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Citistates
Reports | Why Peirce
Reports?
Answer:
To help prepare citistate regions for an increasingly
challenging global environment by encouraging them
to raise their sights. To think about world-wide
connections and possibilities. To use their assets,
especially their land and older cities and suburbs,
more smartly. To think about win-win strategies,
wealth creation, for all communities of a citistate.
And to get there by broadening partnerships of business,
government, universities, neighborhoods, and citizens
challenged to think in new and expansive ways.
So why is all this
necessary? As former HEW Secretary and Common Cause
founder John Gardner often notes, there’s sufficient
leadership talent in any moderate sized American
city to run a small nation. The problem: too much
of it is buried away in the ranks of the professions
and executive positions, and not available for fresh
thinking about the city. The Citistates team believe
the key to the future of American regions is to
unlock that talent, fuse it with the inherent skills
of the citizenry, and use the license of newspaper
commentary to reach virtually the entire reading
population of a region.
Peirce Reports are
journalistic, independent products. They are based
first and foremost on listening — interviews
with a broad cross-section of a region’s business
and government leaders, activists, neighborhood
representatives. They are not all-purpose formulas.
They’re not expected to substitute for fine
ongoing journalism in the local press, or for any
part of a citistate’s own civic life. But they
are intended to catalyze, to add perspective from
what’s happening in other American regions,
to add credibility to the forces of reform and civic
renewal inherent in American communities.
Where it seems necessary,
our reports do raise fears — You could call
them a sort of constructive destabilization. But
the goal isn’t to produce consternation, it’s
to spur creative thinking within the community.
A related goal: to
highlight constructive and challenging ideas that
interviews show have been germinating among community
leaders, but never received full public attention.
Bottom line: Peirce
Reports aren’t designed to solve anything.
They’re intended, in a positive spirit, to
stir things up. To leave the civic debate more informed,
energized, more focused on shared solutions, than
when the Citistates Group hit town.
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