Together, we can solve challenges
that no one of us can solve alone.
Some neighborhood problems are too complex for any one group to fix. So we get the right people together: the people who live there, local nonprofits, and businesses committed to their communities. Then we help them work out what to do about it.
Who comes to the table
Neighbors You say what matters. In your own words, before anyone proposes a fix. You help decide how we'll know it's working. And nothing gets built unless you agree it's worth building. Find out more
We believe that community change happens at the neighborhood level — and that the people who live there can and should drive it.
How the work moves
Three stages. Two gates. Any of them can stop the work.
Connect
Listening, then picturing what's possible
We start by listening: what people actually want changed, and what's really causing it. Then the neighborhood says what better would look like, and we agree together how we'll know whether it's working.
Gate one — before any work starts
We only carry on where what the neighborhood wants and what a business already cares about genuinely overlap. If they don't, we say so, point you to people better suited, and stop. Walking away is a real answer.
Innovate
Working it out, then building it
Residents, nonprofits and businesses try things out together and test them with the neighborhood. Nobody gets to rule an idea out before it's been explored. Not the business paying for it, and not us.
Gate two — before anything is rolled out
The neighborhood has to agree the idea would actually make life better here. They don't have to approve of how we work, but they do have to be willing to live with the result. Without that, nothing gets rolled out.
Grow
Keeping it going, and adapting
Does it still work once we step back? If it only works while we're in the room, we built the wrong thing. What people learn here feeds whatever the neighborhood takes on next.
See the whole framework. It's the full version, with every step, who does what, and how it's measured. It's a big diagram, so it opens on its own.
Who pays for what
Paying for the listening doesn't buy the answer.
A business can fund the listening, but it can't shape what the listening hears. There are no conditions tied to the findings, no veto and no sign-off.
We run the process and we're the ones who interpret it, and the neighborhood checks that we got its priorities right before anything gets published.
Our fee is based on the complexity of the challenge we're facilitating, published, and the same whatever the result. We aren't paid more for telling a business what it hoped to hear. And most of every project budget goes to the organizations actually delivering the work, because the alternative is asking underfunded groups to absorb the cost of collaborating.
We'll publish the fee schedule once the pilot tells us what the work actually costs. Until then we'd rather show you nothing than a number we invented.
What we won't do.
- Work in a neighborhood without a trusted local organization already inside it.
- Take on something whose real causes sit well above the neighborhood. We'll point you somewhere better instead.
- Run the programs ourselves. The organizations already doing the work do that.
- Work on policy or campaigning.
- Work with a business that wants the findings softened, the credit rewritten, or the room controlled.
Each of those costs us work we could have taken. They're written down because a convener with no limits is just another vendor.
What we can claim
Two of these are empty on purpose.
We'd rather show you an empty box than fill it with something we haven't earned.
-
True today
The conditions are in place
A local organization that people already trust. A real overlap between what the neighborhood wants and what a business has committed to. Agreements with consequences if anyone acts in bad faith. And a way of measuring progress that the neighborhood picked before the work started.
-
Not yet
Results from the work
The pilot hasn't produced these yet. When it does, they go in this space, measured the way the neighborhood asked for, including the parts that came out worse than we hoped.
-
Not ours to claim
Change across the whole city
This box stays shut. Neighborhood change shows up in the things a neighborhood chose to measure, not in city statistics we take credit for.
Say Hello!
We promise there isn't a pitch. But if you want to talk through how this works, argue with a part of it, or tell us about your neighborhood, we'd like that.