A new model for community leadership

By Patrick Muller

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Recently, I had the pleasure to participate in an event spanning Otis Road in Cedar Rapids, from Indian Creek Nature Center to Czech Village: an educational tour that started at the Center and ended at the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library.

Ostensibly, we spent a delightful autumn morning discussing climate phenomena, the environment, wetlands, water management, waste management, disaster preparedness, recovery, cultural heritage and community vitality. In truth, it was trail blazing - a historic moment - pointing the way to how learning and community leadership might be practiced tomorrow.

What we learn in our wired, social media-saturated, sustainability-aspirant, flat and transforming world are lessons perhaps we should have known all along. Organizational protocols and intellectual infrastructures need to respire, leaving breath for collaborations and conversations that might only yesterday have been unprecedented and unorthodox. Boundaries need porous malleability, allowing opportune, explorative connections instant germination.

Fences might make the best neighbors. Doors, windows and passageways probably make for the most vibrant communities.

Regional models of economic development and health care already have currency. Regional models of river management are taking hold. It's only a matter of time before we engage regional models of learning and community collaboration.

Desperate but determined after the 2008 flood, cables were laid for all kinds of cooperation and connectivity. Museums and libraries danced with malls. The flow of the Cedar's riverbed appeared as salient a model for accessing shared interest as county line demarcations or school district boundaries.

Could a model more instructive than Hancher Auditorium's be found? Once hobnobbing only with players like the Dresden Staatskapelle and Joffrey Ballet, it forged invigorating partnerships with towns, churches, high schools, diminutive entertainment venues, bars and a casino. What Hancher achieved macroscopically, neighbors in Iowa City attained on a micro scale, (unthinkably) breaching property lines to create a rain garden.

During our tour, representatives of a non-profit environmental organization, a non-profit cultural organization, a governmental agency and a for-profit media company presented a lifelong learning and leadership event outside the walls of school buildings and certification programs and not wholly inside the protocols and infrastructures of their respective organizations.

There are many enterprises here with multiple-platforms - a good example is a media company that prints a newspaper, maintains a website, and operates a television station. There are industries that have association across a spectrum.

Higher learning fits this mold - delivered by public, private, four-year, two-year and technical schools. We have robust exemplars of enterprises willing to collaborate within their own platform (really not that difficult a stretch ideologically.)

Not too many blueprints exist, though, for collaboration across the spectrum (a public radio station collaborating with a private newspaper or a private college collaborating with a public university, articulation agreements and guest speakers aside.)

Our tour presented a small but enthusiastic rendition of what we might begin to call ipsa - interwoven platforms, spectrally associated - engagement.

Collaboration is as potent a nutrient as competition.

Once-in-a-lifetime floods, financial meltdowns and impending ecological catastrophes shove us outside our comfort zones, forcing us to innovate or perish. Emboldened, fruitful thinking, however, can become matter-of-course practice in normal, prosperous times as well - ipsa engagement could be an essential substrate upon which this practice happens.

At the first NewBoCo, a local development official asked for what could this region be known? What could be its “Silicon Valley” tagline?

“The place where ipsa thinking was/is fortified, promulgated, practiced and polished” could be the answer.

Turn that answer into a sexy sound bite, and you have our branding tagline. Turn that tagline into daily ritual, and you have a self-generating, enduring mother lode for community vitality.

Patrick Muller of Hills is an artist and cultural advocate, and is a member of the Johnson County Historical Preservation Commission and the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences. Comments: patrickomuller@gmail.com