The Santa Clara Basin Watershed Management Initiative
The Santa Clara Basin Watershed Management Initiative started in 1996. It’s purpose is to manage and control sources of pollution entering the southern waters of San Francisco Bay from the surrounding watershed. It began with identifying the various stakeholder groups that occupy the watershed, helping them to organize and have a voice, and facilitating the process by which they expressed their own interests while listening to all the others, thereby establishing a spirit of mutual respect and desire to work together for the maximum common good. The result is documented on the current web site of the organization. Its success is demonstrated by the effectiveness of its work, while very few people in the watershed are even aware of its existence. This quiet success is the result of the collaborative methodology which gets good results with very little fuss.
I-70 Through Glenwood Canyon, Colorado
Glenwood canyon in Colorado is a location of great scenic beauty and grandeur. It also happens to be the route of I-70. It was the last major stretch of the Interstate Highway system to be completed because of environmentalist resistance to the desecration of the canyon by construction of a four lane highway. The impasse was broken by application of Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS) (See NCHRP Report 580, pages 11 through 22), a methodology used in highway planning that is almost identical with Collaborative Solution-Discovery. The CSS process lead to adopting a solution in the form of a pair of braided two-lane roadways, one in each direction, instead of a four-lane highway. This concept made tunneling more practical where needed, and allowed cuts to be smaller. Where cuts were necessary, the rock was sculpted and tinted to match the age-old natural formations. The result is actual improvement over the previous two-lane highway through the canyon.
K-12 Math Education in the Torrance Unified School District (TUSD)
The TUSD in conjunction with Math Leadership Corps, a non-profit operating out of Loyola Marymount University, has carried out an in-house development of better math teaching/learning methods for K-12 schooling. This project utilizes Collaborative Solution-Discovery, both as the basis for engaging the teachers, staff, and administrators of the school district in developing the teaching methods, and as a component of those methods as applied to addressing unfamiliar and challenging math problems in small teacher-student classroom groups. As an in-house development within the school district, the new methods have enjoyed much quicker adoption and and eager acceptance throughout the district, as compared with improvements attempted through outside-imposed concepts. This quick success has attracted the praise of the Gates Foundation.
If you look at the products of this project, you will find it hard to recognize the presence of CSD in a form as described on this web site, but it is definitely there. However, although present in essence, it is not evident in superficial appearance. That is because the developers of the math methodology recognized that CSD is a paradigm, not a cookbook recipe, and implemented that paradigm in a form that is consistent with their own specific language and methods as familiar in the education profession.