Applying Lessons from Chattanooga Venture

Chattanooga was dirty, divided, and sad in the late 1970s. Efforts to change the city resulted in a powerful model for improving quality of life, place, and work. It was astoundingly successful. Then it was abandoned. It was too successful for those who sponsored it. It was not successful enough for those who were not involved. Those who were involved were too close to fully see its potential.

Its was celebrated. Representatives from other places came to learn about it—Chattanooga Venture, “Vision 2000” and “The Chattanooga Way.” Numerous local leaders told and retold the story. It became lore. Critical elements were lost in the lore. At least a couple of local initiatives sought to replicate Venture but left out critical elements and had limited, if any, impact. Other communities copied Venture but, as far as I know, did not have the same level of success. (Further research into these issues is in process.) Now it is largely forgotten.

Chattanooga Venture was the prototype for community venturing, the process of tapping the collective intelligence of people in an area, getting their ideas, identifying and prioritizing key issues, needs, and opportunities, and turning talk into action. That last step was not rhetoric; it was the essential goal. It is what community venturing is all about.

I have been leading a study group on Venture for the last year because I wanted to know how to engage and mobilize community members so effectively for inclusive, positive, sustainable change. This post summarizes key insights and provides a roadmap what to do with that knowledge. First, a bit of background and some definitions.

Background and Definitions: Community Venturing

Community is where we meet our needs together. Every person has a unique community around them but true community is shared. What we typically think of as community is a fuzzy set of the personal communities of all members. Any particular community is itself a fuzzy set of members, resources, and spaces. That is the inherent — and really interesting — nature of communities. They can be evaluated in terms of the extent to which members occupy particular places and use particular resources.

Information is that which reduces uncertainty. It is essential to the formation and function of communities and needs-fulfillment activities (and everything else). Information is embedded in and transferred via resources and spaces. Who has what, who needs what, and how they might meet those needs are all general information that must be generated and shared among members for a community to exist and operate. Indeed, such information defines communities. Much of life is creating, finding, sharing, and using information to meet our needs and strengthen our communities.

The general question for communities is, “how we might better meet our needs together?” The general goal is for this to be done equitably, without some benefiting at the expense of others, and sustainably so future generations better meet their needs together, too. The meta-question is how to answer that question. What are the common and critical needs in the community? What should be the priorities for personal, private, and public action? Where are the untapped opportunities and under-utilized resources? Again, it is all about information but how we create, find, share, and use it together.

Community venturing is the process of answering those questions. Chattanooga Venture did this very well. How did it do it? What might we learn from it?

What Venture Was and How It Worked

Venture was one of a number of related initiatives and a set of activities. It was intended to be “a permanent avenue of citizen participation” (from the original Chattanooga Venture brochure) that built on prior and parallel initiatives. It was terminated after a decade and had major ripples effects years later. Venture’s fundamental purpose was to turn talk into action via an inclusive, open process. It did not address any particular cause other that community decline; it was a catalyst and facilitator of other initiatives. It’s agenda was simply for the public to have a say in public planning and policy-making.

The major factor in Venture’s success was that key leaders, including the City Mayor, County Executive, and major funder, the Lyndhurst Foundation, did not impose an agenda or specific goals on Venture. The goal was to enable the agenda to emerge from community discussions, and that agenda was very broad and comprehensive. The importance of this feature cannot be over-emphasized. Venture’s “challenge agenda” was to get community input on five general topics, which enabled it to address issues and tap insights from across community divides:

• People - education and health

• Place - built and natural environment

• Play - Arts, culture, and recreation

• Work - economic development and jobs

• Government - management of public resources and services

Another key to Venture’s success was that it had an inclusive and very large board of directors, over 60 members, which ensured that it had connections to and participation from all parts of the community. Venture provided a quasi-public spaces for collaborative learning and coordinated action, and it went to where people were, at businesses, churches, community centers, etc. It had professional staff to run the programs, process the results, and feed them back into the process, active involvement of local media, particularly the two daily newspapers, and was fully funded by local foundations. The key factors were a space to engage, means to inform people, and capabilities to gather their input in a fair manner. A key question going forward is whether those factors can come together without substantial resources to support activities.

