Learning Initiative

The Community Partnership Center’s (CPC) Learning Initiative is a program funded by the Ford Foundation to promote public participation in decision-making processes through participatory research, planning, and evaluation. It is based on the CPC’s pilot participatory evaluation of ten rural Empowerment Zones (EZ) and Enterprise Communities (EC) across the United States from 1996-1999.

Community Partnership Center's "Promoting Participation in Community Development Workshop 2000"
November 30, 2000 ~ December 3, 2000

With funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Ford Foundation, the CPC recruited citizen learning teams, led by a local coordinator, to use a ten-month process called the Learning Wheel to find out what differences, if any, were being made “on the ground” in the rural EZ/EC program. Most of the ten learning teams were located in the historically poorest rural regions of the United States, including the coastal and delta South, the Appalachian region, and the southwestern border states.

The results of these learning team participatory evaluations are available from our publications page. The Learning Team approach is presented in detail in “Promoting Participation in Community Development,” a publication developed for practitioners and community members.

The Planning Team approach is an expanded and methodologically richer version of the Learning Team approach that was primarily crafted for community development and planning practitioners, but is also appropriate for local organizers, community-based organizations, and community members. This approach is being developed for pilot implementation over the next several years, and is this basis for our work in Knoxville’s Empowerment Zone and the Sustainable Communities Project.

In order to expand the number of practitioners who can use these participatory approaches, the CPC hosted a national workshop, Promoting Participation in Community Development: Models, Methods, and Best Practices,” in November and December 2000. (Watch our website for the availability of a publication based on this workshop.) CPC has also been conducting workshops and other sessions at a variety of conferences, workshops, and national meetings of organizations interested in promoting public participation and shared decision-making.