The community design world is going through a major change. Budgets are smaller, agency staff are being called upon to do more and high-tech tools are making it possible for people to connect and collaborate in new ways. In response, NCI is working on changes to our curriculum that will offer a broader range of tools for design collaboration.
Starting with our Portland courses next March, the NCI toolkit will include a wider range of charrette and non-charrette approaches to fit a range of budgets and project factors. Trainings will include social media and web-based distance participation with hands-on training in public meeting tech tools, such as touch tables and keypad polling.

These exciting changes will provide a big collaborative toolkit to address every community planning situation. Training registration is available now for Spring 2012.

Register now through December 9th and receive a $50 Early Bird Discount on registration.

Each January the MRED+U Program invites the public to join its graduate students in learning the ins-and-outs of planning a charrette with National Charrette Institute instructor David Brain and other local real estate industry leaders. This year the training seminar will be held at the University of Miami School of Architecture, January 11th-13th. Please see our NCI webpage for more details.

As a curriculum supporter you will get free access to a webinar on this content of the update including high-tech public participation tools, conflict resolution and approaches to shrinking budgets when you help support our major NCI curriculum Update.

This is our biggest curriculum update in 6 years. We are revising our trainings to include hands-on learning in high-tech tools for meetings and distance participation. We will also add a module on tools for pre-charrette conflict resolution and consensus building, as well as a regional scenario planning case study.

Why is this important? Our influence is growing. We are now training FEMA, EPA, HUD and DOD staff. We must provide the most advanced tools to these policy-setting agencies and others.

We need your help to do this. Your tax-deductible membership donation through the end-of-the-year will help pay for an intern and the staff time needed to take our curriculum to the next level.

Learn more about the curriculum revision in detail. To support this important effort with your membership donation, click here.

Did you know that NCI has NCI Resources Free for Download? Our most popular resource is the RFP template. NCI has developed the first model Request for Proposal (RFP), a general guide for the procurement of services relating to a community planning project that includes a NCI charrette. We also have videos, presentations, articles and publications you can download and view. Please see our tools and resources page for further details.

In additional to the free resources we have also eight recorded webinars and several other other products for sale on our website.

At NCI, we are interested in not just how to plan and run a successful charrette but how to assure long-term project success. Visionary projects get approved and built in a timely fashion when strong leadership is combined with a collaborative team approach. On one end of the leadership spectrum you have the guru approach and on the other end the collaborative team approach. Let’s face it, most of us are not involved in the guru approach. NCI teaches the approach for the rest of us, the collaborative team approach called the NCI Charrette System™. Step one toward collaboration is the Project Start-up Intensive.hear NCI Executive Director, Bill Lennertz, discuss the NCI Project Start-up Intensive in the following video:

NCI is offering a 25% discount on in-house NCI Certificate Trainings for the week of December 5-9. This slot opened up unexpectedly so we are offering this last minute deal. The sale applies to both the 3-day NCI Charrette System™ and the advanced 1.5-day NCI Charrette Management and Facilitation™ Certificate Trainings.

This is a one time only offering available on a first come first served basis for the week of December 5th. Please email info@charretteinstitute.org or call Heidi Haberbush, Program Coordinator at 503-233-8486 x 3#.

“The NCI Charrette System Training is the best training I have taken in the field of integrated participatory planning.”

-Hiroaki Suzuki

Lead Urban Specialist
Finance, Economic and Urban Department
The World Bank

NCI is about to undertake a significant curriculum upgrade. Our new courses will include hands-on learning in high-tech tools for distance participation and meeting facilitation including the use of touch-tables and keypad polling. We will also add a module on tools for pre-charrette conflict resolution/consensus building as well as a regional scenario planning case study.

Areas of Curriculum Revision
High-tech/High-touch Charrettes: Social media and web-based distance participation are rapidly changing public participation. Funding will allow us to include hands-on use of a selection of these tools in our trainings, such as keypad polling, touch-table exercises and web-based polling.

Conflict Resolution: Today’s increasingly contentious political environment often calls for pre-charrette conflict resolution and consensus building to assure that a community is “charrette ready.” Your support will allow us to conduct research and include best practices from these fields into the curriculum.

Budgets: We must respond to “the new normal” budgets, adjusting our training curriculum to include strategies for conducting charrettes on smaller budgets as well as writing two more versions of the NCI Charrette RFP template (for mid-sized and small budgets).

Your support will afford us the time to accomplish this revision in a focused and timely way. It will also allow us to hire an intern exclusively assigned to this valuable project. To support this important effort with your membership donation click here.

Free Technical Assistance Available from NCI and Other Organizations

NCI is a technical assistance provider working through a grant to the Project for Public Spaces from US EPA’s Office of Sustainable Communities under their Building Blocks for Sustainable Communities Program. This grant makes it possible for us and our partners at the newly formed coalition, Livability Solutions to provide free support to communities around the country, helping them to enhance livability, to create lasting economic and environmental improvements, and to affect positive change in the public and social health of their residents.

We are looking for applications from communities with a strong commitment to livability, smart growth, and sustainability principles, but who face a significant challenge or barrier to moving forward. This targeted technical assistance will provide selected communities with tools and improved capacity to achieve their livability and engage them with a network of other communities working toward similar goals and facing similar challenges.

Now is your chance to train agency staff and community groups in the NCI Charrette System tools, including hands-on design workshops, charrette planning and public meeting facilitation skills. NCI will be working with our partners to lead one- to two-day workshops in these and other subjects. With this grant from the EPA, we will be able to provide free technical assistance to 6-12 communities in 2012.

Take this step toward achieving your goals by applying now.

Application deadline: November 22, 2011. Click here now to apply.

For more information on the technical assistance, providers, the tools offered, and how to apply, please see the Livability Solutions website. If you have questions about the training program please email info@charretteinstitute.org.

We’re excited to announce that NCI is a member of the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) team that has received a grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency to provide technical assistance to communities seeking to implement sustainable and smart growth development and programs. Through this program NCI will be available to provide free technical assistance to selected applicants. For more information see the newly formed Livability Solutions coalition website.

This project is funded by US EPA’s Office of Sustainable Communities under their Building Blocks for Sustainable Communities Program. The Building Blocks program funds quick, targeted assistance to communities that face common development problems. Three other nonprofit organizations have received competitively awarded grants under this program this year to help communities get the kinds of development they want- Cascade Land Conservancy, Global Green USA, and Smart Growth America.

November 16, 2011, 10:00-11:30 am PST (1:00-2:30 pm EST)
Note: after live webinar date a recording will be available

Register today at: https://shop.charretteinstitute.org/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=WEB5-11

Overview
Stephen Coyle’s new book, Sustainable and Resilient Communities, presents a step-by-step action plan for making communities resilient, resourceful, and healthy. This webinar will focus on stormwater (aka rainwater). Presented by Stephen and two key contributors to the book, Paul Crabtree and Thomas E. Low, it will cover strategies and tactics for developing an actionable stormwater plan for sites, neighborhoods, communities, and regions, to help them become more livable, environmentally healthy, resource-conserving, and economically resilient.

-From the watershed to the tap: a whole system that’s more than the sum of its parts
- What’s wrong and right about the conventional stormwater approach?
- The Light Imprint Development method versus Low Impact Development
- Why scale matters: stormwater practice as a continuum instead of an object
- Building resilience and capacity at the neighborhood, block, and on site
- Addressing big storm events through network redundancy

Presenters
Stephen Coyle, Principal, Town-Green
Paul Crabtree, Principal, Crabtree Group, Inc.
Thomas E. Low, Partner, DPZ Charlotte