The Harwood Institute and Kettering Foundation Kick off new “Initiators” Project
April 3, 2007 by Taylor Willingham
Monday, April 2, 2007
(The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation)
The Harwood Institute and the Charles F. Kettering Foundation have entered into a learning agreement to focus on how people who initiate civic action in communities decide to step forward, overcome resistance and barriers in their work, and engage in community politics.
This innovation work will consist of a series of interviews with a number of public innovators, paired with Harwood tools and frameworks, and distributed online so that other innovators across the country can learn from their personal experiences as they attempt to promote change in their communites.
The Harwood Institute will take material from the interviews to create an online series that makes use of mulitmedia content in order to: a) portray the experiences of real-life initiators; b) use this portrayal as a mean by which to engage other initiators in an ongoing conversation about their own experiences, and c) spark people to move along their own path of fully engaging as initiators.
Along with the online series, The Harwood Institute will:
- Create online personal learning spaces where people can document their own journey of discovery and then generate questions and ideas to generate feedback
- Engage in online dialog about the initiators and the implications for themselves and their communities;
- Create collaborative online workspaces that will allow people across the country to create a body of their collective experiences
- Create online surveys to gauge what triggers people’s imagination and engagement
- Hold periodic webcasts and teleconferences to dig deeper into understanding people’s experiences and engagement
