The rapidly growing IDA and asset building field of practitioners needs new leaders, connections, capacities, and systems for it to be a fully functioning field. One of CFED’s foremost strategic objectives is to help to envision – for others to develop – a sustainable, comprehensive, value added and interactive infrastructure for the IDA field which is broadly owned, supported and guided by stakeholders of the field. This session was designed to bring together a hand-picked group of individuals who are key relationship builders within the IDA field in order to further explore how best to build the IDA infrastructure.

We started off with a round of visioning; each participant had a chance to individually depict the ideal structure as it would be in 2010. These visions were shared in small groups and synthesized into either idealized designs or collaboration models in the next round of work. At this point, the participants had time to view what other groups outside of the IDA were working on and gather information to bring back to their teams. For our third round we took a look at a day in the life of what was needed from the perspective of a particular constituency. This led to new insights and a radical questioning of whether the current concept of a basic network was really the right next step. We had a conversation as an entire group and decided to focus on developing questions that our grad student from Duke would use to develop a survey that would be conducted in order to get more information about what was needed by the practitioners. We split the work into 3 teams of interdependent topics: the basic network, the cooperative network and the national match fund.

Round 1a:  Vision 2010.  An Individual Assignment.

It is now January 2010. You are being celebrated as part of the team that made a difference in the lives of many people. Part of your contribution is having created an IDA network that is an exemplary model of connectivity, inclusiveness, and functionality.

Back in early 2006, you and your colleagues developed the perfect system and were able to implement it over the following year. Since you were a key contributor to the process in creating this network, you have many insights about how this plan unified the IDA field and solved many of the concerns it faced.

Please take about 20 minutes on your own to describe how it was possible to create such a network and its key features on the flip chart paper provided.

You may use the questions below to stimulate your thinking:

• What is the overarching vision that drove this project to success?
• What makes this the ideal system?
• What benefits are derived?
• Who uses it?  And how?
• What critical issues does it address?
• What barriers and pitfalls had to be overcome?
• What are unique attributes of your model?
• What were the compelling reasons to collaborate?
• How were decisions made?
• What is most inspiring about it?

Click on the images below to see the results of this activity: