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Broken Windows Brigade: New Street Lighting on the North Shore = Safer Downtown Friday, October 14, 2011

In the arena of Sustainable Development, experts often speak of designing infrastructure and services to meet a “triple bottom line,” that the contruction, use, and maintenance of a project are economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable. It’s easy to define the economic and enironmental sustainability of a project by simply asking “can it financially support itself?” and “does it accrue the lowest negative environmental impact possible?” Determining social sustainability is less exact, but crime prevention is a perfect example.

Recently, the Office of Sustainability for the City of Chattanooga completed a space-lighting project on the Walnut Street and Veterans Bridges and throughout the North Shore, arguably the “‘smartest’ urban lighting system in the nation.” A coordinated set of clear, bright, highly efficient LED street lights - connected to a digital network - gives city officials (particularly the Police Department) remote control and surveillance of the entire system, substantially lowering operations and maintenance costs. With plans to eventually expand the project throughout the downtown area, projections indicate the system should save the city $30-50 million over the next 20 years in energy savings.

The Broken Windows Brigade views this project as “a step in the right direction” as the lighting of public spaces definitely influences the amount of crime occurring within an area.

Chattanooga Northshore Lighting Project from Chattanooga Office of Sustainabi on Vimeo.
Considering recent issues with delinquent behavior in Coolidge Park, the completion of this project should prove to be a valuable tool for ongoing crime prevention on the North Shore.

Posted by Dave Walker in Safety
Shift Chattanooga: Why a STEM School Is Important for Chattanooga Thursday, October 13, 2011

How will we sustain our community beyond the construction of a Volkswagen manufacturing plant? How will we assure that the Chattanooga, and our region, establishes itself as a smart place to live and create jobs? As Warwick Sabin, the publisher of The Oxford American magazine wrote in 2010, “The only way to control our future is to summon the courage and confidence and intellect and energy to create the South that we would like to see fifty years from now.” And that requires us to understand our current short-commings as opportunities for innovation.

For instance, The Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce wrote a paper in July called, STEM: Good Jobs Now and For the Future, which stated that “in 2010, there were 7.6 million STEM workers in the United States, representing about 1 in 18 workers, but that STEM occupations are projected to grow by 17.0 percent from 2008 to 2018, compared to 9.8 percent growth for non-STEM occupations, and that STEM workers command higher wages, earning 26 percent more than their non-STEM counterparts.” This is incredibly compelling evidence of where we need to focus the education of our students. We cannot wait five or ten years to create schools that specialize in STEM education. This is why one of the most talked about issues in education is the creation of STEM schools, and this is why Hamilton County schools are considering establishing a STEM school in our community.

In August of this year, The ESA published a paper titled Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation, which states, “Women are vastly underrepresented in STEM jobs and among STEM degree holders despite making up nearly half of the U.S. workforce and half of the college-educated workforce.

Although women fill close to half of all jobs in the U.S. economy, they hold less than 25 percent of STEM jobs. This has been the case throughout the past decade, even as college-educated women have increased their share of the overall workforce—Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation

The report continues, saying, “Women with STEM jobs earned 33 percent more than comparable women in non-STEM jobs – considerably higher than the STEM premium for men. As a result, the gender wage gap is smaller in STEM jobs than in non-STEM jobs. Women hold a disproportionately low share of STEM undergraduate degrees, particularly in engineering. Women with a STEM degree are less likely than their male counterparts to work in a STEM occupation; they are more likely to work in education or healthcare. There are many possible factors contributing to the discrepancy of women and men in STEM jobs, including: a lack of female role models, gender stereotyping, and less family-friendly flexibility in the STEM fields. Regardless of the causes, the findings of this report provide evidence of a need to encourage and support women in STEM.”

The ESA also recently published a paper titled Education Supports Racial and Ethnic Equality in STEM, which similarly advocates, “Increasing the numbers of STEM workers among currently underrepresented groups through education we can help ensure America’s future as a global leader in technology and innovation.

STEM workers in all demographic groups, including the foreign‐born, earn more than their non‐STEM counterparts..—Education Supports Racial and Ethnic Equality in STEM

These inequalities are an opportunity for growth, as the ESA states, it “leaves an untapped opportunity to expand STEM employment in the United States, even as there is wide agreement that the nation must do more to improve its competitiveness.”

As Hamilton County schools move closer toward the deadline to submit a letter of intent (October 21st) to the Tennessee STEM Innovation Network to form a STEM school, it is imperative that our community discuss the importance of STEM schools, and their impact upon the sustainability of our community.

The Tennessee STEM Innovation Network, a partnership between the Tennessee Department of Education and Ohio’s Battelle Memorial Institute, have already established schools in Knoxville and Nashville based upon a model school formed in Ohio, and plan to devote $2 million to two schools one in East Tennessee and another in West Tennessee. The STEM schools founded create a unique connection between K-12 schools, post-secondary education, education organizations, and businesses to promote the development of STEM occupations within the community. As Nooga.com reported on September 29th when the Hamilton County Education Board met to discuss a STEM school in Hamilton County, Chairman Mike Evatt said, “If we were to be awarded a school, we would have to identify a location, but we would also have to sustain it, and that’s where the local businesses come into plant. It’s going to take the entire business community to wrap their arms around the idea and say, ‘Let’s make this work.’”

STEM v. STEAM
Within the STEM conversation, there is a movement to include Arts in STEM, and The Rhode Island School of Design supports STEM to STEAM, this movement:
STEAM represents the economic progress and breakthrough innovation that comes from adding art and design to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education and research: STEM + Art = STEAM. The value of art and design to innovation is clear: Artists and designers humanize technology, making it understandable and capable of bringing about societal change. The tools and methods of a studio-based education offer new models for creative problem solving, flexible thinking and risk-taking that are needed in today’s complex and dynamic world.

To learn more about the continuing STEM v. STEAM conversation please visit these links:
STEAM Not STEM
National Alliance for Media Art+Culture

Posted by Dave Walker
Revitalizing Our Cities Requires Dynamic Collaboration from Non-traditional Emerging Leaders Tuesday, October 11, 2011

The Let Go & Lead series recently featured Carol Coletta for a discussion about ‘Cultivating Relationships, Networks and Communities.’ Carol is president of ArtPlace, “a collaboration of top national foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts and various federal agencies to accelerate creative placemaking across the U.S.”

Highlights From the Conversation:
On Leadership: Leadership is happening outside of the traditional hierarchical structure. Leaders must learn to function in a network and work along a diffuse path.
On Community: To build a community, you need a strong sense of shared purpose. And that must be expressed in terms relevant to the people you want to engage.
On Chaotic Alignment: As traditional boundaries among stakeholders disappear, a new, networked model of authority has emerged. Influence is the new currency.
On Engaging the Younger Generations: The younger generations have grown up in a digitally connected community—which has shaped their value systems. They expect collaboration. They expect you to share.
On Talent Management: “We define opportunity as a city that develops all of its talent, and puts all of its talent to work.”

Dynamic Collaboration

The most recent issue of the Stanford Social Review featured an article titled Revitalizing Struggling American Cities. The author by Ben Hecht is the president and CEO of Living Cities, “an innovative philanthropic collaborative that blends the collective financial resources of its members and deploys their collective knowledge and experience to improve the lives of low-income people and the cities where they live.”

Several Principles That Guide the Work of Living Cities:

Create a resilient civic infrastructure: Problems such as stunted economic growth are complex and require long-term solutions. Yet often cities’ responses are technical and short-term, focused, for example, on supporting a better after-school program in one school or renovating buildings on one block. We need to require key decision makers from government, philanthropy, the nonprofit sector, and the business community to come together formally to drive long-term, more adaptive change processes.

Disrupt obsolete and fragmented approaches: Essential systems, such as education and transportation, were built decades ago and are based on now-outdated assumptions, such as the imperative of a nine-month school year to accommodate summer harvests. We need to give local leaders space to innovate and propose bold approaches that cut across traditional silos. We can’t “nonprofit” our way out of our problems—nor can we fix them solely through government grants or market forces.

Engage private markets on behalf of low-income people: If we’ve learned anything in two decades, it is that engagement of private markets and capital is critical to sustainability and scale. We need to support solutions that combine grants with debt to attract private sector money and bring mainstream market goods and services, such as grocery stores and financial services, to underserved people.

Establish a new normal: We must establish a new way to mainstream successful innovation. We need government and business, in particular, to commit permanently to driving public and private sector funding streams away from obsolete approaches and applying them to proven solutions.

Chattanooga STAND hopes to see Chattanooga’s emerging leaders tomorrow, October 12th, at noon for CityShare: Design + Build featuring Dan Harding, and at the kickoff Open Chattanooga (#openCHA) between 5:30-7:30 with pizza and beer at CreateHere. Please share your ideas, resources, and thoughts here prior to the event, so Chattanooga STAND can identify overlapping ideas and government needs in order to build teams ready to create new solutions at the event.

Chattanooga STAND plans to see these teams segue into the ‘social innovation’ track of 48hour Launch and share their ideas at the pre-event pitch night on Novemeber 3rd from 6pm-9pm. As mentioned at City Share, Chattanooga STAND is sponsoring the social innovation track this year and excited to put forth $2,500 to the winner, and encourages those interested to utilize the STAND data/results for idea generation.

For more information about Stand, please visit our website.

Posted by Dave Walker
Broken Windows Brigade: The Citizen Police Academy Monday, October 10, 2011

In less than two weeks, the Chattanooga Police Department’s Citizen Police Academy will graduate around 25 local residents, adding to an ever-growing force of Chattanoogans committed to taking every possible action to prevent crime throughout the city.

The Citizen Police Academy is an 8-week course (meeting one evening per week) designed to thoroughly educate citizens about the “ins and outs” of their local police department. The goal of the course is to “create positive interaction and communication between the department and the citizens it serves.” Participants are introduced to the main concepts and processes involved in keeping Chattanooga safe, from investigation procedures to appropriate self-defense measures. Hundreds of local residents have completed the course since it began in 1999, and many are still active as alumni and/or volunteers.

Graduates are also given the opporunity to work as screened-volunteers within the police department, and are usually asked to help with clerical work or support community outreach. This contribution is benficial to the department in many ways. For example, with civilians helping on certain tasks, officers can focus more of their time and energy on street duties.

For Chattanooga to become a safer city, more citizens need to be made aware of the best ways to prevent crime in their neighborhoods and cooperate with the police department most effectively. The Broken Windows Brigade’s efforts and the Citizen Police Academy’s mission are aligned toward this purpose. The more united our stance against crime, the less crime we will experience.

The next Citizen Police Academy course is scheduled for the Spring of 2012. For updates or more information, contact Wayne Jefferson with the Chattanooga Police Department at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Posted by Dave Walker
Why Public Education Must Be Preserved—Washington Post Op-Ed Friday, October 07, 2011

Shift Chattanooga

This Op-Ed by Peggy Zugibe, a member of the Haverstraw-Stony Point (N.Y.) Board of Education, was published on 10/04/2011 by the Washington Post. She is also a member of the Rockland Board of Cooperative Educational Services and a member of the board of directors of the New York State School Boards Association.

People often ask me why I’m a school board member. To be sure, it is an unpaid and largely thankless job. You make decisions that affect people’s wallets and their children, and emotions can run high. No matter what forms of academic progress our students achieve, some will say our schools are failing and call for radical changes.

But I love being a school board member because I believe in public education. I believe that all of us associated with public schools — school board members, administrators, teachers, students and involved parents and community members — are working to preserve one of our nation’s greatest assets.

Our Founding Fathers believed in public education. In 1785, John Adams wrote, “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.”

In the 1800s, when our country took in more immigrants and it became more diverse, education reformers saw public education as a means of creating productive citizens, ending poverty and crime and unifying an increasingly diverse population. Those societal goals are as relevant today as they were then.

Polls show that the American people value public education.

But the current political climate is downright hostile to public education. Teachers are viewed as underperforming, administrators as overpaid and school boards as overly contentious if not dysfunctional. In certain cases, the criticism might have merit.

But overall, schools and school boards do vital work. This is what democracy looks like.

Political scientist Benjamin Barber has argued that our public schools don’t merely serve the public but actually create the public: “Public schools are not merely schools for the public, but schools of publicness: institutions where we learn what it means to be a public and start down the road toward common national and civic identity.”

As a nation, we need to remind ourselves of the value of public education. This has been recognized by national education organizations such as the American Association of School Administrators, which has a terrific campaign called “Stand Up for Public Education.”

Also, the Center on Educational Policy has a great publication called Why We Still Need Public Schools that covers the history of public education and explains how public schools are linked to the common good. It cites six missions that our country has expected public education to fulfill. Our schools:

*Provide universal access to free education.
*Guarantee equal opportunities for all children.
*Unify a diverse population.
*Prepare people for citizenship in a democratic society.
*Prepare people to become economically self-sufficient.
*Improve social conditions.

Are those not worthy goals? Like our Founding Fathers, I believe that that my district and public education in general is serving the public interest. How else can we offer an equal chance for success to all students?

We owe it to future generations to preserve the ideals which have served our nation since its beginning. Our public schools have produced presidents, statesmen, scientists, sports and entertainment figures. We can’t let outside forces result in public education becoming a system of haves and have-nots. We must make sure that we remember what our Founding Fathers saw: that public education is essential to our country’s common good.

Posted by Dave Walker