About the Protocol

Just Communities is Designed To:

  • Unlock the power of resilient leaders, community-based organizations, developers, and municipalities in advancing racially equitable and environmentally regenerative development of our built environment.

  • Help community teams deliver meaningful social, economic, and environmental outcomes in the areas of civic participation, housing, economic development, transportation, public health, safety, food, parks and open space, energy, water, and environmental protection.

  • Usher the next generation of the EcoDistricts Protocol 1.3 – reimagined with the input of over eighty leading equitable and sustainable development practitioners.

Why Just Communities Is Needed

We are grappling with a number of interconnected and overlapping challenges that require an intersectional and multi-solving approach to urban and community development. These include:

Equity isn’t being effectively addressed
  • Growing health disparities
  • Rise in distrust and political polarization
  • Accelerating housing insecurity and homelessness
  • Rising income and education inequality
  • Rising threats of violence against people of color
  • Increasing levels of social isolation and social disconnection since the pandemic
  • Loss of culture and local knowledge in the face of rapid development
OUR NATURAL SYSTEMS ARE FAILING
  • Accelerating climate change
  • Unprecedented biodiversity loss
  • Rapid land conversion
  • Excess nitrogen and phosphorus and microplastics pollution in our waterways
What makes us different?
  • Too many land use, community development and infrastructure projects do not achive the goals they set out to achieve.
  • The Protocol is designed to empower a diferent model of urban and community development based on people coming together, in a structured and collaborative way, to achieve large scale social change. This is known as Collective Impact.
  • A Just Community requires a commitment to building a multi-organizational partnership that leverages talent, time, and treasure towards a meeting common set of goals. We call this a civic–public–private partnership (CPPP).
  • Collective impact calls for the creation of common agenda and vision; the establishment of shared measurements and mutually reinforcing activities; and lifting up of a multi-party governing body that is supported by a backbone organization.
We are guided by collective impact
  • Too many land use, community development and infrastructure projects do not achive the goals they set out to achieve.
  • The Protocol is designed to empower a diferent model of urban and community development based on people coming together, in a structured and collaborative way, to achieve large scale social change. This is known as Collective Impact.
  • A Just Community requires a commitment to building a multi-organizational partnership that leverages talent, time, and treasure towards a meeting common set of goals. We call this a civic–public–private partnership (CPPP).
  • Collective impact calls for the creation of common agenda and vision; the establishment of shared measurements and mutually reinforcing activities; and lifting up of a multi-party governing body that is supported by a backbone organization.

We Believe

In order to transform our communities, we need the following conditions:

  • Civic-public-private project governance models to advance equitable and regenerative development, and centered in the needs and wisdom of the community

  • Comprehensive performance-based district and neighborhood scale implementation plans that leverage civic and private investment and community action

  • Holistic local policy frameworks to enable equitable and regenerative district and neighborhood development

Just Communities is a Bold Reimagination of How Communities Grow

We have developed a set of comprehensive bedrock PRINCIPLES that inspire and guide our work

Learn More
Protocol Overview About the Pillars