Community-based Projects

At the heart of the Collaborative's program is a commitment to wed the theory and insights developed by scholars and practitioners to actual practice, on the ground in communities.

In close consultation with community-based organizations and citizens groups, the Collaborative is beginning to implement community building activities in locales where innovation seems possible and where new lessons can be learned.

Here are two examples:

NEW JERSEY
In New Jersey, the Collaborative's Agora Coalition is working to elevate and advance the discussion of suburban sprawl as it relates to civil society. The Coalition's special area of focus is the creation of public spaces, as successful public spaces can help refocus civic life and thus stop sprawl. The process of creating well-planned, well-maintained, and well-programmed public space provides a forum for residents to become citizens. Public spaces can help facilitate the sort of community life that can counter the anti-civic and anti-community tendencies of sprawl. The Agora Coalition strongly believes a democratic and citizen-based approach to development is central to the likelihood of centered living and the arrest of sprawl.

PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY, MARYLAND
In Prince George's County, Maryland, the home of the University of Maryland at College Park, the Collaborative is now implementing an "Information Commons" project as a follow-on to recently completed research on developing a Public Telecommunications Service. (For more information, you can download the report "Building the Electronic Commons" PDF, 291K)

Collaborative scholars are working in partnership with local stakeholders and citizens to design this project. In particular, we are collaborating with Northwestern High School in Hyattsville, Maryland (a large, comprehensive school with an African-American majority and students born in 80 countries). Representatives of The Collaborative are now teaching a class there and work with students to create an autonomous Prince George's County Website that can later be filled with content contributed by other local groups: churches, Community Development Corporations, libraries, and so forth. During the spring quarter, the students will begin the process of mapping their community's assets through a set of low-cost and manageable exercises.

We regard this as the beginning of an important experiment because Prince George's County — like many places where Americans live today — is sprawling, ill-defined, racially and economically divided, and notorious for its troubled public schools and distrust between the community and police. The County also contains many assets and resources that are often unfairly ignored, including a major public university, many other nonprofits and firms, and the nation's largest concentration of African-American professionals. We believe there is great potential to strengthen our community by using the Internet to map and publicize our common assets and to develop representations of our shared identity for both internal and external consumption.

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