The Innovation CaféSpecial Conference Features
Innovation Café
The Innovation Café is a new twist on a traditional cyber café. The Innovation Café provided a physical space during breaks for refreshments, networking and reflection. But even more than that, the Café is also an online place where conference goers posted introductions, shared ideas, took surveys and helped shaped the conference. The virtual café remains open. You are welcome to visit!
Roundtable Discussion: “Issues and Actions”
This session challenged participants to interact in new ways while reinforcing the idea that anyone can innovate. Participants used strategies for innovative thinking—visioning, modifying, exploring and experimenting—to discuss community development’s “hair-on-fire” issues identified by conference participants themselves.
Facilitator: Julia Young, Vice President, Facilitate.com
Breakfast
Breakfast at the conference served up more than bacon and eggs.
On Thursday, conference-goers enjoyed a little Swamp Gravy with breakfast. Swamp Gravy, the folk-life play of Georgia, is an original, crowd-pleasing blend of comedy, drama and music that transforms southern life into unforgettable theater. Performers from Colquitt, Ga., traveled to St. Louis to present a shortened version of the play. The play is part of a community arts, cultural, heritage tourism initiative that has revitalized a town.
During Friday's “Breakfast and Brainstorming” session, participants discussed innovative ideas and breakthrough discoveries they heard during the conference and set the stage for turning those new ideas into real results.
Facilitator: Michael Torrens, CFED
“Fed Prize” Challenge
Exploring Innovation participants had the chance to test their innovation skills in the “Fed Prize Challenge,” a contest that asked participants to submit their most creative response to a question on the minds of community development practitioners.
Specifically, the St. Louis Fed posed this challenge: “Based on traditional models, the viability of today’s community development sector looks bleak. Describe how an innovative approach could change that horizon. What new structural changes, measures of success, funding tools, partnerships and comprehensive approaches will enable the community development sector to reinvent its role and sustain itself in the 21st century?”
The winners were Ben Steinberg of Southern Bancorp and Karl Cassell of the Cedar Rapids Civil Rights Commission.
Steinberg impressed the judges with his description of an innovative approach to improving communities by providing access to capital in areas of persistent poverty in a way that is scalable, replicable, sustainable and effective. The core of this approach is building lasting partnerships that empower local leadership to drive comprehensive community revitalization. “Instead of waiting for borrowers to approach Southern, Southern, guided by the community goals, creates and solicits opportunities to lend and leverage resources,” Steinberg wrote. He outlined a geographically focused, bank-centered community development strategy that has delivered real results, decreasing poverty and unemployment, increasing high school graduation rates, and leveraging more than $70 million in investment.
Steinberg won a scholarship to the CFED Assets Learning Conference in Washington, DC.
Cassell’s winning submission was based on a project that uses an urban radio station and the Internet to link economic development, social awareness, education and music. He described a model where technology and information are used to support and sustain community development efforts. KOJC opens opportunities for lesser-known artists and small businesses. “KOJC Radio will stand out amongst current models of radio stations because of its unique vision and focus on providing critical thought-providing educational programs; access to social and human service outlets; opportunities for economic development; consumer playlist choice; and the latest in technology to better serve the listener,” Cassell wrote.
Cassell won a scholarship to the NeighborWorks Training Institute sponsored by NeighborWorks America.
exploring: searching or traveling for the purpose of discovery innovation: to add value by applying a new idea or method to something established. |