Center for Community Stewardship

The Center for Community Stewardship supports people of many backgrounds, perspectives and interests as they discuss strategies for creating a vision of their community's future. The Center offers skillful processes, experienced coaching and financial resources to communities of interest seeking to work together for a better future.

Communities of Interest
"Communities form around many interests, including and not limited to neighborhoods, cities, towns and villages. Nongeographic communities might include people involved in health care, agriculture, the environment and education."

— Bert Stitt,
Founder, Center for Community Stewardship

Communities are often prompted to consider their future when faced with a crisis, a conflict or an opportunity, such as proposals for major neighborhood development, highway expansion or school closures; uncertainties about the future of agriculture, the environment or health care; or opportunities brought on by demographic changes or new investments.

The Center for Community Stewardship helps all players find power and possibilities in crises, conflicts and opportunities like these.

Too often, fear dominates discussions about change and implementation of strategic direction for the future. Various interests may feel stymied by community objections and fearful their goals will not be met. The public may feel ignored by government-planning efforts, or intimidated by bureaucracy, and political and administrative processes. When people are left out, they can become agitated and can cause great havoc with any initiative. Everyone can lose time, money, energy and standing when private, community and government interests are not transparent, or coordinated and handled effectively.

Led by President Bert Stitt, the Center for Community Stewardship recognizes the existence of a common good, and that most people want to serve that common good. Community engagement gets people with diverse agendas to articulate together their shared goals.

The Center’s community-engagement model reduces the emotional, physical, spiritual and political suffering of people who hold differing views about how their community should respond to and manage change. The Center’s mediation process moderates the leverage of special interests and stakeholders, and engages “ordinary” residents. By ensuring residents contribute their collective wisdom to the conversation about community change and development, the Center nurtures thoughtful, rational and productive deliberation, and facilitates equal participation in the work to craft the vision for a community’s future.