Thriving Communities
What We Do and Why We Do It
This article gives an overview of the Thriving Communities initiative and why we do what we do.
What We Do
Thriving Communities helps ambitious communities to create mission-led change — change that demonstrates it is possible to ‘do what must be done’ in order to meet our challenges, harness opportunities, and thrive in the 21st century.
We help communities to find new ways to bring about radical changes that will benefit everyone, that their community needs, and that humanity globally needs.
Our core approach to community transformation, includes these 6 key elements:
- Mission-led change
- Process and portfolio management
- Enablers of change
- Acceleration team and governance models
- Creating transformative investment
- Collective strategic learning
The overall logic behind our approach is illustrated in this article, using the metaphor of a tree.
We focus on working with communities in southern and south-eastern Europe. We are already working with the city communities of Maribor (Slovenia), Skopje (North Macedonia), Križevci (Croatia), Niš (Serbia) and Sarajevo (Bosnia & Herzegovina) — on a collective mission to make these cities into some of the best possible places in Europe to live, work and visit by 2025 — and climate neutral by 2030.
Why We Do This
The way we have organised ourselves as human societies in the last couple of centuries has led to much good. It has also exacerbated deeply entrenched issues and inequities. Multiplied by the extraordinary acceleration to a global population of 8 billion or so of us today and, as Kate Raworth illustrates, we find ourselves far short of being able to live well in the 21st century — where everyone has the means to live well, without breaking the ecological systems of the planet. See diagram below.
For some time, we have recognised the risks while failing to sufficiently rise to the challenge — despite significant efforts. If in the coming decades we are to effectively respond to intertwined crises of health, climate, employment, inequality, conflict, ecological collapse, migration and trust — then we must reflect on what we need to do differently. We need to quickly find a different and better way of creating radical change in our communities.
The COVID-19 crisis also now represents an unprecedented moment in time to radically accelerate action to address the risks we face and instead build much more prosperous, resilient and thriving communities. If we miss this opportunity, our chances of success will rapidly diminish.
We believe that together humanity will solve for climate challenges and the impacts of the pandemic when communities focus on transforming into better places locally. Places that provide what is needed for everyone to thrive while eliminating their contribution to global problems.
To ensure that real change takes place, we need to make sure that all actors in communities are empowered to contribute to the change process. Citizens, business, academia, civil society, and different levels of government all have crucial roles to play. Ultimately, we believe that transformation of our communities by our communities will lead to the best possible future.
City communities will surely be key to the global change needed. Concentration of a rapidly growing human population in urban areas comes with the need to address multiple interrelated challenges in those places. City communities cannot solve everything though, and change in their surrounding regions and more rural communities will also be critical. Neighbourhoods are also a key place where change that is deeply connected to local communities needs to be nurtured — with an eye on the systems around them.
Communities everywhere are struggling with an entrenched way of working that leads to a proliferation of stand-alone projects rather than a systemic approach to transformative action. Pressure to take rapid, visible action often incentivises a focus on short-term and easy-to-measure actions, technical innovation and information-provision activities. In isolation these are not sufficiently challenging or changing the underlying system. The result is a growing gap between ambition and action; while entrenched mindsets, organisational and governance models, short-term incentive structures, and limited capabilities all limit our ability to work differently and create the change we need. The recent EU Mission Board recommendations on cities and regions reinforce the fact that success will demand a markedly different approach.
Forward Together
Thriving Communities is a collective initiative, involving a number of organisations with a wide breadth of experience and perspective. Together we bring expertise in process management, 21st century solutions and approaches, and the critical ‘enablers’ that are essential to transformative change in any community. Our core support alliance includes Korimako, Bankers without Boundaries, Material Economics, Democratic Society and Dark Matter Labs.
Working together, we can overcome the challenges and unlock immense value from transformative changes in our communities.
We can do what must be done, and reap the benefits.
Interested to join us? contact tim@korimako.org
