By Bob Brown, editor
The CVPost staff
Vicki Hoehn concedes there was a certain David vs. Goliath quality to the task awaiting her and Mike Huggins as they boarded a flight on May 18 bound for Cambridge, MA.
There, two days later, Hoehn and Huggins presented the final argument that Clear Vision Eau Claire – a collaborative effort among Eau Claire County government, business, education, and nonprofit agencies – is most deserving of a $100,000 award to be presented by Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
The annual Roy and Lila Ash Innovations in Public Engagement in Government Award recognizes initiatives that “represent the committed efforts of city, state, and federal governments to engage with the communities and citizens they represent,” according to the Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. “The Innovations Award is designed specifically to recognize government-led innovations that demonstrate enhanced public engagement and participation in the governance of towns, cities, states, and the nation.”
Hoehn, vice president of community engagement for Royal Credit Union, and Huggins, a former Eau Claire City manager, have been board members of Clear Vision Eau Claire since its founding in 2007. On May 20 they tried to convince judges that Clear Vision’s efforts to increase citizen involvement in democracy at all levels of government is more deserving of the $100,000 prize than is the work of these co-finalists:
- The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services – for launching a national dialogue on mental health issues in response to the Dec. 14, 2012, Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting tragedy in Newtown, CT.
- The state of Oregon – for an initiative to create a permanent infrastructure for uniting residents and elected officials in joint civic projects.
- The city of New York – for an initiative to involve the public in a “participatory budgeting” process.
“Those are very large programs and they have all sorts of lessons learned in dealing with very large issues, like Sandy Hook,” Huggins said.
“Are they huge? Yes,” Hoehn agreed. “But I think we have an equal chance, because the whole purpose of this award is to recognize innovation.”
And Hoehn and Huggins believe that over the nearly eight years of its existence, Clear Vision Eau Claire has devised truly innovative concepts and – perhaps more importantly – specific action plans that cities and towns of all sizes can use to involve their citizens more directly in developing and improving their communities.
“Our nation is made up mostly of smaller communities that don’t have a lot of the technical expertise that larger communities have,” Hoehn said, referring to the resources available to the other award finalists.
Clear Vision concepts easy to share
Traditionally, finalists for the Innovations Award have been specific government agencies being honored for specific programs or projects, Huggins said, adding, “We’re a little bit outside the mold of what seems to be the typical examples.”
Key criteria for the award include a program’s novelty, significance and transferability. That final criterion plays into one of Clear Vision’s primary strengths, Huggins says.
The Clear Vision Eau Claire method – focusing on small work groups implementing such innovative concepts as “power mapping” and “values house meetings” – doesn’t require large start-up costs and annual operating budgets. “So it can be transferred and replicated in a lot of communities, including in communities that don’t have a lot of financial resources,” Huggins said. “We think the idea of what we do can transfer to any size government, but especially to those in communities of less than 25,000 people.”
About 95 percent of the roughly 19,500 municipal governments in the United States serve communities of that smaller size, he adds.
Implementing Clear Vision’s concepts can begin with something as simple as forming a single work group of no more than 15 people to tackle a single small project, such as creating a community garden, Huggins said.
From there the possibilities are endless. “You can have one work group. You can have 50 work groups across the community,” he said.
In announcing the four finalists, Innovations Award sponsors cited Clear Vision Eau Claire for its involvement in community projects large and small – from an early program in which Clear Vision solicited grants that allowed nearly 9,000 new books to be distributed in Eau Claire schools to later, much larger efforts aimed at improving the status of underemployed workers, revitalizing Eau Claire’s downtown, and advocating for new facilities, including the Sojourner House homeless shelter, the Eau Claire County courthouse expansion and the proposed Confluence Project.
Award nomination came from D.C.
Clear Vision Eau Claire’s first nomination for the Ash Innovations Award came last summer from Matt Leighninger, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Deliberative Democracy Consortium, which defines itself as “a network of practitioners and researchers who practice, study, or champion public deliberation and democratic governance.”
Leighninger first learned about Clear Vision Eau Claire through contacts with Huggins.
Since retiring as Eau Claire city manager in December 2011, Huggins has worked for the International City/County Management Association (ICMA), a Washington, D.C.-based organization whose mission is “to create excellence in local governance by developing and fostering professional management to build better communities.”
While conducting civic engagement training on behalf of the ICMA, Huggins has met with Lieghninger often at conferences.
