Our cities and communities 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
- Rising income and education inequality
- Growing health disparities
- Accelerating housing insecurity and homelessness
- Rising political polarization and distrust
- Increasing threats of violence against marginalized communities and people of color
- Growing levels of social isolation and social disconnection
- Loss of culture and local knowledge in the face of rapid development
OUR NATURAL SYSTEMS ARE FAILING
- Accelerating climate change and global warming
- Unprecedented biodiversity loss
- Sea levels rising
- Growing water and air pollution from agriculture, ranching, forestry, and industrial processes
What Makes the Protocol Unique
Just Communities is a people-centered, process-based equitable and regenerative development framework, management tool, and verification platform that:
- Centers inequity and climate change as core drivers for change
- Provides a rigorous and practicable pathway for action
- Centers the community in all aspects of planning and implementation
- Applicable in district, neighborhood, and campus settings
- Promotes trust and a broader sense of ownership
- Requires the creation of key targets and performance metrics
- Emphasizes shared values and collaboration
- Acknowledges professional and lived experience
- Supports ongoing implementation and verification over time
What Success Looks Like
The Protocol helps community development project teams and organizations transform neighborhood, district, and campus by creating:
- 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 implementation plans that leverage public, private and civic investment and community action, and
- Robust process management and monitoring tools to measure impact over time.