Roberts & Kay, Inc. -- Pew Partnership for Civic Change

Pew Partnership for Civic Change

1995 – 1998

The Pew Partnership for Civic Change, based in Charlottesville, Virginia, is a civic research organization whose mission is to document and disseminate cutting-edge community solutions. For the Pew Partnership, Rona served on a team that worked to discover and describe how civic change unfolded in 14 smaller U.S. cities (populations between 50,000 and 150,000) that were part of the Civic Change Project. The report from this documentary project, "Just Call It Effective" – Civic Change: Moving from Projects to Progress" was released in September, 1998.

In 1994 the Pew Partnership provided grant money to 14 smaller cities that were tackling tough issues, such as at-risk youth, affordable housing, and jobs. Each community launched collaborative community problem-solving projects that aimed to develop long-term solutions to urgent problems.

In 1995 Suzanne Morse, Executive Director of the Pew Partnership, invited three people – Rona, Tom Dewar, and Virginia (Gina) Paget – to think with the Pew Partnership about how to draw "lessons learned" from the civic change work people were carrying out in the 14 cities. Tom Dewar, then at Rainbow Research in Minnesota, is now Director of Evaluation for The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Gina Paget, then at the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio, is now Director of the Individualized Master of Arts Program at the McGregor School of Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Ohio. (So how come Rona didn't get a new job, too?) Later on David Dodson, Executive Vice President of the non-profit research firm MDC in North Carolina, joined the team for visits to two cities.

We knew from the beginning that our purpose was to document lessons learned, not evaluate the 14 projects. We were not asking projects to show us their goals so that we could then measure their progress toward those goals or against any kind of outside standard. Instead, as we explained many times in the beginning, our assignment was to learn with the Partner groups what they were learning about how to accomplish civic change. This included learning from successes, failures, or a mixture of both; all kinds of learning had value for our project. Eventually, very late in the project, we timidly used the term "documentation" to describe the work. The most accurate statement is that we worked to uncover, in partnership with the 14 communities, what lessons they were learning about civic change.

At least one member of the research team visited each community. Rona went to Asheville, North Carolina; Eugene, Oregon; Charleston, South Carolina; Longview and Tyler, Texas; and Peoria, Illinois. David went to Peoria with Rona, and went to Danville, Virginia. Tom visited Fargo, North Dakota and Moorhead, Minnesota; Rapid City, South Dakota; and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Gina visited Albany, Georgia; Charleston, West Virginia; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; and Waco, Texas.

Team members attended and participated in several of the semi-annual gatherings the Pew Partnership sponsored in order to make it easier for the 14 Partners to learn from each other and from first-rank practitioners and thinkers on such topics as developing civic capacity, community building, and creating social capital, as well as specific developmental approaches such as jobs and economic development, or youth development.

We began writing as soon as we completed our first visits to Partner groups, and we shared what we wrote about each visit with that Partner community for comments and clarification. By 1996 we had begun putting together a draft of joint findings. Late in 1996 we invited about 15 people from Partner communities to read the first draft and give specific, focused feedback on the early findings. By mid-1997 we had a new draft in a new format – arranged according to stages of growth – that named key dilemmas Partner groups seemed to encounter at each stage and then identified practices Partners seemed to use to address these dilemmas.

Late in 1997 and early in 1998 we conducted long interviews with a series of key people from the Partner cities. We also identified a person from seven different Partner efforts who could offer a description of the changes s/he had experienced personally. We conducted interviews with these people and developed short first-person narratives that tell seven different change stories.

Rona took responsibility for constructing the final report draft. The report, "Just Call It Effective," was released in the fall of 1998.

Visit the Pew Partnership's website for more information about this and other projects.

Check out other descriptions of our work in the area of community change and citizen engagement.