Making My Personal Covenant to Being a Public Innovator

Editor's Note: For more than a decade, The Patterson Foundation has partnered with The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation to strengthen how people across Southwest Florida engage with their communities. More than 320 people in our region have participated in Public Innovator Labs, learning practices for turning outward and making community the reference point for change. This reflection from the North River area of Manatee County offers a closer look at what that work can mean, not only in the tools we use, but in how we choose to show up for our communities.

More than 40 people from organizations across the North River area of Manatee County invested two full workdays in The Harwood Institute’s Public Innovators Getting Started Lab. That commitment alone was noteworthy. Community challenges do not pause while practitioners spend sixteen hours in professional development, yet everyone in the room decided the investment was worthwhile.

Over those two days, we learned the Harwood approach, practiced using its tools, and considered how those tools would be used in our Action Teams. By the end of the Lab, I expected our attention to turn toward implementation: what we would do differently once we returned to our work and met in our teams. Instead, the Institute staff closed the Lab by asking everyone to quietly reflect and write responses to five Personal Covenant Questions.

The questions were not about the approach itself. They asked each participant to think about why they chose to work in public life and what personal commitments would guide how they showed up in their Action Team participation. Perhaps even more significantly, the answers remained private. We were not asked to discuss them with colleagues, compare responses, or build consensus around them. Each participant left with their own reflections.

That choice revealed something important about The Harwood Institute’s understanding of community work. The Institute is not only interested in teaching practitioners an approach. The Institute is also interested in preparing them to use it in alignment with their own values and motivations. Those are related goals, but they are not the same.

Professional development often emphasizes what practitioners need to know and what they need to be able to do. The Personal Covenant Questions added another dimension: how we choose to show up while doing the work. Keeping those reflections private reinforced that these were not commitments we were making to The Harwood Institute or even to one another. They were commitments each of us was being asked to consider for ourselves.

That made the questions a fitting conclusion to two days focused on engaging communities differently. The tools and practices we learned will shape what our Action Teams do. But they cannot determine how each of us will listen, respond, build trust, or navigate difficult moments. The Harwood approach may provide a way to do the work, but each practitioner still carries responsibility for how they put it into practice.