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The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) is the nation's newest people-powered department, founded on the truth that art and culture are our most powerful and under-tapped resources for social change. Radically inclusive, useful and sustainable, and vibrantly playful, the USDAC aims to spark a grassroots, creative change movement, engaging millions in performing and creating a world rooted in empathy, equity, and social imagination. 

The Center for Applied Cultural Evolution was created to help communities guide their own social change efforts using integrated social science tools and frameworks. Our mission is to launch a series of Culture Design Labs around systemic challenges ranging from poverty and inequality to climate change and more.

The Center for Applied Cultural Evolution was created to help communities guide their own social change efforts using integrated social science tools and frameworks. Our mission is to launch a series of Culture Design Labs around systemic challenges ranging from poverty and inequality to climate change and more.

The Cultural Evolution Society is a professional scientific society that advances the theory and practice of cultural evolutionary studies. Our goal is to build capacity for researchers, educators, and practitioners to coordinate efforts.

The Social Innovation Labs started in 2012 in partnership with the Bush Foundation. In the past two years, more than 1,200 community change makers have participated in 11 lab events. Each lab has had a different theme, but all of them focused on the following overall goal and strategies: Our vision: All Minnesotans thrive in a socially just, ecologically sound, and economically sustainable ecosystem of social innovation. More about our vision: The fruits of the ecosystem and the cultural soil that makes it possible: visioniconStrategies to move toward this vision: 1. Learn new tools and ways of seeing things 2. Advance innovative projects 3. Connect with other change makers Simple rules for the Lab: 1. Bring an open heart, mind, and will  2. Listen to the part, whole, and greater whole 3. Attend to difference, privilege and disparity 4. Tango with different perspectives to seek unexpected sparks 5. Invite a balance of creativity and structure 6. Honor commitments

work with communities to tell great stories that inspire, activate and enliven our democracy. We believe that communities thrive when they draw on participants' personal experiences and local cultures. By telling stories-whether in the form of performance, radio, video, or other media-communities build power, envision new democratic possibilities, and change culture and policy. Our work is located at the intersection of arts, technology, and social change.

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.

"The e-learning programme consists of four dimensions: Social Design, Ecological Design, Economic Design and Worldview., each contained in an eight-week period.  You will learn skills and effective methods to collaborate with others in regenerative design for societal transformation and the creation of thriving communities within vibrant regional economies. The course will explore case studies and best process examples that demonstrate how regenerative cultures use energy and materials with greater efficiency, distribute wealth more fairly and strive to eliminate the concept of waste, in order to regenerate the material, energy and social resources they depend upon as much as possible at the local and regional scale. "

As part of this work, we draw inspiration from growing movements to claim and control 'the commons'. This refers to resources that are life's necessities. They include: Natural resources: land, water, air, and sources of energy Cultural resources: knowledge Economic resources: funds for investment in the public interest Social resources: relationships and activities through which we help each other participate and flourish

Soulful Cities is a coalition of innovators, urban designers and social equity pioneers fostering cultural development in newly urbanized areas.

The Consilience Project is developing a body of social theory and analysis that explains and seeks solutions to the unique challenges we face today. It focuses on the deeper generator functions beneath the world's major problems, drawing on the best of social theory while showing where existing theories and institutions are no longer adequate to fix the current problem landscape. The aim of the project is to help catalyze a cultural enlightenment that will develop a new set of shared values and capacities adequate to the needs of our time.

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.

WHAT IF WE BUILT OUR COMMUNITIES AROUND PLACES? As both an overarching idea and a hands-on approach for improving a neighborhood, city, or region, Placemaking inspires people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces as the heart of every community. Strengthening the connection between people and the places they share, Placemaking refers to a collaborative process by which we can shape our public realm in order to maximize shared value. More than just promoting better urban design, Placemaking facilitates creative patterns of use, paying particular attention to the physical, cultural, and social identities that define a place and support its ongoing evolution.

With his very honest, stark, and poignant perspective, Chuck deconstructed our nation's infrastructure maintenance deficiencies and compared our current pattern of development to a bonafide Ponzi scheme. For example, California needs an additional $37 billion per year just to maintain our existing highway system. Like experiencing Springsteen's "Nebraska" or Boston's City Hall for the first time, Chuck's message weighed heavily on the audience as he painted a bleak picture for our economic, social and cultural landscape.

The Initiative on Triple Bottom Line Development evolved from the College's Social Equity and Opportunity Forum (SEOF).  The Forum was established by the Dean in 2007 as a bridging and brokering entity with a mission to elevate visibility and understanding of equity and opportunity issues in the region and facilitate effective response. When we speak of opportunity, we speak of fulfilling potential to thrive in physical, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual terms.  When we speak of equity we speak of fairness, within and between generations, in the distribution of access, benefits, and burdens.

We are a group of passionate and proven leaders from the non-profit sector that saw a way to share a basic best practice with everyone: how to exponentially grow your organization using unique online strategies. Empowered.org was thoughtfully developed to tangibly empower you to take a decentralized approach to online fundraising, volunteer recruitment and marketing to accelerate your mission while maintaining oversight, brand and culture. Empowered has the unique ability to grow with you from a single group of volunteers in one location to a multi-national organization with hundreds of groups.

We face an entangled communications challenge. Becoming a sustainable city is less a technological issue than one of mindset, understanding and behavioural. Too many people still believe there is no problem. How can this be overcome? Do we approach it by engendering fear, cajoling, or persuasion? By providing evidence of the threats or examples of good practices? Do we jolt people into focus by ascending graphs of problems or imagery of iconic events like Katrina or Superstorm Sandy? It is best to show how the shift is doable and already happening and that those at the forefront have a better life economically and socially. The image of the sustainable city needs to feel as emotionally satisfying as the lure of consumer culture.

NLGN believes that local government, their partners, and the communities they lead, must undergo a profound cultural shift to embrace three core 'changemaking' values of creativity, collaboration and self-determination. Only then will councils and citizens be able to generate the many innovations necessary to solve our biggest social problems. 

Community well-being is the result of a complex interplay of social, cultural, economic and environmental factors that is beyond the influence of any one individual, organization or level of government alone. The most creative and lasting solutions to enhance community well-being depend upon citizens, government, and a diversity of organizations that unite around a common vision-a vision to work in collaboration on initiatives that makes solutions a reality.