New Community Paradigms

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index® is the first-ever daily assessment of U.S. residents' health and well-being. By interviewing at least 1,000 U.S. adults every day, the Well-Being Index provides real-time measurement and insights needed to improve health, increase productivity, and lower healthcare costs. Public and private sector leaders use data on life evaluation, physical health, emotional health, healthy behavior, work environment, and basic access to develop and prioritize strategies to help their communities thrive and grow. Journalists, academics, and medical experts benefit from this unprecedented resource of health statistics and behavioral economic data to inform their research and reporting.

Xavier University's American Dream Composite Index™ (ADCI) measures the extent to which people living in the United States achieve the American Dream. The ADCI is based on a random sample of no fewer than 1,000 adults who are surveyed online each month, with at least 400 respondents recurring from the previous month.

"Rethinking the Automobile" is a project created by livable streets advocate Mark Gorton. Its goal is to raise awareness around the negative impact of the automobile on our world. Through public events and media campaigns, Rethinking the Automobile reveals how policies that prioritize the automobile destroy public space in our cities and towns and have created a dangerous and unsustainable world.

Capitalists seem almost uninterested in capitalism, even as entrepreneurs eager to start companies find that they can't get financing. Businesses and investors sound like the Ancient Mariner, who complained of "Water, water everywhere - nor any drop to drink." It's a paradox, and at its nexus is what I'll call the Doctrine of New Finance, which is taught with increasingly religious zeal by economists, and at times even by business professors like me who have failed to challenge it. This doctrine embraces measures of profitability that guide capitalists away from investments that can create real economic growth.

California will soon launch its cap-and-trade program, which uses a market-based mechanism to lower greenhouse gas emissions. California's program will be second in size only to the European Union's Emissions Trading System based on the amount of emissions covered. In addition to driving emission cuts in the ninth largest economy in the world, California's program will provide critical experience in how an economy-wide cap-and-trade system can function in the United States.

The Knight Digital Media Center @ USC Annenberg is dedicated to increasing the flow of critical news and information by helping organizations and community leaders develop digital skills and strategies for the 21st Century. The Center provides training and resources in several formats including self-directed web-based learning modules, instructor-led virtual classes as well as conferences and workshops throughout the country. In addition, the Center offers customized training and consultation to organizations seeking to engage their communities on critical issues.

Technology of Participation is an integrated set of facilitation methods, tools and approaches that foster authentic participation and meaningful collaboration. From rural villages to global corporations, people want to participate in making choices that affect their lives. We want our efforts to make a difference in the world. Changing expectations are morphing the hierarchical triangle into a circle. Leaders of the future will foster authentic participation.

The LivCom Awards were launched in 1997 and are endorsed by the United Nations Environment Programme, (UNEP), with which it shares a Memorandum of Understanding. The LivCom Awards is the World's only Awards Competition focussing on International Best Practice regarding the management of the local environment. The objective of LivCom is to develop and share International Best Practice, with the further objective of improving the quality of life of individual citizens through the creation of 'liveable communities'.

Breakthrough Capitalism Our financial, environmental and social systems are heading towards breakdown. But some visionary organisations in the corporate and investment communities are stepping beyond traditional corporate social responsibility (CSR) and socially responsible investment (SRI) and driving systemic change with breakthrough ventures. This is the focus of Phase II of the Breakthrough Capitalism program: see Progress Report. To contribute to the upcoming report Betting on Breakthrough: Top Team Agendas for Transformative Change, or to get involved with a Breakthrough Labs, please contact breakthrough@volans.com

Positive Deviance is based on the observation that in every community there are certain individuals or groups whose uncommon behaviors and strategies enable them to find better solutions to problems than their peers, while having access to the same resources and facing similar or worse challenges. The Positive Deviance approach is an asset-based, problem-solving, and community-driven approach that enables the community to discover these successful behaviors and strategies and develop a plan of action to promote their adoption by all concerned.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee have a list of 19 proposals that they support - which range from massive investment in education, infrastructure and basic research, to lowering barriers to business creation, eliminating the mortgage interest deduction and changing copyright and patent law to encourage new (as opposed to protecting old) innovations.

The American economy is running on empty. That's the hypothesis put forward by Robert J. Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University. Let's assume for a moment that he's right. The political consequences would be enormous.

Federal-aid Simplified. Understanding the Essentials. More and more, transportation agencies must pursue better, faster and smarter ways of doing business. Federal-aid Essentials offers a central online library of informational videos and resources, designed specifically for local public agencies. Each video addresses a single topic-condensing the complex regulations and requirements of the Federal-aid Highway Program into easy-to-understand concepts and illustrated examples.

Many people now agree that achieving sustainability is a bigger challenge than just buying more efficient devices. Steve Mouzon coined the phrase "Original Green" several years ago to describe the sustainability that existed before the Thermostat Age. The Original Green is the most important initiative being pushed forward by Steve Mouzon and Wanda Mouzon.

Civility is the ability to disagree with others while respecting their sincerity and decency. Our mission is to find and promote research-based methods for increasing political civility. Mission At CivilPolitics.org, our mission is to find and promote research-based methods for increasing political civility.

Directors: This website is run by Jonathan Haidt at NYU-Stern, Matt Motyl at the University of Virginia, and Ravi Iyer at the University of Southern California. We exercise some light editorial oversight, but the content here is provided by a network of contributors who, we can assume, do not all agree with everything that the other contributors have written. We selected the initial contributors for the excellence of their research and the diversity of their perspectives. The content on each page can be assumed to reflect the views of the editor listed at the bottom of that page, unless the content is specifically signed by another contributor. In 2012 we will gradually develop a set of policy recommendations that are supported by the large majority of the contributors.

Code for America hosted Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu for a discussion of their recent book, "Gardens of the Democracy." In it, they challenge Americans to approach the world not as a machinery that needs to be perfected but as a garden that needs constant attention, discretion, and periodic weeding. The book argues that since society and technology have fundamentally changed, so must our notions of citizenship and democracy: turning "the machine" into a garden. 

At the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC), we believe everyone has the power to make a difference in how their community and country thrive. We are a dynamic, non-partisan nonprofit working at the forefront of our nation's civic life. We continuously explore what shapes today's citizenry, define the evolving role of the individual in our democracy, and uncover ways to motivate greater participation.

LocalData is a new digital toolkit designed to help community groups, professional planners and government agencies modernize community-led data collection of place-based information. THE NEED Across the country, community groups, planners and government agencies collect parcel-level information about communities. Typically, the process for collecting, transcribing and cleaning this data can be confusing, lengthy and disempowering. LocalData transforms this process with technology. LocalData began as a 2012 Code for America project with the City of Detroit. Three Code for America fellows (Matt, Alicia and Prashant) identified a need for local data in Detroit. Though community groups were actively surveying neighborhoods and using this data - neighborhood level surveys took a long time and further stressed the under-resourced technical assistance providers that were assisting this effort. Additionally, comprehensive city-wide surveys were taken infrequently, often involving multiple partners, with months of surveying and transcription.