Heartland Innovators update November 12, 2007
Posted by Zack in Off Topic , trackback
I want to enlist the help of everyone reading this blog for a project that Elizabeth and I have been working on, called Heartland Innovators. It’s a little hard to explain—but basically its an experiment in raising the profile of local successful leaders who are actually solving America’s biggest problems.
If you can suggest anyone who fits that description, please email us at info@heartlandinnovators.org
For example, American education is broken and neither politicians nor policy experts seem to know how to fix it. However, there are people in every community—teachers, principals, school staff, parents and students—who are fixing schools or at least classrooms, or building programs to educate children outside of broken schools.
So the idea of the Heartland Innovators project is to create a high-profile forum where those fixers can write about their success, and write their based-in-experience analysis of the failures of the system.
The hope is that such a forum would eventually begin to compete with the chattering nonsense (Elizabeth will probably make me take that out) of the policy establishment—and begin to inform and influence sincere politicians.
As for the INsincere politicians who don’t really care about fixing problems—the hope is that this process would eventually identify Heartland Innovators who could run for office and replace them.
(There is precedent for this. In a certain corner of the political world, a broad community of progressive activists have been having a huge influence on the Democratic party and elections over the last few cycles—and their power is founded on public forums (blogs) where they have successfully competed with the Democratic party establishment and mainstream political journalists.)
We started this project in September. For two months, in between our other work, we experimented with various ways of locating those local, successful leaders. It’s hard, because a teacher who is saving her students and holding back the tide of violence and apathy all around them—she doesn’t a have PR person, no newspaper has written about her success, she doesn’t have a website where she documents her work (but she should, and that’s the point of this project!). So we experimented and found various ways of drilling down into communities and finding these folks.
Now, moving in to phase two, we’re announcing the Heartland Innovators community policy blog. This is where the teacher gets a space to document her work. It will launch April 8, 2008. We’re inviting many of the leaders we’ve met over the last two months, but we’re going to have to find a lot more over the next five months for the blog to succeed. It may be that we decide to focus on one policy area to start (e.g. education) if that’s where most of our good submissions are coming from.
Here’s more detail on the community blog idea from the Heartland Innovators site.
And here’s the first sample post, from one of the first local leaders we met on our trip in September. I think Rev. King’s post is just the perfect example of a voice that needs to be heard by the policy establishment in her field.
Tag: Heartland Innovators
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