In 1995, in the East Lake Meadows public housing complex located four miles from downtown Atlanta, only four percent of residents earned incomes above the poverty line. The unemployment rate was 86.5 percent, and the neighborhood was home to a multi-million dollar drug trade. In 1993, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) a $35 million grant to renovate the crumbling housing stock of East Lake Meadows. Renee Glover, who had recently joined AHA as President, realized that merely renovating housing would not create a safer, more prosperous community. Concurrently, Tom Cousins, Founder of Cousins Properties, Inc., formed the East Lake Foundation to support and lead an integrated and holistic community approach which would provide mixed income housing, cradle-to-college education, and community wellness resources through cross-sector partnerships. This case study tells the story of how Tom and Renee catalyzed a collaborative effort to transform East Lake Meadows.
“In our latest City Accelerator guide, ‘Resilience, Equity, and Innovation,’ we share the tools and processes four cities, Pittsburgh, Saint Paul, San Francisco and Washington D.C., explored in an effort to increase equity and fund infrastructure. With new approaches to managing public resources, these cities…
“It’s still early days for governments experimenting with pay-for-success (PFS) projects, in which governments ask private funders to foot the bill for social programs, and then agree to repay those funders if the programs achieve agreed-on results. As public budgets tighten and social challenges remain…
“Social impact bonds—also known as ‘pay-for-success’ contracts, since they are not true bonds, but rather performance-based contracts—aim to help governments experiment with new ways of providing social services. The basic concept is this: Private investors provide the original funding, and the government only pays if…
“Traditionally, statutory regulation was viewed as the primary mechanism for achieving environmental and social change. Its uniform system and top down implementation was expected to engineer social and environmental change at every location. However, this vision never constituted an entirely satisfactory empirical account of the…
“The literature indicates that social capital plays a crucial role in facilitating collective action in collaborative governance. Despite this important role, the extant literature has not systematically conceptualized what forms of social capital exist in the context of collaborative activities and when and where such…
“This chapter can be found in Innovations in Public Leadership Development. ‘This is the best single-source guide to leadership development in the public sector. It offers a wealth of advice for teachers, students, trainers, human resource officers, and established leaders. The all-original chapters include discussions…
“Defined as the process of establishing, steering, facilitating, operating, and monitoring cross-sectoral organizational arrangements to address public policy problems, collaborative governance has emerged as an institutional form valued by both professional and research audiences across a growing range of policy arenas. Practice has preceded theory,…
“Multi-level and collaborative governance are multifaceted concepts grounded in several academic disciplines, government orientations, and community-level experiences. This diverse foundation provides a rich and complex canvass for constructing and operationalizing ‘governance’. The fluid and organic definition of governance contributes to the diversified origins of the…
“We examine the adaptability of collaborative governance regimes associated with publicly managed ecosystems as they move from direction-setting to implementation phases. This is an under-researched topic and is particularly relevant given the growth of collaborative environmental governance efforts around the globe. Through an in-depth analysis…
“Collaboration has emerged as a central concept in public policy circles in Australia and a panacea to the complex challenges facing Australia. But is this really the cure-all it seems to be? In this edited collection we present scholarly and practitioner perspectives on the drivers,…