Three federal programs demonstrating the value of collaboration won top honors Thursday in the prestigious Innovations in American Government awards competition.
The Navy, Forest Service and Consumer Product Safety Commission were among the 10 state, local and federal programs that received the awards and $100,000 prizes in the annual competition. The winners were selected from among 1,400 applicants.
The winners demonstrate the importance of government cooperation with the public and industry, said Bob Stone, the self-described energizer-in-chief at the National Partnership for Reinventing Government.
"Partnership is a thread that runs through the whole bunch of winners," Stone said. "These programs transcend the old system, where government sat on one side of the table and everyone else sat on the other. They are a model for everything government does, from regulatory activities to law enforcement."
Through its Northern New Mexico Collaborative Stewardship program, the Forest Service worked with community activists and businesses to balance the needs of people living and working around Carson National Forest. