The Institute's mission is to provide innovative strategies, working models and timely information to support environmentally sound and equitable community development. To this end, ILSR works with citizens, activists, policymakers and entrepreneurs to design systems, policies and enterprises that meet local or regional needs; to maximize human, material, natural and financial resources; and to ensure that the benefits of these systems and resources accrue to all local citizens.

Here's how the positive deviance approach is different: * Outsiders don't bring in ideas to change a community's culture. Instead, they ask the community to look for its own members who are having success. Those local ideas, by definition, are affordable and locally acceptable - at least to some people in the community. Since they spring from a community's DNA, the community is less likely to feel threatened by these ideas and more likely to adopt them. * The focus is not a community's problems, but its strengths.

The "Los Angeles Research Collection" empowers citizens and researchers to use the tools of interactive "time mapping." With HyperCities, you can explore social, cultural, and political history in Los Angeles over time. The site can be accessed from a web-browser in any school, community center, government office, home, and academic setting, allowing citizens to delve into and create their own collections of mappable knowledge and cultural heritage. Community-generated content exists side-by-side with scholar-produced research data, thereby creating new interactions between traditionally separated domains of knowledge.

Built on the idea that every past is a place, HyperCities is a digital research and educational platform for exploring, learning about, and interacting with the layered histories of city and global spaces. Developed though collaboration between UCLA and USC, the fundamental idea behind HyperCities is that all stories take place somewhere and sometime; they become meaningful when they interact and intersect with other stories. Using Google Maps and Google Earth, HyperCities essentially allows users to go back in time to create and explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment.

HOW IT WORKS MUNICIPALITIES SUBMIT PROJECTS TO CITIZINVESTOR.COM. These are projects that have already been scored, department-approved and only lack one thing - funding. Projects range from building a new park to installing speed bumps or adding a few parking spaces to your neighborhood library. The list of these projects for any city is nearly endless. Currently, these projects sit on a long-list behind other budget priorities, especially now when local government budgets are tighter than ever before. CITIZENS INVEST IN THE PROJECTS THEY CARE ABOUT MOST. For the first time ever, we are giving citizens the opportunity to tell government exactly where they want their dollars spent. Citizens can find projects that their local government has posted on Citizinvestor.com and pledge to invest any amount they wish towards the project. Not only can citizens invest in projects from their local governments, but Citizinvestor also gives citizens the opportunity to petition for new projects that local government either hasn't thought of or hasn't approved. ONCE A PROJECT IS 100% FUNDED, THE PROJECT IS BUILT!

"In 1973, social scientists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber defined wicked problems as those incomprehensibly complex and messy issues we have trouble defining, let alone attempting to solve. Climate change has proven one of the most wicked, as have healthcare, corruption, and the prison system. Such problems are inherently systemic, with unavoidable social complications that require flexibility and patience."

The mission of SA2020 is to catalyze the entire San Antonio community into passionate, focused, and sustained action to achieve the shared goals that will transform San Antonio into a world-class city by the year 2020 in eleven key vision areas. SA2020 acts as a steward, connecting San Antonio citizens to opportunities that contribute to their aspirations for their city.

"Personally, I consider the social leg to be the most critical, as I'm unconvinced that we'll ever be able to effectively handle the challenges of the other two - especially at the local level in times of turmoil and change - in the absence of the rich social interdependencies that used to define us."

What is Pathways through Participation? Pathways through Participation is a two-and-a-half year (April 2009 - Nov 2011) qualitative research project that aimed to improve our understanding of how and why people participate, how their involvement changes over time, and what pathways, if any, exist between different activities.

The circular economy is a generic term for an industrial economy that is, by design or intention, restorative and in which materials flows are of two types, biological nutrients, designed to reenter the biosphere safely, and technical nutrients, which are designed to circulate at high quality without entering the biosphere.

Main Street Crowd is designed to bring projects directly to the investors who are most likely to be looking specifically for projects of that kind. We do this with our exclusive network of Clowdz™. Here's how it works:

On April 5, 2012 the Crowdfund Act of 2012 The best solution payday loans was approved. This groundbreaking legislation enables start-ups and existing businesses an opportunity to raise funds for their companies directly from the public who can invest small amounts of money in return for shares in the company. Americans will be allowed to invest in ways that have historically been reserved only for the wealthy. Together, America's entrepreneurs and investors will launch the next great ideas of our time!

IAP2 USA advances public participation in the United States by providing its affiliate members with tools and information to conduct high-quality public participation processes, by providing government, industry, nonprofit organizations and participants with educational resources to increase the quality and value of their participation in such processes, and by advocating for quality public participation programs based on our Core Values and Code of Ethics.

Strategy-Nets is a spin-out from the Purdue Center for Regional Development. The principals of Strategy-Nets understand the dynamics of developing and implementing complex strategies in open networks. The primary challenge of civic leadership today is to create and sustain adaptive regional economies. By definition, an adaptive economy has the built-in ability to renew itself by continuously developing new strategies to thrive.

The Purdue Center for Regional Development will foster Indiana becoming the nation's leader in supporting creative, regional approaches to development, that build on three core values: a voluntary approach; the power of data, analysis, ideas and information; and the importance of dialogue, social capital development, and collaborative partnerships.

The slow implosion of the Republican Party - along with the growing strength of a Democratic coalition dominated by low-to-middle-income voters - threatens the power of the corporate establishment and will force big business to find new ways to reassert control of the policy-making process.

"Full exploitation of a technology can take far longer than that. Innovation and technology, though talked of almost interchangeably, are not the same thing. Innovation is what people newly know how to do. Technology is what they are actually doing; and that is what matters to the economy. Steel boxes and diesel engines have been around since the 1900s, and their use together in containerised shipping goes back to the 1950s. But their great impact as the backbone of global trade did not come for decades after that."

Passyunk Avenue Revitalization Corporation (PARC) has a dual mission as both a non-profit real estate development/management company and a public space maintenance and enhancement organization. As a non-profit organization, PARC owns real estate primarily on the Passyunk Avenue retail corridor from Federal Street to McKean Street. With the income from these properties PARC provides supplementary public space maintenance and improvement services on Passyunk Avenue and on the surrounding residential blocks from Broad Street to 9th Street, Federal Street to Snyder Avenue.

PEC primarily serves homeless families consisting of single mothers and their young children. Many of these families are headed by young mothers with little or no work experience and some history of personal or familial trauma. The work of PEC is to support these families through a complement of social services that are intended to chip away at their barriers to success. Families at PEC are supported through emergency and transitional housing, employment and job training, computer skills development, GED and workplace literacy, as well as case management and counseling services. Through its efforts, PEC enables the families it serves to achieve long-term economic and personal self-sufficiency.

University City District is a partnership of world-renowned anchor institutions, small businesses and residents that creates opportunity, improves economic vitality and quality of life in the University City area of West Philadelphia. Our primary mission is community revitalization. We work within a place-based, data-driven framework to invest in world-class public spaces, address crime and public safety, bring life to commercial corridors, connect low-income residents to careers, and promote job growth and innovation.