The Center for Whole Communties:
Commentary on the Exhibit Rubric

Q&A between David Grant of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and Peter Forbes, Executive Director of the Center for Whole Communities. Edited slightly for clarity.

David Grant (DG): I imagine your extraordinary rubric may seem a little overwhelming at first to people who are perusing this site wanting to learn about assessment. So, I’m hoping in our conversation we can introduce and explain the rubric in a way that will help people understand it. Would you begin by summarizing the process that led to its creation?

Peter Forbes (PF): Yes. Let me start, if I might, with a Robert F. Kennedy quote about “The Measure of Wealth.” I’ve actually found that reading this to my colleagues, either in land conservation, or just at TPL, has been the single most helpful way to explain why we needed the rubric in the first place.

"The Measure of Wealth”

“Our gross national product, now, is over eight hundred billion dollars a year, but that GNP – if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder to chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, nor the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud to be Americans.”

Robert F. Kennedy – 1967

This is a very powerful political statement. But it transcends one’s Republican/ Democratic politics, and you can see the connection right away to land conservation. In the introduction to the rubric, I say, “To draw a parallel to Robert F. Kennedy’s words, acres and dollars tell us everything about land conservation except why we are proud to be land conservationists.” That’s at the heart of it. You know, we wanted to figure out “What Matters Most” to us, because we’re at a time in our history when it felt like we needed to remind ourselves how we could make the most amount of change.

DG: Were there people at the time who said to you, “Why change anything?” After all, Trust for Public Land is one of the most important and influential nonprofits in the country.

PF: Yes, and the way we measure success is still valuable. There’s a lot of hope that’s conveyed in acres saved and dollars raised. But I think what we all recognized is that those figures don’t convey any information about the kinds of relationships that we’re changing, and that’s where the most juice is for creating social change. In our 30 th year we recognized that the saving of individual parcels is really important, but it is not the story that is going to lead to our culture being any different. And what we want is a different world. That’s why we’re in the land-saving biz -- we want to create a better world.

DG: So, you’re clearly going after big game here. Just the title of your rubric alone, “What Matters Most,” invokes higher ground. Ok, that’s great, but how do you go about the conversation of determining what matters most?

PF: By unharnessing TPL to have discussions about what its values are as an organization, and what our values are as individuals. We did this in a very serious way. We collected the best writings that I could find on the role that land plays in our culture, and we published it, in ten chapters -- it’s called Our Land, Ourselves. Then we had a listserv discussion (this was 5 years ago) each week that was devoted to a single chapter. We had all of our $1,000 donors, all of our staff, all of our board members, all of our advisory councils -- we had almost 750 people on this listserv. Then we invited all of the authors, and we had a free for all, open discussion, which got really startling at times. This was a discussion where a receptionist who had been at TPL for three weeks was on an equal footing with our president. There was such respect conveyed, and there were such hard feelings, too, about where TPL had failed. Yet it was all done with great , great respect. The issue of, for example, second homes, came up. Now you can imagine, quite a few of our $1,000 plus donors, and board members, and staff, have second homes. And so we had a question about what is the morality about having second homes? It was very very heartfelt. And some people were saying, “You know, second homes are the scourge of our culture, and it’s only because people messed up their first nest that now they think they can have this romantic vision of a second home somewhere else.” And then other people said, “Well hold on here, Thoreau wrote from a second home, and Leopold wrote from a second home.” So, hard issues were accessed, and we began to feel free -- I used the expression “released” to more readily talk about What Matters Most. But it did begin five years ago. And then the retreats followed.

DG: Please talk about that. These listserv conversations were courtesy of technology, but when you use the word “retreats” I’m assuming you mean face to face.

PF: Yes. Well, we started with the computer-based e-mail based listserv, which if there were almost 750 people on it, maybe a quarter of them actually sent messages. So most people were bystanders and readers of it. But there was enough energy that we thought the next step was to have a retreat, and we did it at the Vallecitos Mountain Refuge in New Mexico. It was a real risk. Everyone, including our president was questioning, “Do we really need to take a week? We’ve never taken a week to do anything. We decide our entire budgets in three-day marathon 28 hour sessions, why take a whole week?” But we did.

DG: So how did you frame that week for people? What was the invitation like to come? What did people THINK was going to happen?

PF: TPL was really struggling about our role in the movement. We had launched the Green Cities Initiative, but we had sort of backed off it. It wasn’t really clear who we were, and I think people felt that. We had a new president come on, and he had high aspirations, and a group of us were just saying, “You know it feels like we’ve gotten away from our original purpose and we’re drifting a little bit.” We can’t even say what success looks like for us anymore. We’re divided. Some of us think that it’s greener cities, others think “this,” and, others think “that” and, you know, we’re just not, we’re not there.

DG: I can imagine people reading the transcript of your words now, and nodding and applying some of the same notions to their own organizations. How did you then get from good conversations about important things to what essentially is an assessment tool – this rubric here?

