March 2022
Announcing 2022 Issue of Next Gen Regional Case Profiles
We are pleased to release new case profiles spotlighting three additional leading regions that have embraced the Next Gen Sector Partnership model. These case profiles are a continuation of our national Benchmarking Project, conducted with support from Ascendium Education Philanthropy. The Benchmaking Project documented the lifecycle of nine regional teams across the nation, telling the stories of their partnerships, their evolution and their impact. In the 2022 issue, you will find case profiles of Lane County, Oregon, the North State of California and Cape Fear, North Carolina. You can read the original benchmarking report released in January 2021 here.
December 2021
From a Zero Sum to a Positive Sum Vision
As communities around the country grapple with what a post-pandemic recovery will require, we at the Institute for Networked Communities know that activated public-private networks are key to building economies that work for all. This is the third in a series of blog posts from 2021 that explores why public-private networks matter, what gets in the way, and what it takes to mobilize them for collective benefit, building strong and inclusive economies. Read our introductory blog in the April 2021 post (below).
“A functioning society rests on a web of mutuality, a willingness among all involved to share enough with one another to accomplish what no one person can do alone.”
That’s a central premise of Heather McGhee’s 2021 book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. It’s also one of the core beliefs that motivates what we do here at the Institute for Networked Communities.
That’s why we can’t stop thinking about McGhee’s central argument that the United States has a uniquely weak commitment to “public goods”— things like roads, bridges, water systems and public libraries that benefit all and are provided publicly. These investments require an understanding that we depend on one another and that investing in the public is investing in ourselves.
McGhee argues that, in the United States, a deeply ingrained and racialized zero-sum mindset erodes a willingness to invest in public goods. In the United States, there has long been a racialized narrative that Black people are the “takers” and white people are the hardworking “makers.” This underpins a reluctance to invest in libraries, schools, or swimming pools that benefit a portion of the populace perceived as undeserving. As McGhee writes, “Public goods are only for the public we perceive to be good.”
Here’s why this matters for our work here at INC; healthy economies depend on public goods. They need functioning roads, bridges, and shipping facilities. They need high-quality schools that prepare a skilled workforce. They need universities that spur innovation and technology. But making these investments—and making the investments work—is a shared endeavor. Government plays a critical role. But so do civic-minded business leaders, who need to be actively engaged in helping to shape public investments to ensure they achieve maximum impact for the region’s economy and for its communities.
That’s what makes Next Gen Sector Partnership a powerful tool for making regional economies stronger. They bring business leaders together to invest in the public goods they all depend on, working hand-in-hand with public partners. They rally business leaders and public partners around a positive sum mindset; the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats. And they work, achieving real impact on the health and vitality of regional industry sectors.
But what will it take to build economies that are not only strong but also inclusive? Economies that expand opportunity for all, especially those who have been historically excluded and marginalized?
We think that McGhee’s work offers an important contribution toward answering that question. Because our ability to build an inclusive economy depends on our ability to rally our communities around a positive sum vision. It will require:
· Rediscovering the importance of investments in public goods as the foundational underpinning of strong economies;
· A recommitment to investing in those public goods—particularly from business leaders who have a role to play in contributing their time and resources to building the ecosystem needed to make their regional economy thrive;
· A critical examination of who benefits—and who has been excluded—from these investments, and;
· A purposeful expansion of benefits to deliberately engage all, particularly those who have been left out.
We have work to do in making this vision a reality. But we know that we can only do that work when the right coalitions of public and private leaders come together with an understanding that we depend on one another, and that investing in each other is investing in ourselves.
May 2021
Overcoming the Blame Game
Making an economy work is no simple feat. It takes a complex web of public and private actors working together in close coordination. Businesses need a supportive environment in order to stay competitive; they need the right infrastructure and technology, access to capital and peer support. And, most of all, they need a local talent pool of people with the right mix of skills and experience. That means educators must stay finely attuned to the needs of the labor market and must be purposeful about building pathways that expand access to good jobs and careers.
Getting this right requires public and private partners to work together to ensure that the economy is growing good jobs and that people can access those good jobs. They need to operate as a high-functioning network, tackling complex issues that no one entity could solve independently.
But, in most parts of the country, and for far too long, we have failed to make these networks work. In many places, we have failed to build them in the first place, let alone mobilize them for collective and mutual benefit. What gets in the way?
