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89 Nat'l Civic Rev. 1 (2000)

handle is hein.journals/natmnr89 and id is 1 raw text is: NOTE FROM THE PRESIDENT IN 1994, the National Civic League launched an ambitious effort to engage organizations from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors in a national dialogue on community renewal. The hope was to bring together partners from across the country in a network that would raise the profile of community- based problem solving and allow organizations doing work in a variety of issue areas to share information and create new partnerships among themselves. We called this effort the Alliance for National Renewal (ANR). At first, some of the people we talked to about the idea were skeptical. It may have seemed too ambitious to some observers. Others felt that other groups were already doing similar projects, so why duplicate their efforts? We invited groups and individuals to attend a meeting and asked if there was a need for such an initiative. In May 1994, 130 individuals representing more than forty national and community-based organizations met to discuss this in Washington, D.C. The response was so positive that we went forward with the initiative. Undoubtedly the success of this first meeting was due to John W Gard- ner, who was serving as chair. A former secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, a founder of Common Cause, and a widely read author of books on leadership and renewal, Gardner was dismayed by the mood of pessimism and cynicism that seemed to have gripped the American public. Opinion polls and surveys suggested that public confidence in some of our most important institutions was falling. At the national level, the political dis- course often seemed stale and contentious. This negative mood, however, con- trasted sharply with a wave of public innovation that was occurring at the grassroots level. Whether the issue was public safety, housing, education, or community health, community problem solvers were making inroads against an array of challenges. In the first year of ANR, we explicitly laid out the principles that provided a basis for common effort. ANR partners agreed on the importance of taking individual responsibility to meet shared challenges. They understood that diverse voices added vitality to common purpose. They believed in revitaliz- ing communities through collaborative efforts of the public, private, and non- profit sectors. They sought to remove the barriers to individual growth and fulfillment that face some members of communities. Finally, they agreed on transforming institutions and organizations at all levels, from local to national, to become more active participants in community renewal. There was general agreement among ANR partners that the media did not provide enough coverage of community successes, instead focusing on prob- lems and conflicts. There was also a widespread feeling that people who worked in different issue areas did not always talk to one another. Most agreed that an initiative such as ANR could make an important contribution if it could NATIONAL Civic REVIEW, vol. 89, no. 1, Spring 2000 ©Jossey-Bass, a Wiley company 1

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