Venture worked via a series of structured public input sessions that used a version of nominal group technique (see ASQ Quality Resources for description) to gather participants ideas about one of the general topics. A two key elements of the process are that everyone was given a chance to speak and all participants’ inputs were written down exactly as they said it. Another important factor for Venture was bringing all sides so the inputs were diverse but moderated. Those inputs were aggregated into a “commitment portfolio” for the community; a set of goals or projects that those involved would work on together. Venture had a number of committees to address general issues—diplomacy, membership, publicity, etc.—and task forces to work on items in the commitment portfolio. “Future Alternatives” was both a committee on the range of possibilities and scenarios for the community and a general topic for public input.

Learning from other communities and via subject matter experts was a fundamental activity for Venture and was its genesis. Numerous collaborative learning activities led up to Venture, were integral to it, and flowed from it. Of course, individuals involved in Venture and related initiatives were learning but Venture also created new knowledge that was embedded in the structure of the community. The learning was a catalyst for new organizations, restructuring of the economy, government, and social services, and revitalizing the built environment, particularly downtown and areas along the river. Indeed, community venturing is a particular, methodical, intentional form of community learning.

Venture worked by empowering individuals to purposefully learn and work together. It did that by first listening to community members — the hopeful and helpful — without any specific agenda. People connected with each other, information, and resources based on what they said, their interests and issues. Venture provided the human capabilities and information tools as well as physical space is necessary for this to happen. What would it take to replicate some of what Venture did, especially with abundant community and tech resources, if not large amounts of money?

What to Do with Knowledge from Venture

Today, Chattanooga is vibrant and growing, with many wonderful activities and resources. That is no reason to settle. In fact, it can be seen as a challenge to do better, especially if continuous improvement, economic prosperity, environmental quality, and socioeconomic equity are important to community members. If we do not maintain what we have, we will lose it. Various organizations are working assiduously on these things — agencies, corporations, institutions, etc. — focused on their particular missions. But what lies across those efforts and between those missions? Where are the gaps, overlaps, and potential synergies?

More importantly, how do current activities and resources meet the needs of community members? What are peoples ideas and issues for the community? What do people want for and in their community? It is necessary to understand these things in order to understand how well needs are being met and where there are opportunities to do better or more.

There are no apparent resources for answering these questions, for doing community venturing. No organization exists for the purpose of listening to the voice of the community, translating it into a set of priorities, and turning the talk into action. No foundation is interested in funding community venturing. In concept, community venturing could greatly increase efficacy of and support for existing causes. It could increase impacts of philanthropy and returns on private and public investments, and even create new opportunities for and sources of investment. But, at this point none of the “usual suspects” have expressed interest in supporting community venturing.

Fortunately, Venture provided a “Do It Yourself Kit” (text of the kit is online here) that should be easy and simple for anyone to use. The dual challenges are to get people engaged and to share and summarize their inputs. The kit calls for a facilitator and moderator along with participants. What is really needed is a convener, an individual or organization that prospective participants recognize so they will see an invitation to participate as legitimate. The kit also calls for supplies, which includes butcher paper and markers, along with structure. An online platform could replace the supplies as long as the the facilitator has a means of displaying the results to the group. This would also make it easier to organize discussions as well as aggregate and analyze inputs.

The Larger Challenge

The challenge is to develop community venturing as a practice. This is challenging because the practice is necessarily shared. One or a few people cannot do it. It is about collaborating to create new opportunities and resources within a community in part by linking with external experts and other communities. The practice can be simple, especially when the structure and supplies are provided digitally. The rationale is clear — better solutions, greater buy-in, more effective resource mobilization and more efficient, equitable innovation — as are the results.

That said, it has to start somewhere. A few people must have a shared vision for a shared vision. They must use to tools to listen to the voice of the community and create opportunities for capable, caring people to come together around a shared vision. Part of that vision must be of community venturing as a practice. What would that look like? What needs could it meet? What is required to establish it and keep it on track?

Chattanooga created the prototype. We now have the opportunity to translate it into a practice that we can apply here and share with others. Pioneering the practice of community venturing, showing how people with modest resources can use it to transform their communities, will undoubtedly create multiplier and network effects that will have totally unforeseeable returns to our community. The starting point is simple: adapt Venture’s process to make it easier and more efficient, and use it to hear about what people value and what they want.

If you are interested in working on this, fill out the interest form, join the Study Group discussion online at https://venturing.chattanooga.digital/, and/or join in upcoming events, which you can find at https://luma.com/ChattanoogaVenturing. Watch this space for a more detailed analysis of inputs from key leaders from the Venture era... and some really cool tech stuff.