First, let’s talk about a national discourse that, left unchecked, can have detrimental effects on the building or rebuilding of an economy: the blame game. This may sound over-simplified. We’d understand if you suddenly thought you were reading a parenting blog. But it’s no secret that personal belief systems drive everything we do as individuals, so these beliefs clash at a larger scale as a society. They show up loud and clear in political discourse; they also show up in our daily lives where we live and work every day. In the context of rebuilding an economy, many blame government for holding back job growth, for getting in the way, and, at the extreme, for being inherently failed and intolerable. Others point the finger directly at business for making the economy work for only a few, believing that business leaders are just in it for themselves, and harboring a belief that businesses, if left to their own devices, will simply never do what’s good for workers or for their communities. At the Institute for Networked Communities, we disagree.
It’s true that government is fragmented and public programs do not always have the impact they should. It’s also true that many businesses are woefully disconnected from their communities. But the bigger truth is that pointing fingers only serves to further erode the connections among businesses and government that should underpin a strong economy. When the blame game is going strong, individuals who could make a difference check out. Business leaders disengage and stop participating in community initiatives or volunteering in schools. A familiar vicious cycle begins. Job training and education programs that should connect people to jobs rely on limited input from business. Therefore, they don’t always prepare students with the right combination of skills and experience. As a result, people struggle to get jobs in their communities. And businesses struggle to hire locally. The cycle is only exacerbated when political leadership shifts and the pendulum swings again from one camp to the other, leaving no room for what’s really needed: harnessing the power of civic-minded business leaders and the resources and programs of the public sector, coordinated and aligned. The truth is we need everybody.
We think there’s good news here. Every day we see communities that are making the shift. What does it take? First, business leaders realizing that the problems they’re facing are not theirs alone. There are others with the same concerns, and by working together there can be real solutions. To be clear, it takes getting personal about shared issues. That means flipping the script. In our experience helping to build Next Gen Sector Partnerships, this means being deliberate about creating a forum for individual business leaders to come together. To do what? To dig deep into how their business interests intersect with their personal interests, squarely centered on the best interest of their shared place, the communities in which they live and work. This is not about sitting on a board; it is not a community benefits initiative. It is not a temporary council targeted at one narrow issue. It is an active, business-to-business network, facilitated in a way that builds buy-in and ownership from business leaders who set their own agenda with a strong bias toward action.
When business leaders develop and own their own agenda for solving their shared problems, there is a tipping point of shared responsibility. It’s a shift from “that’s not my job” to, “if not us then who?” This is the opposite of the blame game. It’s about business people stepping up to own their challenges and their solutions. It’s a force multiplier, especially when a coordinated network of public and community partners also see a stake in pitching in. In Next Gen Sector Partnerships, that’s usually not hard to do. When business leaders build an agenda for strengthening their businesses, their industry, and their community, that means it’s likely to impact the things community members also most need, like good jobs, education pathways, small business incubators, or maybe affordable housing. All this because public and private partners dropped the finger pointing and got practical.
But while a solid start, that’s not all it takes. We’re just warming up. Stay tuned to learn more about what we think building an inclusive economy requires.
April 2021
Rebuilding Our Economy by Activating Public-Private Networks
Introducing a Series from INC
These days we’re all doing a lot of thinking about what it will take to make our economy work. With the end of the pandemic in sight—or, at least, the beginning of the end in sight—we are turning our attention to what it will take to rebuild. Beyond just the economic fallout from COVID-19, there is a growing imperative to “build back better.” What will it take to ensure that all have access to good jobs and careers? What will it take to facilitate generational economic mobility and build more roads into the middle class? And what will it take to build a more equitable economy, dismantling the structures that prevent some from accessing opportunity while privileging others?
Answering these questions will not only require considering what is needed to make our economy work—policies and investments that support education and workforce training, infrastructure, small business assistance, childcare, to name just a few—but also who is needed. Because, while the work of building a strong and inclusive economy certainly depends on effective public policy at state and federal levels, it also requires the right coalition of public and private leaders working together at a more local level, committed to the goal of making their economy work for all.
What does that look like in practice? It means business leaders coming together to take shared responsibility for the issues that impact the overall health of their industry and their community, recognizing that the two are interdependent. It also means government and nonprofit leaders stepping out of institutional silos to align their efforts in support of broad regional goals, not just focusing on narrow, programmatic solutions. When these public and private actors are all motivated by a commitment to place—a shared love of where they live—they become a powerful network and force for positive, collective action.
