Surdna Foundation's Five Year Initiative to Advance Smart Growth May Have Found Gold In Sacramento

Hooper, the Surdna Foundation, along with the California Center for Regional Leadership and Funders Network for Smart Growth co-hosted a conference in Sacramento this month for both California regional leaders and regional leaders throughout the country to look at smart growth and how to advance it. Speaking as a co-convenor, what was the objective of this conference?

We brought together select invitees in California's capital city as part of a long-term Surdna grant initiative around smart growth. Our intent: to highlight the experiences of different smart growth efforts, both of place and conditions, with regard to implementation of smart growth strategies. Surdna's initiative supported smart growth planning in four states. The states include: New Jersey, which had a long-standing state plan; New Mexico, which really didn't have more than a glimmer in its eye about smart growth prior to this project; as well as Maryland and Utah.

Our original purpose in convening this particular conference was to have our grantees in the four states download everything that had happened in the five years of our funding initiative. But, as we have repeatedly done over the last five years when we have met in host states, we have scheduled, to compliment grantee knowledge transfers, site visits to see what was happening on the ground.

For this meeting, I thought it would be of interest to find a place where there was a sense of a major emerging smart growth opportunity. Many of us have heard of the voluntary efforts in smart growth ongoing in Sacramento and in Southern California. We heard much about them this morning and we easily could spend the whole day hearing about them. What I think made this gathering particularly exciting was the buzz around the Schwarzenegger administration. In speaking with the governor's cabinet secretaries, I began to get the sense that there might be something exciting happening in California-more than anyone would have anticipated even six months ago.

This meeting has evolved from focusing simply on the sharing of regional stories to the discussion of a big state with a significant story potentially emerging. For those attending who are not from California, they will benefit from being able to hear about California's experience with smart growth planning and may return home with the sense that California may emerge soon as the leader of this movement nationally.

So far, I would say that the meeting has exceeded my expectations. By what we heard from Secretary Sunne McPeak, it is clear that these folks really get it. They also get how this is an issue that is affecting everything and how everything affects it.

By choosing to invest in smart growth projects in Maryland and New Jersey, both of which had state initiatives in support of smart growth, surely Surdna and your grantees have learned much about strategic alliances with state government to advance a smart growth agenda. What are the lessons learned that might be of value for Californians?

Well, the four grantee states are Utah, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Maryland. If you bring together the experiences of the four states, you begin to have an interesting data set from which you can extract lessons about what kind of a toolbox you need to deal with smart growth.

One lesson we heard in today's discussion is focusing on who and how you engage coalitions of support. Each of those states have successes and failures to report on their engagement strategies. First and foremost we heard about the need for broad coalitions, how you form them and what you do with them. And these experiences varied from place to place.

The second lesson we heard from all of those states is the degree to which the smart growth agenda can successfully be connected to the whole agenda surrounding the state's economic well-being, jobs, equitable access to resources and so forth.

And the role of the Governor in these states; how important is leadership from the top?

In two of the four states I have mentioned, there have been governors who have come forward and said the right things about smart growth. In New Jersey, Gov. Glendening truly put some of them into policy. However, the lesson is that committed and engaged coalitions are necessary in order for this stuff to stick.

Also, you need buy-in and understanding from the rest of your government, Governor's cabinet, and from other elected officials in your state. It's my sense that while California is a huge state, you may have more of those elements in place than we saw in the states we've been working in. We've seen progress in our four states, but not enough. There just are not enough people working on smart growth. Perhaps, part of the reason is the question of what is the endgame? Is the end game simply to avoid further negative change? Is the endgame to actually have a place in 10-20 years that looks better than it does today? I see this question of defining the endgame of smart growth planning as the very important question that has yet to be answered in any of the four states in which we are working. Although, they've all made some progress. For California, if what we heard today happens and happens in a fully integrated fashion, you could have an endgame here. That is amazing given all of the problems in the state.

We heard a lot at this conference about integrated, holistic, place-based, smart growth strategies. Put in simple terms what the endgame of smart growth ought to be?

