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The Positive Change Collaborative is an innovative approach to creating true change by engaging researchers, volunteers, and activists in local areas and networked across the country in identifying, conceptualizing, developing, and attacking community challenges. The goal is to create a group interested in learning, growing, and collaborating with others in their communities, schools, neighborhoods, states, and nation to create positive change.
To do this, we have created a national registry in which we encourage anyone interested to register. Members of this registry will be provided with regular updates of information on a number of topics, including programs, laws and regulations, and other topics of interest. By December, we will also provide local areas with forming or established collaboratives web subpages for activity coordination, sharing of information important to their goals, and blogging about activities and results.
If the national registry is made up of individuals forming groups in many parts of the country who are working in their own areas, then why should we form this collaborative in particular? The answer is easy.
What is tried in one location may be partially or completely useful in other locations. Not all areas have interested researchers and activists with skills on which to draw. As multiple groups try different approaches to a problem, it would be useful to collaborate on what works and what doesn’t. As groups in rural areas develop programs without the presence of researchers, it would be wonderful for them to draw on the knowledge of multiple researchers without incurring large costs.
In other words, as communities grow increasingly concerned with using their resources most effectively, it will be useful to draw as many resources together to ensure the success of any activity as possible. Gathering researchers from different locations with different areas of relative expertise is important. Gathering large groups of individuals willing and able to create the changes they learn about and select from the options presented to them is critical. Gathering the individuals and resources available to create change more easily and quickly can make a be the pivot point between success and failure.
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