Roundtable on Community Change
Roundtable on Community Change
Publications
The Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change produces a number of books, reports and working papers each year. Here you can find Roundtable publications and research, and check out our current featured publications.
FEATURED PUBLICATIONS:
Ten Lessons for Taking Leadership on Racial Equity
“Surfacing contradictions between our national values and our realities helps us to compare what we would like to have with what we actually have. It sheds light on what we need to do to achieve our values, and it broadens the perspective on the kinds of changes needed to advance racial equity.”-- Ten Lessons for Taking Leadership on Racial Equity
The Roundtable’s most recent publication distills ten lessons for taking leadership on the difficult topic of race in America. Based on our ten years of work in this arena, the document is intended to encourage and suggest strategies to people who are willing to take up the challenge of promoting racial equity and inclusion. It is also meant to counter the fears, reticence and pessimism of those who believe that race is just too hard a topic to address. Indeed, our experience shows that, when equipped with the right training and tools, there are many people of all races who become inspirational and effective racial equity leaders.
“This is the first report that I have ever read that really feels ‘community friendly’ and that communicates what we do as community builders.”
— Roque Barros, San Diego
What is special about resident-centered community building? Why is there such importance on relationship-building? Resident Centered Community-Building---What Makes it Different? A Report from the Connecting Communities Learning Exchange distills lessons and recommendations from resident activists and locally embedded change agents on how to engage communities in activism and change. Based on discussions at the 2012 Learning Exchange, co-hosted by the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation and the Roundtable, the report features strategies for putting residents at the center of neighborhood-based community building.
More information about the 2012 Connecting Communities Learning Exchange can be found here.
Performance Management in Complex, Place-Based Work: What It Is, What It, Isn't, and Why It Matters
“Performance management contributes to effective implementation because it sets up a continuous learning and adaptive system. The emerging lessons about how to utilize performance management to improve practice are helpful for all in the business of improving well-being for disadvantaged groups. However, the community change field has not yet produced all the elements of performance management that are needed in complex, place-based work."
Written by Patricia Auspos and Anne C. Kubisch, this October 2012 work from the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change explores the promise, practice, and challenges of performance measurement and management in community change efforts. It distills the views of a group of high-level policy experts, researchers, practitioners, and foundation staff convened by the Roundtable to discuss what we know about performance management in other fields and how it can be integrated into community change efforts. Performance measurement and management pose special challenges for the community-building field because these efforts are both comprehensive and complex: they involve multiple layers of management and stakeholders; they aim for a broad array of outcomes that are hard to measure and quantify; and they spur change that is unpredictable and dependent on multiple interactions.
This publication, transcribed from a session at the April 2011 Council on Foundations Annual Conference, captures lessons and reflections on how philanthropy can best stimulate and support place-based change. Anne C. Kubisch (The Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change) and foundation leaders Tonya Allen (The Skillman Foundation), Anthony Cipollone (The Annie E. Casey Foundation), Kevin F. Walker (Northwest Area Foundation), and moderator Charles Rutheiser (The Annie E. Casey Foundation) review key findings in Voices in the Field III and discuss their implications for philanthropic policy and practice.
“In order to do this work really well you have to change your institution and you have to put the mirror up to yourself. Are you aligning silos in your own institution? Do you have collective decision making? Do you have a collective vision? Are you a learning institution? Those are the things that matter.”- Tonya Allen
“We think about the next generation of our place-based work in a way that does not entail the traditional initiative approach and is instead is much more organic.” – Anthony Cipollone
Voices from the Field III: Lessons and Challenges from Two Decades of Community Change Efforts, the latest publication in the Roundtable's signature series, assesses what place-based change efforts have accomplished and learned over the past twenty years. Written by Anne C. Kubisch, Patricia Auspos, Prudence Brown, and Tom Dewar, it includes response essays by practitioners, intermediaries, evaluators, and policy experts.
“I must tell you that I think your review of the community change field is the best, most honest and wisest review of any social programming or policy field that I have ever read. We might actually make progress if there was more thinking like that. Congratulations on an excellent piece of work!” - Gary Walker, President Emeritus Public/Private VenturesHere are some of the things people are saying about Voices III:
"Yet another herculean feat. The latest “Voices from the Field” is an astonishing, substance-filled accomplishment. The best part is that, when you re-read the first two volumes and then this one, you really can see what we are learning and evolving as a field! It doesn’t always feel this way on a day-to-day basis, but these books have really marked the path. They’ve laid bread crumbs along the route we've taken and shines a spotlight on the path ahead. So thank you for that.” - Elwood Hopkins, Emerging Markets
"This book is required reading, and everyone should study Chapter 6 on “Lessons to Improve the Design and Implementation of Community Change Efforts.”” - Sterling Speirn, President, W. K. Kellogg Foundation
You may purchase a hard copy of this publication here.
Edited by Keith O. Lawrence and featuring essays by Michelle Alexander, Eric Cadora, Blake Emerson, Ian Haney Lopez, Marc Mauer, Alan Mobley, Alice O’Connor, Jonathon Simon and Phil Thomson
“More than 2.3 million people in America are in jail or prison. Sixty percent are African American and Latino. Of all the statistics portraying racial inequity in our country, this is the most alarming: it indicates the failure of so many of our society’s institutions; it predicts dire consequences for millions of children and families of color who are already at socioeconomic disadvantage; and it challenges the very definition of our democracy…"
Nine scholars contributed essays to this volume, which examines the nature and significance of the persistent linkage of race, crime, and punishment in the public mind. It offers strategies for breaking that connection, and for reducing the severe racial disproportionalities in the criminal justice system.
Funding for this publication generously provided by the Open Society Foundations
More New Roundtable Publications:
Using Neighborhood Survey Data to Understand Neighborhoods and Improve Practice in Comprehensive Place-Based Change Efforts, by Patricia Auspos. Washington, D.C.: The Aspen Institute, 2012.
Developing and Using Data and Evidence to Improve Place- Based Work: Proceedings from a Meeting Convened by The Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change with Support from The Annie E. Casey Foundation, by Patricia Auspos. Washington, D.C.: The Aspen Institute, 2012.