There are two things that I would say are idiosyncratic to me. One is a return to common sense, a world where we don't spend our money and conduct our policy implementation and govern ourselves and organize our civic sector in silos. We need a world where people understand how things go together and figure out how to solve problems in a way that respects the system in which they exist. And that's common sense. You still have small little pockets where they don't have services so they just have to take care of themselves.

Second, it's probably not realistic to expect that we're going to see some sort of utopian place where things are truly better than they were. But, certainly if you look around the world at some of the great places, it's possible to imagine: a) a place where we've held the line against further bad change, and b) a place where we've managed to make what we got work much better, look much better, feel much better, and have a broader group of people involved in enjoying it. It's also important to recognize that we've been able to achieve our goals in a system governed by our democratic traditions, that we're able to credit our system with being able to do that. That isn't something that people can do in places where taxes are high and government spending is a non-issue or where the government is not democratic at all. I am confident we can do it in our own system.

Is Surda an anomaly when it comes to foundation support for smart growth and sustainability? Here in California, the Irvine Foundation was significantly involved for a number of years; but has now withdrawn. A number of foundations supportive of the environment focus less on the urban agenda and more on preservaton of open space. What explains Surdna's long term interest in smart growth, livable communities, and sustainability?

First, I'm not sure we're an anomaly. If you look at the Funders Network for Smart Growth, there are a hundred members and they are not only environmental foundations. When we started the Funders Network, it was only environmental foundations talking to each other and I insisted that we had to broaden things, only to lose some of the environmental funders. So, I'm not sure it's that much of an anomaly.

Why aren't the environmental foundations, at least the national foundations, working on this issue? There are several reasons. One is that we are living through an era in which there is a sense that environment is under siege from the actions of folks at the federal level. So, a number of foundations have felt that they had to put all of their resources into defense-defending our national environmental laws.

Another piece has to do with the drop across the board in the last five years in foundation funding, about a 10-20 % drop. Yet another reason stems from a major drop in certain foundations' involvement due to under-performing investments. Some foundations have experienced changes in leadership and changes in direction.

Nevertheless, the issue actually has a lot of attraction. To me, part of the challenge however is going to be able to find ways to measure what foundation investments do and also how foundations understand that this is a long-term agenda. Almost anything that is complex and important to change is a long-term proposition and performance measurement is challenging, to say the least.

We've heard today much about the potential role of community foundations vis a vis smart growth. Have you, representing a national foundation, had much collaboration with community foundations and what's your take on the possibility of local community foundations being in the lead re support for smart growth?

Well, I wouldn't say that Surdna has had direct collaboration with community foundations. We funded one of the examples you heard about at the conference, the East Bay Community Foundation, because we thought that it might be an inspiring example. But, part of grant-making is working with other funders and helping to learn collaboratively. To that end we helped create the Funders Network for Smart Growth. The Funders Network has a major outreach program to try to help community foundations understand the intersection between their approach to these issues and how they can be proactive and how it can benefit them by bringing more dollars into their endowments.

The future of funding for this issue is going to be with place-based funders-whether they are community foundations, family foundations, or other foundations-that have multiple issues intersecting in the place in their region of focus. Those foundations have a long-term commitment to be there. If nothing else has come out of the Funders Network and the work that we've done, I hope at least that we've helped to raise the understanding of community foundations on the interconnected nature of this issue for regional development.

There's been much said today about the downside of governments, universities, and non-profit institutions addressing growth and development from a single issue/ silo point of view. What has been your experience in assisting civic and institutional leaders to work collaboratively on an integrated, placed based public agenda?

Within the foundation, we strive to find ways to collaborate with other programs. This often is not easy because of the way our missions and program goals are written. My experience is that our day-to-day agendas make it hard for people to break out of silos. Part of the reason for that, and one of the causes of the more global problem of silo thinking, has to do with language. Finding a way to develop a common conversation is extremely challenging. There are a few people who are very talented doing that and those are perhaps our best leaders.