[ad_1]
Think tanks have been around for decades. Think-and-do tanks are an entirely different matter.
But that is exactly what longtime Ombudsman Malin Burnham has in mind.
For the record:
09:03 July 15, 2021This column has been corrected to reflect the correct spelling of Tad Parzen’s name.
The establishment of the Burnham Center for Community Advancement in San Diego was announced on Tuesday, with Tad Parzen named President and CEO. Its goal is to bring community input, research, data, innovation, and collaborative design together to solve problems, create solutions, and advance the San Diego area.
“Nobody just needs another think tank,” Parzen emphasizes. “We need to ‘do’. We are unsuccessful unless something happens. “
Several years ago, Burnham and his wife Roberta named theirs and provided seed money to the San Diego Foundation’s Center for Civic Engagement.
“But we only got to the 50-yard line,” says Burnham. The ideas were there and there was a lot of discussion about civic issues, but the suggestions didn’t get over the finish line.
After the centre’s CEO retired, Burnham negotiated a friendly divorce from the program, and the civic center disappeared more than two years ago.
As fate would have it, about nine months later Mary Walshok, assistant vice chancellor for public programs at UC San Diego, approached him with news that the university would be erecting a building in the East Village. The upper two floors were reserved for non-profit organizations, the lower two for art exhibits and exhibitions, auditorium events and public meeting rooms.
“I think we were the first nonprofit to sign up for an office,” says Burnham. The new community development center should be able to move in before the end of the year, perhaps as early as October. With this change of focus and the new name, Burnham swears: “We’ll make sure we get over the goal line.”
To begin, a working partnership has been forged with the National Conflict Resolution Center that will help lead discussions on issues of concern to the fellowship.
Parzen says the center is “problem-agnostic,” which means that everything is on the table. “When a good idea seeps through and there is a critical mass of interest and identified resources to drive it forward, we are happy to get involved.”
Burnham describes the center as an architect and contractor, but not an operator. The center will advise, support, assist and even provide seed capital for purposes it deems worthy, but a third party has to do this.
“We’re looking for new ideas. We don’t have to be the writer. We bring people together, bring ideas together and see how we can best move forward. Then another group takes over, ”explained Burnham.
“We’re not trying to run the city and the county,” he says, but he does see that San Diego has great potential in areas that no one is working on today. In addition, the binational San Diego / Tijuana region is a gold mine waiting to be explored. this is what distinguishes our region from all others.
“Malin does everything in the team,” says Parzen; he brings the right people together around visionary ideas in order to realize positive things that promote the quality of life in our region. “It has to be a collective effort.”
While the feedback from the community will drive the initiatives that have been initiated, the areas of affordable housing, workers’ housing and the creation of a strong training and development pipeline for the local workforce will certainly be on the hit list of community funding.
The tired and neglected Balboa Park, which requires millions of dollars in delayed maintenance, is expected to be another focal point.
The Design Forward Alliance, named this week (alongside Moscow) as one of two finalists in its quest to make the San Diego / Tijuana region the world design capital in 2024, is an example of the early involvement of the Community Advancement Center, the Founded about 16 months ago as a non-profit 501 (c) 3.
The creators of the center advised and advised Allianz when they put together their package of offers that will put San Diego in an international spotlight.
“Our partnership with the Burnham Center for Community Advancement is critical to the success of the World Design Capital Initiative,” said Allianz President Michèle Morris. Their goal is to turn the WDC application into a catalyst that will help solve some of the biggest challenges in the San Diego / Tijuana area.
“Communion Before Self” has long been the Burnham motto. In 2016 he co-authored a book that propelled the idea.
His passion was recently fueled by two books he read: “Alienated America” by Timothy Carney and “Them” by US Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska.
Both books examine the loss of a large percentage of nonprofits (and volunteers) in our country that have traditionally provided assistance in a wide variety of areas including: health care, nutrition and shelter for the poor, music, arts and education.
“A lot of them have disappeared in the last 30 years,” says Burnham.
Because of this, when most people crouched during the pandemic, Burnham and Parzen met at Burnham’s downtown office every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning until 2 p.m. to give birth to their vision.
In addition to Burnham and Parzen, the board of directors is made up of various bourgeois personalities: Paula Cordeiro, Peter Ellsworth, Lisette Islas, Jack McGrory and Vincent Mudd. Advisory committees are also formed.
On Tuesday, Cordeiro posted online: “I am very excited to be part of this new initiative and look forward to working closely with our community to identify regional needs, find innovative solutions and address some of our most pressing problems.”
When the concept of a think-and-do tank emerged, Parzen rummaged around and found only one other company, the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University, which characterizes itself as a think-and-do tank.
“But in reality, they research and arrange to meet. They don’t update themselves, ”Parzen notes. “We haven’t found anything that does what we’re going to do … find a solution that really works and make it work.”
[ad_2]
Source link
