Kennedy School Honors Innovative Programs

In Connecticut, No Child Left Inside encourages outdoor recreational activities. In Colorado, Climate Wise helps local businesses reduce greenhouse gases. In Massachusetts, MassDocs makes housing more affordable.

These three innovative government programs are among the 50 finalists announced yesterday in the Harvard Kennedy School’s 2008 Innovations in American Government competition.

Run by the Kennedy School’s Ash Institute for Democratic Governance, the competition showcases and honors progressive local, state, and federal programs that address issues ranging from community and economic development to the environment.

Stephen Goldsmith, director of the awards program, said that the competition is “designed to identify and improve innovative practices in government and shine a bright light on them for the purpose of helping cause replication.”

When the program was first established by the Ford Foundation in 1985, “Ford was concerned, as was Harvard, that public anxiety about the competency of government was reaching a dangerous point,” Goldsmith added.

Today, a committee of policy experts from the Kennedy School continues to select from a pool of nearly 1,000 applicants the most problem-solving and forward-thinking ideas, according to the press release.

“It’s a bit of a tightrope,” Goldsmith said, “because they have to be implemented enough that we have begun to see results, and new enough that they are innovative.”

This year, six of the 50 programs come from Massachusetts.

These efforts include the City of Boston’s Foreclosure Intervention Initiative and Suffolk County’s Teen Prostitution Prevention Project.

Ruston F. Lodi, director of public affairs at the Massachusetts Housing Partnership and a contributor to the MassDocs project, described the program as “an example of government being efficient.”

The initiative promotes affordable housing in Massachusetts by creating one set of loan documents.

The next round of finalists will be announced on June 3, and the winners, who will receive a $100,000 award, will be announced in September.

—Staff writer Lindsay P. Tanne can be reached at ltanne@fas.harvard.edu.