our research partner could document our progress for everyone to see and understand.

We know enough right now to act.

Why do we tarry?

Google Wisdom

Over time I've learned, surprisingly, that it's tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious.  It turns out most people haven't been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking.  They tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what's actually possible.  It's why we've put so much energy into haring independent thinkers at Google, and setting big goals.  Because if you hire the right people and have big enough dreams, you'll usually get there.  And even if you fail, you'll probably learn something important. 


It's also true that many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, with a few incremental changes.  This kind of instrumentalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, because change tends to be revolutionary not evolutionary.  So you need to force yourself to place big bets on the future.

Larry Page

Google Cofounder and CEO

from How Google Works

pages xiii-xiv

Cut loose imagination. . .

Failure as necessity

Harvard Business Review: Message for business leaders

Check this out!  Five minutes that will inspire new visions for business development: 

A Brief History of Doing Well by Doing Good

Courage

To Live Courageously

Courage is exhibited when someone strikes out into unfamiliar territory where few if any have yet gone, and helps pioneer a new way of working and serving. [They] blaze new trails despite what everyone else around them is doing, and whether or not others join, they do what they see is right, at whatever sacrifice. When someone lives originally and courageously, it inspires others to examine their own lives and actions and find within themselves the courage to follow their own original paths.

Dave Smith

To Be of Use

This work. . .

Ken Kraybill, training specialist and Director with the Center for Social Innovation and and co-director of t3,  wrote the following.

This work. . .

exhilarating

and exhausting

drives me up a wall

and opens doors I never imagined

lays bare a wide range of emotions

yet leaves me feeling numb beyond belief

provides tremendous satisfaction

and leaves me feeling profoundly helpless

evokes genuine empathy

and provides a fearsome intolerance within me

puts me in touch with deep suffeirng

and points me tworard greater wholeness

brings me face to face with many poverties

and enriches me enoucnter by encournter

renews my hope

and dealves me grasping for faith

enables me to envision a future

but with no ability to control it

breaks me apart emotionally

and breaks me open spiritually

leaves me wounded

and heals me

409

Place is important.

History and memory lead us back toward significant places where things occurred, were planned and executed.

Such a place is 409 N. Haskell Avenue (409) here in Dallas, Texas.

In 1994, thanks to the commitment of Jim and Betsy Sowell, along with the support of many of their friends at the Preston Road Church of Christ and from other churches, Central Dallas Food Pantry purchased the property at 409 to accommodate the expansion and growth of the organization. The property had been purchased from the Resolution Trust Corporation at a very good price.

I arrived at Central Dallas Food Pantry just as the remodel began on this new facility. Previously, the organization ran everything from the much smaller building located at 801 N. Peak Street in the same neighborhood (and that is another story to be told at another time!). The new property signaled a new beginning for what soon would be tagged "Central Dallas Ministries."

With the current development of CitySquare's Opportunity Center, the 409 property is now for sale.

As we move on to the next chapter in our history, it seems appropriate to reflect on all that transpired in this special, unique corner here in inner city, Old East Dallas. So, over the next several months (most likely it will take that long!), I'll be telling stories on this page about the events at 409 that have shaped us all and that have led to the transformation of so many lives.

Thinking about this little memory project brings to mind so many key words and tags. Here are a few just for starters. . .

• Church and Food Pantry
• Seasoned, burned out volunteers from outside the community
• Changes in staff leadership and choice
• Learning the ropes of day-to-day food distribution
• Memorable trips to the North Texas Food Pantry
• A truck without brakes
• Josefina Ortiz
• Conflict and change
• Janet Morrison and contemporaries
• Volunteers who got it
• Theology of urban renewal
• Cocaine campground
• Crack house at the corner
• Pay phone at Crutcher and Haskell
• Getting out a newsletter. . .seriously?
• Jeffie Massey
• Beyond charity
• The Christmas Store
• Dallas Morning News Charities
• Project Access Dallas
• The first Kids Kamp

And, the list goes on and on! 

Stay tuned for short stories and vignettes from our past at this very sacred place where community has been breaking out for years now!

Innovation

The urban ability to create collaborative brilliance isn't new.  For centuries, innovations have spread from person to person across crowded city streets.  An explosion of artistic genius during the Florentine Renaissance began when Brunelleschi figured out the geometry of linear perspective.  He passed his knowledge to his friend Donatello, who imported linear perspective in low-relief sculpture.  Their friend Masaccio then brought the innovation into painting.  The artistic innovations of Florence were glorious side effects of urban concentration; that city's wealth came from more prosaic pursuits:  banking and cloth making.  Today, however, Bangalore and New York and London all depend on their ability to innovate.  The spread of knowledge from engineer to engineer, from designer to designer, from trader to trader is the same as the flight of ideas from painter to painter, and urban density has long been at the heart of that process. 

The vitality of New York and Bangalore doesn't mean that all cities will succeed.  In 1950, Detroit was America's fifth-largest city and had 1.85 million people.  In 2008, it had 777 thousand people, less than half its former size, and was continuing to lose population steadily.  Eight of the ten largest American cities in 1950 have lost at least a fifth of their population since then.  The failure of Detroit and so many other industrial towns doesn't reflect any weakness of cities as a whole, but rather the sterility of those cities that lost touch with the essential ingredients of urban reinvention. 