PF: I don’t think any of this, in fact none of it, would have happened without our new president, Will Rogers, in place. He’s an individual who has a great ability to see the value in being self aware. Self aware as individuals, but also as an organization. And it takes a lot of sometimes difficult, uncomfortable self awareness to do this process. All the way along. And that self awareness comes from a real desire in our heart of hearts to create change. There’s a guy at Harvard professor by the name of Mark Roberts who came and spoke to us and he gave us a wonderful definition of leadership, which was “being responsible for what actually happens in the world.” So we asked ourselves, “Well what IS really happening in the world, and what’s our connection to it?” You can’t ask that question responsibly without initiating a process of inquiry.

So Will detailed me to continue and carry the ball on this, which I really wanted very much to do. And I would say that within the first six months of the process we hit the realization that an organization IS what it measures. And part of our problem is that we were only evaluating acres – we were only looking at acres and dollars, and it didn’t say anything about relationships and change and our highest aspirations and where was all that being handled? Around the water cooler? That’s silly.

DG: This is the classic dilemma that I hear in working with organizations where whenever something comes up that they care deeply about they say, “You can’t measure that.” But you have burst through some sort of barrier there.

PF: Bursting through the barrier was the contribution that you made to our Advisory Council, which was set up to help me think through this for the organization. That group met on four occasions, and they were really focused on specific tasks. One was language, the second one was philosophy, and the third one was how we defined success. So we knew what the leverage points were by the time you came to the session on defining success. When you said you don’t necessarily have to quantify and analyze – describing it can be just as powerful – lights went on for everyone.

DG: That makes a lot of sense. I remember the lights in the eyes because I’ve frequently been with groups where I say, “If you can describe it, you can measure it.” And here was a group that had spent a lot of time finding the right words to describe what mattered, and in a way the rubric gave them a place to put them.

PF: Exactly. It was a really clear tool.

DG: Now, the rubric will in some ways explain itself for people who can access it on this site, accompanying our interview. But do you want to say anything about the conversation about how many values to include? Or let me put it another way. If you could imagine strangers reading the rubric, what would you like to point out to them?

PF: Well, the first thing I’d like to point out is that pretty early in the process, the most interesting thing that came up was our desire to have a “negative” column. This wasn’t self-flagellation, it was, “Hey, this is a learning tool and this is a training tool and part of our sophistication is seeing really that we haven’t done as well as we would like, and that for every positive thing we can do, there can also be at least one unintended consequence. And if we really want to be mature, we have to realize that there are unintended consequences of our work.

DG: That seems to me to be a very important contribution to the art and science of rubric writing. It’s the first rubric I’ve ever seen with a negative number attached and, of course, it makes a very strong point that there’s something much more problematic than work that’s simply not good. We also have to consider the consequences of work that actually does harm.

PF: Yes. It isn’t an exercise just in criticism, it’s an exercise in looking at wholeness and seeing that every piece of good work that we do also carries the potential for doing bad work. At this stage in the maturity of the conservation movement we need to be self-aw a re enough to reco g nize that there are unintended consequences of our action s , of our success.

DG: So, to summarize where we are, you went through a very careful process of cultivating the ground before even writing the rubric.

PF: Yes.

DG: You needed to be in a certain place, a certain frame of mind, before you could consider doing it.

PF: Yes, that’s right, and that first came from the listserv, the process of Unharnessing TPL to be open to larger discussions about our purpose and values. It was the equivalent of preparing the soil before planting seeds . I really don’t think the rubric would be able to take hold at TPL without having first done these retreats. TPL. And that We have now done was followed by five years of these week-long retreats for four years , so that now 25% of our staff have been at them. About three years ago we began in earnest a program called “Redefining Success,” and we started that by first asking ourselves, “Well, what is a mission bulls’ eye project at TPL?” When we queried all of our staff, we got lots of stories, which we digested and boiled down. I think we came up with twenty benefits that we saw ourselves delivering. And we worked with a bunch of different consultants at different times. Some of it was helpful and honestly some of it took us down the wrong path. What we were struggling with all along was “How do we connect the role of land to social change? How do we show that what we do around land conservation creates a change in people?”

So eventually we boiled those twenty benefits down to eight that we could really stand by. We had a task force, including our president and all our chief management people, and we met for four days. We agreed what those eight benefits are, and those are the eight that you see here now, in the rubric. We spent a lot of time wordsmithing – why this word? why that word?. And we brought these eight to the Advisory Council meeting that you attended and, all of a sudden, you gave us the Rubric. All we did was then “pour” those eight into the form. And of course it took a few months of getting the language right on each one and figuring out how it applied for us, but actually at that point, it was very quick work.

DG: I remember being struck at that weekend by the fact that a rubric not only gives you a place to put your descriptive words, but also a place to put your stories. I was using the word “indicators” then to describe how each story could illustrate what you mean by the descriptive language in the rubric. It seems like you have included little sentences in this rubric that are hints to larger stories.

