MULTI-STAKEHOLDER BUY-IN
Concurrent Commitments
Bill Shore, Co-organizer of the Conference
Executive Secretary, Nature Network
www.nature-network.org

A dormant or declining downtown can seldom be turned around with a single injection of activity (a restaurant or government office).  Usually required is a group of reviving activities.  If a single one won’t work, who will take the first step?  What’s required are “concurrent commitments,” agreement among several organizations to act simultaneously.  It begins with a plan supported by all levels of government, nonprofits, education officials and the business community. “If you do this, I’ll do that.”  This process radically improved New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Bill Shore is executive secretary of Nature Network (founded in 2005) a collaboration among organizations dedicated to nurturing a healthy natural environment in the NJ-NY-CT Metropolitan region. He was a Senior Associate at the Institute of Public Administration from 1996 to 2003 after serving the Regional Plan Association for 35 years. While at RPA he pioneered approaches to public participation and wrote the 1968 plan which recommended focusing on a number of smaller cities that could be developed as "metropolitan centers" where offices, shops, colleges, hospitals and theaters would be concentrated. His article, "Recentralization: The Single Answer to More Than a Dozen U.S. Problems and a Major Answer to Poverty," was published in the 1995 Journal of the American Planning Association.