“We’ve talked with Matt and I’ve shared what we do,” Huggins said. “Many times when I’m doing a presentation I talk about Clear Vision.”
After Leighninger’s nomination, Clear Vision Eau Claire board members submitted a two-page report about their project. In December they learned they’d been chosen from more than 500 nominees to progress to the second round of the award competition. “That was very exciting,” Huggins said.
By the end of January, the Clear Vision board submitted nearly 20 pages of detailed responses to questions posed by the award judges.
At that point, Huggins said, “we were just hoping to be in the top 25, because we knew the information about those projects would be communicated to other agencies and local governments.”
Near the end of March, word came that Clear Vision Eau Claire had been named a finalist for the $100,000 award. But that news couldn’t be shared until the public announcement was made last week at Harvard.
Minnesota professor conducted Eau Claire site visit
In early May C. Daniel Myers, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, conducted a two-day site visit to Eau Claire as part of an in-depth evaluation of each finalist.
During his visit, Myers met with a wide range of people, including the Clear Vision board, leading advocates of the Confluence Project, and members of the Eau Claire City Council and Eau Claire County Board.
Tom McCarty, the former Eau Claire County administrator who left recently to become city administrator in Stillwater, MN, returned to Eau Claire to speak with Myers on behalf of Clear Vision.
Myers also met with local residents who participated in Clear Vision-sponsored projects, including the creation of Sojourner House and many of Eau Claire’s bicycle-pedestrian trails.
There’s no way of knowing what Myers reported to the award judges, Huggins said. But, he added, “I felt the meetings in Eau Claire went well.”
Winner to be announced next month
On May 19 representatives of the four finalists participated in a series of preliminary workshops at Harvard. The next day they made their last pitches to the judges. There was a strict five-minute limit on the final presentations, and each was followed by a 10-minute, question-and-answer period.
The winner of the Innovations Award will be announced in June, but there will be no losers.
Hoehn and Huggins believe there will be lesser cash prizes awarded to the award runners-up, but that hasn’t been confirmed.
“We’re approaching it as winner takes all, but we’re hoping there’s a consolation prize,” Hoehn said.
Even if they leave complete the competition with no money in hand, Huggins believes the recognition that comes with being a finalist in this prestigious national competition will reap great benefits for Clear Vision Eau Claire.
“We’re hoping that with that level of recognition we will be able to gain support from other grant-funding organizations,” he said.
On a personal level, becoming an Innovations Award finalist “is incredibly gratifying,” Huggins said, adding that having Clear Vision Eau Claire viewed nationally as an innovative program “is a pretty cool thing. This is an affirmation and a confirmation of what we’ve thought for a few years.”
Prize money would help spread Clear Vision concepts
And if Clear Vision wins the $100,000 award?
“Primarily, that funding is to allow you to transfer your program to other communities,” Huggins said.
Some of the funds could be used to make Clear Vision Eau Claire’s training manual and other materials more easily accessible to other communities in an online format, Hoehn said.
“We’ve had a goal of making the Clear Vision model something that becomes second nature,” she said. “That’s where the dollars will come in.”
Huggins agreed, saying, “I’m really interested in sharing what we have. I’m fairly convinced this Clear Vision stuff can revitalize and refurbish how local government works.
“It’s something of great value that can help a lot of people in a lot of communities to improve their communities,” he added. “That’s pretty cool stuff. I mean, that’s why I went into the career I went into.”
As Hoehn looked forward to the May 20 final presentation, she paused to look back upon a moment of particularly personal significance. During a brainstorming session when the fledgling group was looking for a name, she was the one who referenced the English translation of Eau Claire’s French name – “clear water.”
“I feel very proud that I was the one who threw Clear Vision out on the table,” she said.
Bu as she looked forward to the David vs. Goliath-like task, her feelings were mixed.
“There is a lot of responsibility sitting on my shoulders and Mike’s shoulders to represent our organization. So yeah, I’m feeling some pressure,” Hoehn said. “But I’m also feeling proud. We’ve broken through to a whole new level; we’re being recognized on a national level. I’m elated that we’re getting this recognition.”
A full list of the Top 10 programs, including the finalists, in this year’s Roy and Lila Ash Innovations in Public Engagement in Government Award competition is available at http://ash.harvard.edu.
(Mike Huggins is a member of the Chippewa Valley Post board of directors.)