PF: Yes.

DG: And if we can imagine a rubric as being an infinitely expandable box, these contain your books as well.

PF: Yes. We might become more sophisticated and adept at telling stories through the use of this rubric. But that’s the next stage for TPL. If this is accepted, and I think it is, as an important way of describing our work, then we need to do one of these that’s all just stories.

DG: Let’s talk about what happens now and in the future. Again, in talking about your specific work, we’re trying to understand the role of assessment in improving the work of lots of different organizations. I think you’ve made it very clear how much it took to get to where you have a rubric in hand. Now, what do you do with it?

PF: There are two places that the rubric goes. One is inside of TPL, and the other is out to the larger conservation community. So within TPL we’re using it in three ways:

• The first is as a mission-training tool. Every new project and program manager will be given the chance to sit down with this and talk about how their current projects or past projects are evaluated based on those eight criteria. And as far as we’ve used it so far, just the conversation alone has been catalytic. Because people argue, “Well, I wouldn’t give that a 2, I’d give that a 3, and here’s why.” Or “No, no no, that’s a -1 on that one, however, on this other one, it’s a 3, it’s exemplary.” That has been phenomenal in creating a learning organization setup.
• The second is for our public affairs staff, who are always a little separate from the field staff. This gives them a tool to really understand the best language that we have to offer about our mission. And that’s why we spent a lot of time on language.
• The third is, and this is the hardest, as a screen that, eventually, we want to have at the front of the engine that decides where TPL does its work. But because of the strong culture, that’s going to take years to do,. Like all really important things, it’s going to take time to work it into the machinery of TPL.

DG: I sometimes urge people to write “DRAFT” on the top of the rubric. What’s your sense about whether you may go back to this and revise it with use.

PF: Oh, well, look at what ours says. It says “Version 1.0.” We’ve described this as a free software program that we’re creating, not only for TPL, but for the larger conservation community. And my commitment is to update it regularly, whether that’s every six months or every year, we don’t know yet. We want this to be the equivalent of what the conservation biology movement had 40 years ago when it set out to figure out what areas habitats were needed to preserve endangered species. Or what WERE endangered species? And what we’re saying here, through this rubric, is that the joyful, responsible human being is an endangered species, and we want to be able to describe and measure the role that land plays in addressing this. I hope outside of TPL that this revised rubric becomes an annual document that’s gets better and better at describing what humans need in terms of habitat.

DG: Peter, it’s inspiring work, and I hope that you and I can sit down two years, three years from now and ask some questions like, “What happened next?” and “How did you feel that the work of TPL was getting better and better?” and “Did this assessment work affect a larger arena than just TPL’s work, or even just land conservation.?”

PF: Well, and then we’ll know, won’t we, that land is much more than just about conservation, right? And that’s the point.

My hope is that what’s represented in this rubric can eventually be adopted in the same way that the “precautionary principle” has. By that I mean the idea that if we don’t know, if we’re not sure that a human action won’t create harm, then we shouldn’t do it. In other words, we’re far enough along in the destruction of the planet that we have to be sure, we have to be absolutely sure, that our activities are not harming the planet. I hope that it becomes widely accepted that if you’re doing land conservation in this country, it will be done along guidelines like this. Because land conservation doesn’t have anything like this right now. We have lots of information about the HOW, but very little information about the WHY.

DG: Would you give an example?

PF: Well, one comparison I’ll offer is the story I gave earlier about Classy Parker and the Urban Garden. In the conventional way of evaluating our work, acres and dollars, a 3,000 sq. ft. urban garden on 121 st Street in Harlem does not exactly compare with the Columbia River Gorge. Or even a 100-acre farm we might have protected on the Columbia River Gorge. And that’s a very, very sad thing, because TPL does both of those projects, and yet we might be risk treating the staff who work on the Classy Parker Urban Gardens as second-class citizens because the value of their work has been impossible to describe and measure.

DG: And with the new rubric in mind, these guys are stars.

PF: They’re heroes. But so is the person who does the farm on the Columbia River Gorge, because their set of language is in here, too. And real change will occur where we as an organization can connect the dots between the two. Then the value of that Urban Garden will be equated to the Columbia Gorge.

DG: And both projects, being done, create a kind of a synergy. And the big picture benefits from both being done.

PF: That’s right. And in fact when we do them both, there is a whole other story about them together, and that is called thinking of the whole. There is a connection between what we do in our cities and what we do in our Sierra. That connection resonates with people because it’s true, and it speaks to biological truths – it’s true in nature.

DG: I can’t think of a better place to stop than with the truth. So why don’t we part with the notion that we could pick up this conversation later. I’ll be fascinated to see how things unfold in the next couple of years.

PF: I welcome that, I look forward to that. Thank you.

DG: Thank you.

End of Interview