Cities thrive when they have many small firms and skilled citizens.  Detroit was once a buzzing beehive of small-scale interconnected inventors--Henry Ford was just one among many gifted entrepreneurs.  But the extravagant success of Ford's big idea destroyed that older, innovative city.  Detroit's twentieth-century growth brought hundreds of thousands of less-well-educated workers to vast factories, which became fortresses apart from the city and the world.  While industrial diversity, entrepreneurship, and education lead to innovation, the Detroit model led to urban decline.  The age of the industrial city is over, at least in the West.

Edward Glaeser,

Triumph of the City, pp.8-9

Can we connect the dots? Part I

A couple of days ago I visited one of the poorest neighborhoods in inner city Dallas, Texas.  A large scale community project was underway.  Over 100 volunteers from Home Depot worked side-by-side with the residents of the neighborhood to build a KaBoom! playground for the children who live there.  It was a very cool experience. 

As I drove away, my mind continued to spin. 

How do we change, reclaim and rebuild blighted areas like this one?  I know it takes leadership, and this community has that on the ground every day.  It also has a business champion (one of these posts I'll tell you about the particular, courageous leaders at work here) devoted to following the lead of the local leader. 

Still, substandard housing, lots of it rental and slumlord owned, dominates the streets.  Vacant lots abound.  People and work have basically disappeared over the past 40 years.  The schools are weak, the drop out rates extremely high and not improving.  Unemployment for those still living in the area is very high, and those who work don't earn enough to make life work, certainly not work well. 

Then, I think of the Louisiana coast, of New Orleans, of the fishing professionals who've been wiped out by the incredible BP spill into the Gulf of Mexico that now laps up into the wetlands and sweeps around the Florida coast on its way up the East Coast. 

I think of terrorists and oil imports and what seems to me to be clear connections. 

Somehow in the midst of all of this challenge, each of these large scale difficulties, swirling and seemingly disconnected, we may have a perfect storm brewing that will blow in great opportunity for bold, creative responses or one that will blow us further and further away from each other and down the wrong path. 

What we need in the neighborhoods and among the people with whom I work is heroic leadership willing to think with great, amazing creativity to connect the dots of opportunity that can be identified in the swirl of these seemingly desperate problems.  While the issues/challenges may seem disconnected, I'd argue that we dare not allow them to be viewed in isolation from one another. 

Drop in tomorrow for the rest of my ponderings. . .

Creativity and context

Came across an informative article in Fast Company on the d.school at Stanford University on the very morning I prepared for a trip to Stanford to work with the creative folks who lead this special, creative laboratory!  I'm making the trip with partners from PepsiCo.  It appears that we will be present for the official opening.

Our design challenge is just how to best use the 90 minutes we will stop at each summer lunch feeding location on our mobile delivery routes this summer. 

What should we bring to the children and their communities besides the food that will be delivered daily? 

How do we maximize the impact for the overall good and growth of the children? 

Should be an interesting experience.  The report below makes it clear that my quick trip won't be a waste.  See what  you think.

11 Ways You Can Make Your Space as Collaborative as the Stanford d.school

BY Linda Tischler

The Stanford d.school, which opens officially on May 7, is a space whose design has been refined over the course of six years to maximize the innovation process. Every wall, every nook, every connecting gizmo, every table, every storage cabinet, has been created with a grand, collaborative vision in mind.

Nice for them. But what about the rest of us, out here in standard-issue cubicle land? Are we all destined for subprime collaborative work lives because our office spaces and furniture are so numbingly left brain?

Not so, says George Kembel, the executive director of the school. Even if your company doesn't have a few million to throw at making your space more innovation-friendly, there are things you can do to optimize what you've got. The d.school team sat down and brainstormed 11 great ways to transform your digs into a little hive of bubbling creativity--or at least a place that manages to capture the occasional good idea.

To review the most interesting list of ways to make your space radically collaborative click here.

Into the future. . .with impact

Thanks to the fact that we host a large AmeriCorps team (350 members), I was invited to attend the 32nd Annual Governor's Nonprofit Leadership Conference rolled out here in Dallas last week. 

I was particularly intrigued by the presentation made by Andrew Wolk, founder of Root Cause and noted social innovator and social entrepreneur. Wolk has a blog that's work checking out, as well.

As I say, Wolk's speech was important and provocative.  In it he outlines the characteristics of those innovative non-profit organizations that will be able to survive and achieve high level, social impact.  Here they are for your consideration:

• High impact organizaitons measure for continuous improvement.  Not for funders, not for data collection alone, not to justify their existence. . .but to improve and constantly.
• High impact organizaitons relinguish control.  Turning over power, sharing ideas, not worrying about credit or even funding, and staying true to mission and people--these commitments will characterize such groups.
• High impact organizations build bridges with government and the private sector.  Diversification and a willingness to cooperate across traditional dividing lines will be standard operating procedure for these organizations.
• High impact organizations focus on just that, impact, and always over ego. 

Helpful words from a leader worth heeding.