Our mission
Resolving complex issues through community collaboration.
Some problems belong to all of us. Every community has them. The ones where everybody holds a piece of the answer, but nobody holds the whole solution. Where the people who would be affected, the people who know the subject, and the people who could actually do something about it have never once been in the same room at the same time. Just imagine, what could we accomplish, if we actually worked on it together?
The Cornwall Collaboratory is a place to bring these folks together to resolve complex issues through a collaborative learning and innovation process. Participants come together, for a couple of hours, with the same information, and a professional facilitator to keep the work moving forward. And the best part – we are offering this as a public service. It is free to Cornwall.
The problem we are addressing
Something has changed in how we talk to each other.
It has happened in towns all over the country and it has happened here too. We read different things, not knowing what is actual truth. We form quick opinions without realizing the complexity of issues. We hear about each other before we hear from each other. By the time we end up in the same room, most of us already think we know which side everyone is on. We stigmatize each other before one word is spoken.
That is not any one person’s doing. It has built up over the years, in a thousand small ways, and all of us had a hand in it. The spread of misinformation on the Internet has only made the problem worse.
Meanwhile, the ways we have to work through a hard question are not built to deal with its complexity. A public meeting gives everyone a few minutes and a microphone. A comment period collects opinions one at a time, from people who never hear each other. A survey counts us and buckets us. None of these mechanisms were designed to help a room full of people with different interests build solution together, and none of them are at fault for it. Those mechanisms were just built for other purposes and they do those jobs as intended.
So here is the opportunity.
Put the people who care about a problem in one place. Give everyone the same facts to start from. Give them enough time to actually get somewhere, and a person whose only job is to keep the work moving and make sure the quiet people get heard. That is the role of the facilitator.
When you do that, people surprise each other. Positions soften into shared interests and common purpose. Somebody says the thing everyone was thinking. A trade-off nobody wanted to say out loud gets said, and then it can be dealt with.
None of that is complicated. It is just rare. It does not have to be. Instead, let’s make it a habit!
Building a great collaboratory
Nobody gives anything up.
A Collab takes no authority away from anyone. The Town Board still votes. The Village Board still votes. The school board, the planning board, the Chamber of Commerce, every one of them keeps every bit of the authority it had the day before.
What a Collab offers is the time and space to explore a complex problem or issue through structured activities and guided discussions to come to a resolution, and a co-created action plan that comes with the reasoning and rationale to back it up. Plans that are co-created by those actors and stakeholders who will be directly impacted by their outcomes – that’s how you design a resilient and thriving community!
That is the whole offer. We convene the collaboratory. We publish what comes out of it. The decisions stay exactly where they have always been.
It is not a government body. No office, no seat, no standing before any board.
It does not decide anything. What comes out of a Collab is worth what the people in it made it worth, and no more.
It does not take sides. The Collaboratory does not campaign, endorse, or lobby for its own findings.
If you serve on a board or a committee and you have an issue that needs more than a meeting can hold, this is for you too. Sponsor a topic. Sit in a Collab. Bring the question you have not been able to work through. That is not a conflict. That is the point.