Since 1985, the Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group has helped community leaders connect with and motivate each other.  We help equip these leaders with the best ideas, tools and strategies to improve community and economic development, strengthen families, sustain natural resources, create locally controlled philanthropic assets, and build vital and just civic cultures.

We work with community leaders – as well as the foundations, associations, networks and organizations that serve them.  Our work is spread through towns and cities, counties and states, rural and urban places, on the local, regional and national levels.

When does CSG engage?

CSG engages leaders and organizations – and the funders and advisers who work with them – as they:

• Address hefty community and economic development challenges

• Adapt proven methods or pioneer new strategies to make community progress

• Seek breakthroughs that will help them – and others like them – make a greater difference

What are CSG’s core services?

• Peer-to-Peer Learning. We design and facilitate intensive peer-learning sessions and site visits that focus on the challenges participants are facing today.  These sessions combine three elements: stories from exemplary programs, advice from colleagues and seasoned experts, and on-site action planning that sends everyone home with a clear set of next steps.

• Leadership Convening.  When new ideas, methods or policies emerge that have the potential to advance positive and widespread community change, we convene key voices from communities and organizations to spot opportunities and develop strategies that will spark action.

• Initiative Design, Management and Learning.  We help leaders and organizations plan and manage complex, long-term local, regional and national initiatives.  We provide technical assistance, design learning exchanges, organize RFP processes, and develop ways to gather lessons and assess impact.

• Network Building.  As part of our deeper work in specific fields and topics, we develop and grow networks of leaders and practitioners, providing new information products, ongoing communication, websites, and creative opportunities for dialogue and peer-exchange.

• Strategic Guidance.  We help organizations, initiatives and places plan their approaches.  We have experience finding and weighing strategy options, setting priorities and crafting plans.

• Thinking and Action Frameworks.  Working with issue or innovation-focused groups, we construct “theories of change” that chart out the building blocks necessary to make progress towards defined outcomes.

• Action Tools and Storytelling.  We gather strategic lessons and helpful stories about specific community and economic development challenges from communities, initiatives and their leaders.  We produce case stories, action guides, websites, and assessment tools.  We employ a wide range of communication and media methods to spread the news.

Work in Progress

Family Economic Success

Regional Vitality

Community Foundations and Affiliates

Community Development Philanthropy

Current work includes:

Rural Development Philanthropy Collaborative

The Rural Development Philanthropy Collaborative is a volunteer network working together to address this question:  How can we create a true practice of Rural Development Philanthropy and a growing network of competent and effective RDP practitioners who help rural communities achieve and sustain significantly more positive, equitable and transformational change?

The Collaborative’s efforts to date are captured in the materials it has produced and in the emerging development of a network of organizations interested in advancing the field.  The Collaborative seeks to capture the momentum and interest of the growing field of community foundations, rural affiliates of community foundations and other organizations interested in sharing good practice and emerging knowledge.

What is the RDP Collaborative

RDP Rationale

RDP Framework

RDP Core Competencies

Rural Development

Workforce Development

Current work includes:

Making Workforce Work for Central Wisconsin (May 2009)

In this article CSG co-director John Molinaro examines why it makes sense to focus on workforce training during a deep recession.  While the focus of the article is on Wisconsin and the upper Midwest, the arguments in the article apply equally well in many other parts of the country.