Community Sustainability

Achieving community sustainability requires striking a balance between social, environmental, and economic costs and benefits. Because no one entity or sector can achieve such solutions on their own, sustainability also requires collaboration across sectors, jurisdictions, interests, and issues.

NPCC sponsors several projects aimed at improving collaborative approaches to achieving sustainable community solutions:

Oregon Solutions is a NPCC-hosted program that helps communities develop sustainable and collaborative projects that address challenges or opportunities. It provides the mechanism and the forum to bring diverse stakeholders together and help them reach agreement on what they will do together to solve the problems at hand. Oregon Solutions is currently managing 40 different projects over the next two years, and has completed thirty-five.

For more information about Oregon Solutions projects, contact Kim Travis at 503-725-9097.

Several other states and cities are developing their own Public Solutions programs to address the growing need for integrated, action-oriented, community based problem solving, modeled on the successes and lessons from Oregon Solutions projects.

  • California Solutions, a partnership between Community Focus and NPCC, was a demonstration/testing of a collaborative problem-solving process. The California Solutions process focuses on city-level community engagement on a single issue for a relatively brief (6-8 month) period. For more information about California Solutions, contact Stephanie Anderson.
  • Maine Solutions, hosted by the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, works with businesses, non-profits, government agencies and citizen organizations that are able to connect their resources, expertise and interests to collaborative, community based projects. For more information about Maine Solutions, contact Ron Beard.
  • Salt Lake Solutions is a new initiative for Salt Lake City that will engage the business, non-profit, and civic sectors in collaborative decision-making. Salt Lake Solutions is guided by a Steering Committee and projects are chosen based on a set of Community Objectives. For more information about Salt Lake Solutions, contact Michele Straube.
  • Virginia Solutions is a statewide initiative, hosted by the University of Viringia's Institute for Environmental Negotiation, for community collaboration and consensus building. Virginia Solutions involves appointing a neutral convener and forming a stakeholder Solution Team, then develops an integrated solution strategy that is embodied in a shared Declaration of Cooperation. For more information about Virginia Solutions, contact Frank Dukes.