Creating Effective Place-Based Initiatives

Place-based initiatives can take many forms and involve many diverse community stakeholders. But through our work with leaders and practitioners across the country, the Population Change Institute has identified six capacities that are needed to drive high-impact place-based initiatives.

The Collective Capacities

Collaboration to create and practice a shared vision

Creating broad community goals as an umbrella for synergistic strategies
Bringing people together for collective action
Motivating people to work together to achieve North Star goals
On-going management of interactions, conflicts and competition

Active engagement in community change efforts

Helping community groups move effectively from planning to action
Training people to gain knowledge and skills needed to do the work

Distributed leadership of equity-focused community change efforts

Building diverse resident voice and power through shared leadership
Community network meetings support inclusive participation, networking and self-organizing
Network members share leadership and network is not dominated by any organization of sector

Measurement and use of data to guide community change efforts

Fostering community partnerships through data sharing
Increasing local capacity to collect, share and report local process and outcome data
Gaining situational awareness through use of community data
Involving residents in making sense of local data
Creating a change narrative from situational awareness

Effective, innovative community change programs, policies, and practices

Structuring improvement process through iterative cycles of data-informed action and reflection
Coordinating collective action through hubs and activity clusters

Infrastructure to support, sustain, and spread community change

Maintaining a strong network of institutions, organizations, and community residents
Building network connections through diverse communication strategies
Leveraging and aligning resources and policies to invest deeply in community change
Sustaining network infrastructure with local, tribal, state and national public and private funding and resources
Planning to implement solutions on a community-wide scale

Have your Network Take the Survey

New Survey Finds that Place-based Initiatives are Building Six Types of Collective Capacity to Create Healthier, More Equitable Communities.