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Between June and September of 2012, with the support of an Urban and Regional Policy Fellowship from the
Washington DC-based German Marshall Fund of the United States, I visited the three areas to look at the
policies and projects in question. During this time, I interviewed over 160 individuals, evenly spread between the
cities, with a very small number in Washington, DC. The interviews were mainly with those involved in specific
policies and projects: elected officials, city council staff, non-profit managers, community groups, and businesspeople.
This project also involved background reading and interviews with individuals with a wider view of
their cities to get a more balanced take. These additional interviews helped build up a much bigger picture of the
cities and of issues around fundraising and volunteer use. Since that time, I have undertaken further background
reading to examine issues raised in the interviews and, in the summer of 2013, I invited comment on the draft
toolkit from the interviewees and others that appeared in the toolkit.
Three Key Themes
The aim of the toolkit is to highlight the practical options and lessons that politicians, asset managers, local
citizens, community groups, civic non-profits, unions, and local businesses have been using to help them to
participate in the New Barn-Raising. This is done with a view to thinking about what might be done in other
cities and regions around the world. The aims were two-fold:
• to consider possible short-term (next year) responses to recent public spending cuts and private spending
constraints (this latter includes reductions in business’s ability to spend on community activities, charitable
foundations’ endowments, and the wealth of many prospective individual donors); and
• to think about possible medium- to long-term visions for sustaining assets.
The “New Barn-Raising” of the toolkit title is a reference to the practice of barn-raising in North American
agricultural communities in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries (and still found today in Amish and Mennonite
communities). The practice involves local citizens pulling together to construct a building that, in addition to its
economic (agricultural) role, also often serves as the focal point for communal celebrations. 5
Today it is not so much barns that need raising, but awareness about the social, economic and environmental
benefits that assets provide and money and volunteer help to help sustain these assets. For this reason, awareness,
money, and help form the three main sections of the toolkit. And it is also no longer just citizens that are
expected to do the raising but government, foundations, non-profits, and business.
The work will be disseminated widely and freely in the United States, U.K., and elsewhere. The particular
challenge is to get the toolkit read and/or discussed by those who are not supportive of assets however they
might be funded and to those who think that government or the private sector can do it all.
While the focus of this toolkit is upon assets, the framework and many of the findings have wider applicability to
any area currently funded by the public sector such as policing, housing, health, and education.
5
Whilst barn-raising has proven a popular metaphor with those who saw the report drafts and is one I greatly like, it is also not a perfect one. In the past, it was
invariably white people that did it; tasks were allocated along strict gender lines; it required fair weather; it often involved family and friends as well as neighbors; it
relied on a strong norm around helping being seen as desirable and unavoidable; turn-out was very high; it involved lots of reciprocity — you helped others build their
barn and they would help you build yours; most peoples’ involvement was over a very short space of time not a sustained engagement; it relates to an asset that was
primarily for private use rather than, as with a church, communal use; the maintenance was also done privately by the barn-owning family rather than communally.
23 | The New Barn-Raising