How can citizens bring about large scale change

hange on a grand scale requires people to come together in new and different ways, and to reimagine what’s possible. This kind of change is hard, but it’s not impossible.

In 2010, Living Cities, a long-standing collaborative of 22 of the world’s leading foundations and financial institutions, created the Integration Initiative to accelerate the pace of change in U.S. cities. We worked with five cities tackling seemingly intractable challenges such as urban revitalization in Detroit and education and health in Newark.

In our work with America’s cities and a cross-section of public and private sector leaders, we are learning a lot about what works — and what doesn’t — to lead and drive this kind of change. But these aren’t just lessons for the social sector. Much of what we’ve learned is relevant to leaders of any type of organization or partnership that want to catalyze change in the face of complex challenges.

Get the right players to the table. Change happens only when the right mix of partners, with the right experience, knowledge, and power are at the table. The problems that the cities in our initiative were taking on could not be solved by one individual, institution, or sector. Too often, actors that were fundamental to achieving the desired results were not yet involved in existing efforts — that’s why the efforts weren’t working. We asked cities to start from the results that they wanted to achieve, and then to determine who needed to be at the table in order to achieve them. Often, this meant bringing people together who were not used to working together.

Explanation:

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