Giving Compass' Take:

•  Dan Porterfield, President, and CEO of the Aspen Institute, explains the importance of community engagement and collaboration at The Future of Cities: Connecting Innovation, Equity, and Empowerment Conference. 

• Why should city development work have a focus on community development? How are donors prioritizing community development work in their areas?

• Read more about cities, data, and the future of work and economic development. 

The Aspen Institute is dedicated to creating a free, just, and equitable society. Cities—home today to 80 percent of Americans—are crucial to that timeless vision.

Decisions about how to incorporate artificial intelligence into urban transit systems must be driven by the imperatives of equity and community legitimacy.

Decisions backed by data analytics can help support a city that espouses justice—one where no one is disadvantaged because of race, gender, sexual orientation, income-level, or geography.

This “Future of U.S. Cities” handbook reminds us that equity and legitimacy are not by definition in the DNA of innovation unless we make it so.

Again and again in our careers we have seen how changes in technology or the implementation of new innovations happens faster than the broader public’s engagement in the changes happening not with them but to them.

Personally, I see the critical importance of community engagement and change-making through the tangled story of education reform in American over the last 10-15 years. It doesn’t make sense to me that parents and students sit confused as polarizing debates rage around them about whether or not, for example, charter schools and new forms of assessment are beacons of a democratic future in which the citizens are educated for flourishing or if they reflect special interests, business practices, and the privatization, for the good of some but not all, of the public imperative to educate all equally.

If we don’t have all stakeholders at the table to co-create the future that we seek, to ensure that our innovations serve equity and are respected by all stakeholders for the legitimacy of the processes that develop them, we will find our new creations may increase efficiency, perhaps, but drive people apart.

Read the full article about connecting innovation, equity, and empowerment by Dan Porterfield at The Aspen Institute.