The roots of the OMG Center for Collaborative Learning stretch back more than 30 years, to an applied research group at the Management and Business Science Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. We were a handful of folks – Tom Burns, several Penn graduate students, and me – and we considered ourselves a “lab” to explore how large institutions could stimulate economic development, educational opportunities, housing, and jobs in the local community. We began in our backyard, West Philadelphia, and examined the role organizations such as the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel, and the nearby VA Hospital could play in revitalizing a once vibrant section of our city.
Many of my early colleagues and I had professional backgrounds as urban planners, and we were passionate about improving the quality of post-industrial urban life for all people. At that time, planners were more technical in their approach, more siloed, and tended to focus on individual programs like education or housing. We too were steeped in the technical aspects of planning. But we were looking at the neighborhood holistically, and also had experience in social services and organizational development, and we understood the value of business, technical, and financial capacity.
That experience was critical, because around that time, in the early 1980s, there was a significant shift in funding for city programs and services. Prior to our work, it was a given that federal, state, and local governments would fund the important urban redevelopment work in cities. But as my colleagues and I set up shop at Penn, the landscape changed drastically. Fueled largely by urban depopulation, the resulting loss of tax revenue, and a large transfer of private wealth to foundations, the philanthropic and non-profit sectors grew enormously. New social sector leadership and new organizations began to assume a greater role in innovating and providing new solutions, programs, and services in our communities. As well, given the scale and complexity of problems, we also started to assume that public, and private organizations – in many communities for the first time – would collaborate to design and implement these programs and services.
We realized that to sustain, and, ideally expand those crucial programs and services, nonprofits needed to take their business models and capacities seriously. They needed to understand that organizational capacity was central to supporting their mission. We also realized that collaboration, while complicated and often involving many different players, was fundamental to driving change in our community. As our founding director Tom Burns says, “We were attracted to the messiness of urban issues, and that created an impulse for us to apply the principles of systems thinking and organizational learning to complex, intractable urban problems that required solutions across sectors and across expertise. We also were driven by the cultural aspects of community development, and made sure that our approach was deeply sensitive to issues of civil rights, such as racial equity and ethnic diversity.” Those were big ideas 30 years ago, and they infuse OMG’s work today.
As we entered the 1990s, and moved to downtown Philadelphia to eventually start OMG as a nonprofit organization, our work followed three pathways – community development, the role of the arts in quality public education, and the stewardship of urban open space. These areas also were my passions, and I relished the opportunity to apply our expertise in planning and evaluation to addressing these topics. We also were fortunate to secure projects with major philanthropies, such as the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the William Penn Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, and with organizations such as the Comprehensive Community Revitalization Project in the South Bronx, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Those early clients and projects helped fuel our growth over the next decade
Of OMG’s early projects, one that resonates deeply is a long-standing collaboration with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. We worked with PHS, as a partner in planning a new role in Center City, and as an early research and evaluation unit, to reframe a traditional community beautification program into a new way of thinking about urban planning and urban open space. Based on this work and their superb leadership, PHS became a catalyst for open space restoration in Center City Philadelphia and neighborhoods, through Center City Greening, and their neighborhood parks program. Together we led early thinking about how important quality accessible urban open space is in communities, downtown, and along rivers to attract and retain 21st century active lifestyles. Our work in open space laid a national groundwork for city-wide land trusts.
I think those formative years of the late 1980s, as well as the 1990s, offered us numerous venues to position the organization and refine our thinking about how to advance value in evaluation and strategic planning. These projects also provided us with “real-time” opportunities to perfect our tools and methods. Tom Burns believes, and I agree, that we were at the cusp of two important trends – a nascent social sector commitment to independent evaluators and the emergence of more complex methodologies (such as mixed methods approaches informed by a Theory of Change) to do this work. OMG became effective very early in doing that work well, and that success further drove the expansion of our evaluation and strategic planning services.
As I view OMG today, at the onset of a transition to our next generation of leadership, I believe the themes that defined our development, and informed our growth, are very much alive in our organization. We have stayed true to our roots in evaluating complex, messy problems in complex, messy contexts, and have expanded our expertise into fields such as cradle to career education, asset building, and community health. I am also proud of our efforts to diversify social sector leadership. That effort is manifest in our commitment to hiring people who represent communities with which we work, and in our engagements with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Evaluation Fellowship Program, RWJF New Connections, Council on Foundations Career Pathways, and the D5 Coalition.
We have also stayed true to our early commitment to build an organization that has strong management, financial systems, talent, information technology, greater visibility, and a culture that can respond creatively and thoughtfully to external challenges. We also have benefited from a strong Board that has excellent accountability and oversight practices. As our new President, Meg Long, takes the helm of OMG, I am thrilled about the prospects for our future. I am proud to have mentored Meg over the past 10 years, and I know that she and her deeply talented team are ready to chart the next phase of OMG.