What was your New Year’s
resolution for 2008?
Eat healthier
and exercise more?
Take up a new
hobby?
Turn off the tap when you
brush your teeth?
At MPC, we too
began the year with a new sense of resolve to do better by our mission and
ourselves.
Since at least the early 1990s,
MPC has structured its work around four program areas — housing, urban
development, transportation, and regional development.
To build consensus around unfamiliar
concepts such as sensible growth, or give voice to a collective point of view
such as business leaders, MPC initiated and managed a variety of
coalitions.
To have the greatest
policy impact, we split our focus between researching and reporting new ideas
and putting them to the test in real-life situations.
We
influenced a great deal of positive change in the
Chicago
region conducting our work this way
over the past decade.
So, if it
ain’t broke, why fix it?
MPC is
seizing the opportunity of a growing acceptance of sensible growth and regional
planning, coupled with leadership changes, to structure itself.
For example, our staff now works in
project teams, across issues, based on individual
skills and expertise.
We shifted our energy from managing the
Campaign for Sensible Growth and Business Leaders for Transportation coalitions
to deepen our own staff capacity and resources to work on sensible growth and
transportation solutions.
We are
evolving our five committees into three that will have input on a wider range of
our initiatives and more interaction with each other.
Very few people will notice the structural changes we
have made and that’s our hope; we have not altered what we do, only strengthened
how we do it. We are as committed as ever to our fundamental mission to
improve quality of life and economic opportunity in the Chicago region. We
will continue to connect people and ideas and hone our sixth sense for picking
the right issues at the right time. We will invest even more of our human
and financial resources on innovative policy development and cutting-edge
communication strategies. We do, however, hope you will experience the
effect of our change: a higher impact, more coordinated organization that is
tangibly benefiting the places where we live,
work, shop, and play.
MarySue Barrett
MPC President