We call places that get this right “networked communities.” They are places where both public and private sector leaders are mobilized to work together in building a stronger, more inclusive economy. Together, they operate as a high-functioning network, able to address complex issues that no one entity could solve independently.
At the Institute of Networked Communities, we have spent years developing and refining a partnership model that works. And while there is no simple formula for building effective public-private networks, we have identified the essential elements that make the difference.
In the coming months, we will be publishing a series of blog posts on what it takes to activate public-private networks that achieve real impact on regional economies and communities. We’ll be talking about what works—and what gets in the way—based on our experience working in nearly 100 communities and 20 states across the country. We don’t have all the answers. But we hope this series sparks a dialogue and yields new insights that helps communities realize new ways of working together, for the benefit of all.
January 2021
Benchmarking Six Next Gen Sector Partnerships
About the Benchmarking Initiative
After a decade in action and with almost 100 partnerships in nearly 19 states, the Next Gen community of practice has both grown and diversified. Over the years, Next Gen partnerships have learned and evolved to tackle challenges with their region's best interests in mind. This work is imperfect and messy but it is driven by continuous improvement and a commitment to collaboration by otherwise siloed initiatives.
Building off Next Gen's toolbox and in partnership with Ascendium Education Group, the Benchmarking Project set out to document the lifecycle of six partnerships across the nation. The Project is not an evaluation; it is an assessment of the common factors that make these partnerships work. These profiles in this compendium identify each region's motivations for launch, mechanisms for change, moments of transformation, measurable results, major ingredients for success, and plans for the future. While the profiles follow the same outline, the stories are quite distinct, demonstrative of unique starting places and varying strengths and weaknesses along the way.
Together these six regions demonstrate that this work is that of constant cultivation and continuous improvement. Without exception, each region demonstrated the critical role of business and industry leading from the center, as well as almost dogged maintenance of coordinated responses and solutions from public and community-based partners.
We’re excited to share our benchmarking framework and profiles with you! Download the full report or sift through the profiles individually below.
Regional Benchmarking Profiles:
June 10, 2020
An Open Letter to the Next Gen Community
Dear Next Gen Community,
We’ll be honest; we don’t want this to be just another email condemning racism. Like you, we have received many of those messages over the last two weeks from organizations and companies all over the country expressing solidarity with protesters. No doubt these messages signal that our nation is beginning to reckon with one of the most painful and important aspects of our history and society—systemic racism and oppression of Black Americans. But we also know that a public statement only goes so far.
We do, however, want to acknowledge that we can't approach the work of building Next Gen Sector Partnerships without understanding the role of these partnerships in impacting the structural inequities that shape our communities. Our mission at the Institute for Networked Communities (INC) is to build stronger, more inclusive economies by activating public-private networks around a shared commitment to place. We recognize that this work is intimately linked with the work of anti-racism.
We at INC are committed to deeply examining this question that we see as being at the heart of our work: what does it take to activate public-private networks that both strengthen our regional economies and make them more inclusive, actively dismantling the systems that perpetuate inequality and limit access to opportunity?
We know this isn’t a simple question with any simple answers. But we’re committed to pushing for deeper answers and insights and, more importantly, to providing actionable tools for communities around the country to fulfill this vision: strong and inclusive economies that expand opportunity for all.
Lastly, we acknowledge that we, as white people, have work to do in examining our own racial biases and deepening our understanding of the ways in which power and privilege function in our every action. We will be open to feedback when we fail in this regard, and commit to continually striving to do better.
We are grateful for your continued partnership in this important work. Thank you for being a part of this community.
With gratitude,
Francie & Lindsey
May 18, 2020
Why Networked Communities are the Key to Recovery
What regional, industry-led partnerships can teach us about rebuilding our economy
It’s a truth the COVID-19 crisis has made abundantly clear; our health, our jobs and livelihoods are all inextricably linked. As the virus deals a blow to the complex and invisible web that connects us, we feel it in unexpected ways — bare grocery store shelves, idle manufacturing plants, empty college parking lots, and hospitals simultaneously overwhelmed and financially strapped. Leave it to an invisible virus to make visible the networks that underpin our daily lives. They’ve always been there; we just haven’t always noticed them.