Full Circle

Full Circle is an outstanding example of how leaders can provide the platforms through which individual and communal initiatives can thrive. It's city-level co-creation in action.

Greg Sanders and Lee Deuben of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning built and maintain an open source database that community groups can shape and fill to match their individual priorities, from mapping the vegetable gardens in their neighborhoods to preserving a particular type of greystone architecture. As new partners join the initiative, Greg and Lee tailor new fields in the database to their partcular projects; the partners then rally their communities to take part in the mapping, planning, campaigning, and creating processes. When all of these are collaborative and participatory processes, the benefits are myriad: stakeholders are identified and cultivated, new leaders emerge, a variety of viewpoints are incorporated, and community is built as data is collected. This is an incredibly efficient initiative, as no effort (intentional or not) is wasted.

photo by: Christopher Reyes

One Full Circle partner is the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization. They've identified two interesting strategies. First, they take advantage of the particular talents (often overlooked) of Little Village's heavily-immigrant population by supporting community gardening initiatives. Second, they involve eager youth in their Full Circle mapping: during the summer, local kids go door to door surveying property owners on a number of different issues. Not only do they meet their neighbors, but the kids ultimately begin to ask, "Why are we collecting this data? What does it show? Where is our community strong, and where is it weak? What should be our priorities as a neighborhood?"

One "danger" that's implicit in such daring systems: by supporting Full Circle, the city has provided community groups with more effective tools to make claims back on the city, from arguing for the closure of coal plants to campaigning for new parks. This potential for disruption keeps many leaders from embracing co-creation. But the long-term benefits are well worth it: Full Circle also engages new groups in their cities and gives them the ability to feel some ownership and responsibility for the places they inhabit. These groups may make claims on city government, but, newly engaged, they're also more likely to figure out a innovative and non-bureaucratic ways to solve problems themselves. Then, everyone's happy.

  

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