There may be something inevitable about the structural changes that have made American manufacturing less central to our economy, but there is nothing inevitable about the waste, pain and human despair in cities that have accompanied that change. There are policy alternatives that can soften such transitions in ways that preserve wealth and promote equality. Just four hours from Detroit, Pittsburgh, too, grappled with white flight. But it more rapidly shifted its economy from one dependent on steel and coal to one that emphasizes education, health care and legal and financial services.

The University of Illinois at Chicago's Institute for Policy and Civic Engagement (IPCE) is committed to transforming democracy by creating a more fully engaged community with more effective leaders. We create opportunities for scholars, concerned citizens, students, community leaders, elected officials, and the public to actively participate in social discourse, research and educational programs on policy issues and social trends.

DemocracyLab's mission is to improve the democratic process and produce collaborative solutions to public policy problems. Our vision is to help communities throughout the world engage their members to make better decisions and create positive change through collective action.

E-Democracy.org builds online public space in the heart of real democracy and community. Our mission is to harness the power of online tools to support participation in public life, strengthen communities, and build democracy. Starting with the world's first election information website in 1994 in Minnesota, today we host over 50 local Issues Forums in 17 communities across three countries - New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In addition to these "online town halls" and our "community life" forums we promote civic engagement online around the world.

Congress.gov is in an initial beta phase with plans to transform the Library of Congress's existing congressional information system into a modern, durable and user-friendly resource. Eventually, it will incorporate all of the information available on THOMAS.gov. (To compare the scope of legislative information on THOMAS.gov versus the scope of legislative information on the beta site, see Coverage Dates for Legislative Information.)

E.F. Schumacher (author of Small is Beautiful) offered timeless advice about how to boost our communities, "Perhaps we cannot raise the wind. But each of us can put up the sail, so that when the wind comes we can catch it." Here's a handy list of ways you can capture the breeze in the place you call home. And we're sure you'll discover more ideas of your own.

At The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), we believe journalism that moves citizens to action is an essential pillar of democracy. Since 1977, CIR has relentlessly pursued and revealed injustices that otherwise would remain hidden from the public eye. Today, we're upholding this legacy and looking forward, working at the forefront of journalistic innovation to produce important stories that make a difference and engage you, our audience, across the aisle, coast to coast and worldwide.

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS Designing Change: This course extends the purview of design to the structure of society, government, education, healthcare and business. Students will be provided a thorough grounding in systems thinking and how to identify leverage points to create change. They will produce designs and models for a new product, as well as its launch and distribution in a developing country. Training will also be offered in Positive Deviance, a change model used with great success in childcare, women's issues, healthcare and corporate innovation.

Richard Saul Wurman, Radical Media, and Esri bring you the Urban Observatory-a live museum with a data pulse. You'll have access to rich datasets for cities around the world that let you simultaneously view answers to the most important questions impacting today's global cities-and you. Compare and contrast visualized information for a greater understanding of life in the 21st century.

LLGA offers you a program to inspire your city, build international recognition, gain in-depth market intelligence, learn from other leading cities and create growth opportunities for local businesses. Every year we interview 300+ cities to select the most committed partner cities for the LLGA program. By identifying opportunities for improvements early on in the process and inviting a market response, LLGA delivers an average of 10 times more intelligence on inspiring new solutions. Pilots are proven to deliver an important learning experience to city leaders and other stakeholders.

Cities and metros are working to restructure the economy away from tantalizing illusion (endless consumption and irresponsible speculation) and back toward hard fundamentals: talent-fueled production and innovation. For a nation undergoing profound demographic transformation, the metropolitan model of education and social integration provides a path toward managing growth and diversity in a way benefits everyone. Cities and metros understand what the nation fitfully remembers and often contests: The United States is demographically blessed and this is our greatest competitive advantage and strength

We're very inspired by Ezio Manzini, the Italian design strategist and founder of DESIS network, who says: When we design, we search for problems to solve. If you take the capability approach, you search for capabilities to support. He continues, "You don't ask what you can do to make people behave differently. You ask what you can do to recognize people's capabilities and help people use those to solve the problems they face." In the social sector, problems and unmet needs are almost too easy to find. Rather, we look for assets-the people, resources, behaviors, relationships, and systems-that are already working well. Our designs leverage those assets to create more and better life. A structured process We believe strongly that design is a process, and we've often found the design process to be transformative for both students and clients. Ours can be represented by a "double diamond," a two-part sequence of broadening and narrowing.

Look up your county's Rankings, learn about our methods, and download the data you need.

When most people think about economic development, the first thing that often comes to mind is, real estate, infrastructure and the recruitment of businesses. Although, these are indeed elements of economic development, there is more to economic development than only those types of actions. Economic Development generally refers to the sustained, concerted actions of policymakers and communities that promote the standard of living and economic health. The scope of economic development includes the process and policies by which a nation or region improves the economic, political, and social well being of its people. Essentially, a nation's economic development is directly related to its human development, which includes, among other things, health, education, culture and job creation.

National Priorities Project is a national non-profit, non-partisan research organization dedicated to making complex federal budget information transparent and accessible so people can prioritize and influence how their tax dollars are spent. Read on to learn more!

Everyone knows about the big global challenges like economic instability, loss of nature, poverty, waste, conflict and climate disruption. Even after decades of efforts these monstrous problems are not being tackled so much as tickled! Many of these problems are getting out of hand yet even now the possibility of rapidly reversing all of them is within our grasp. This goal looks unrealistic to many people, given the struggle for meaningful change so far. Yet this is the key; the scale of our ambitions must match the scale of the problems as a whole. This is society's blindspot - see this and civilisation gets the chance to go on. This article is the introduction to an 'advanced research workshop' paper, Seven Policy Switches for Global Security, for the NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme

This eventually will lead to a new concept, "mobile networked governance." Community leaders will develop knowledge-connection processes that harness the vast resources of disparate community members. We'll soon see a shift from radical individualism to many new levels of deep collaboration. Ultimately, this mobile networked governance will be transformational, creating a new decision-making structure that engages as many people in the community as are interested.

URBN DSGN is a collaboration between professionals and community leaders, doers and thinkers, and every day citizens. We function in pursuit of better cities.

"Participatory Budgeting is perhaps the greatest innovation in municipal governance in the United States in the last five years, and it has grown rapidly. Originating in Porto Alegre, Brazil-where 20 percent of the municipal budget is now allocated this way-PB has spread quickly throughout Brazil and Latin America over the past two decades. It's currently in place in roughly fifteen hundred municipalities throughout the world, but U.S. municipalities have been late adopters." This is one of the best community empowerment tools out there. Trouble is most communities aren't empowered enough to implement it.

In 2011, the suburban poor outnumbered the urban poor by three million; from 2000 to 2011, the number of poor people soared by 64 percent in the suburbs, compared with 29 percent in cities. Today nearly one-third of all Americans are poor or nearly poor. One in three poor Americans live in the suburbs. If you're poor in the Seattle, Atlanta or Chicago regions, you're more likely than not living outside the city limits.