“Oregon is a poor state.”
It is a refrain we all have likely heard, especially over the past year as federal funding retracts and long-assumed revenue streams thin. And it’s a true enough statement if Oregon’s supposed poverty is limited to only government finances. Our tax structure, drawing mostly from income and property taxes, the latter limited, means we are often “government poor” – even though Oregon rests in the middle of the pack with respect to measures like income, GDP, even our poverty rate (although that’s geographically uneven). But in terms of the state’s fiscal capacity, we are relatively weak compared to the services and roles we expect of state government.
However, Oregon is an extraordinarily wealthy state in one crucial respect: we are rich in collaboration. With over 800 projects, in every county in Oregon – and indeed, disproportionately outside the Willamette valley – our team at NPCC has spent the last two and a half decades building the leading collaborative practice in the US. Case by case, we’ve learned, built, adapted, and applied the quiet, unglamorous infrastructure of shared problem-solving across the state. We have the processes, reach, and skills to learn what Oregonians think about any issue (collaborative engagement), to help stakeholders decide on a course of action to solve particular challenges (collaborative action), and to bring all interests to the table to solve contentions issues (collaborative dispute resolution).
We have facilitators, conveners, and public servants who understand that complexity is not conquered by decree or the courts. Our state agencies are accustomed to working with tribes, landowners, utilities, conservation groups, insurers, and local governments around one table. We have learned, albeit sometimes painfully, that durable solutions require disciplined, collaborative engagement.
Recent research with Dr Dan Costie at Eastern Oregon University and Brenda Smith and team at the High Desert Partnership in Harney County, has helped to identify ten key assets that people who participate in collaborative engagements take away with them, strengthening the community over time. Like lifting weights strengthens muscles, participating in collaboration strengthens collaborative skills. Every day that someone participates in a collaboration, or a citizen assembly, or similar – we become just a little bit of a wealthier state.
We are entering an era in which our most serious issues such as wildfire, housing, water, behavioral health, education, transportation, technology, talent, employment, budget deficits, etc., do not yield cleanly to majoritarian voting alone. Voting retains its mythic stature in American life, and rightly so as a mechanism of legitimacy. But ballots are blunt instruments and they are episodic. Many of the challenges before us are not binary questions of this or that, but represent adaptive systems problems that demand iteration, learning, and negotiated alignment across sectors.
The good news is that in Oregon we’re really very good at this. Very good, indeed. While we may lack fiscal excess, we possess something rarer: a practiced ability to sit with complexity, to deliberate across differences, and to design portfolios rather than slogans.
If the coming years constrain our monetary resources further, and if the challenges we face become increasingly complex, our collaborative wealth will not be ornamental. It will be essential.