Tapping hidden resources

At the Atlanta February TTI Vanguard Conference, 'Embracing Blur,” Zipcar founder Robin Chase articulated a transformative model she called 'peers incorporated,” or PI.

The idea is that companies gain a competitive edge by working together and leveraging assets outside their walls.

Peer partners collaborate to capitalize on each others' strengths. Individuals with excess bedroom capacity, for example. have their idle resources aggregated on a commercial, large-scale participation platform such as Airbnb. Language-learning and translation service Duoliingo offers free instruction and uses learners' homework as crowdsourced translations for which the service's customers pay. Chase's shared transportation business is also PI.

A recent Giving USA Foundation report found that while giving to hospitals and learning or cultural institutions increased at least 4.5 percent in 2013, giving to social service organizations increased only 0.7 percent. Could Chase's PI be applied to enhancing social services in the Corridor and across the country?

Most current office and governmental operations leave their real estate virtually unused during evening, overnight and weekend hours. Arenas and concert halls - often funded with substantial public dime - are ghost towns with skeletal staff during many non-event days. Concourses of baseball fields and football stadiums are vacant of throngs during offseasons. Why, we ought to ask ourselves, are such large chunks of real estate idle for so much of the time?

There are many examples where school districts and municipalities collaborate to share cultural or recreational facilities, but how many schools combine student dining with opportunities to also serve low-income or senior dining needs? Assisted living and care centers often get sequestered in communities. Why not blend them into a large shopping mall, giving residents some access to social interaction and centers a larger pool of potential volunteers?

Food businesses already give excess capacity to food banks and shelters. But when there are heated/cooled concourses of shopping malls, why should anyone without residence ever need to sleep outside during weather extremes? If malls close at 9 p.m., why not open the doors from 9-11 to 'open call” or curated pop-up performances and emerging retail entrepreneur markets?

Sometimes we return to valuable ways that our new rhythms of life have lost. The age-old gardening principle of growing squash, corn and beans in multiple dimensions of the same space is making a comeback. When offices, stadiums, museums, malls and government buildings close down for off-hours, we ought to come up with imaginative and inspired ways to productively use those spaces in multiply-dimensioned and community-building ways.

The costs would not be borne by the host spaces but addressed by other means - such as PI models.

Immediately, a dozen reasons will roll off our tongues why these ideas are not feasible.

It will take some effort and culture shifts to think in such collaborative and blended ways, but let's charge ourselves with exploring just three ways we could make these ideas work.

l Patrick Muller is a visual artist living in Hills. Contact: patrickomuller@gmail.com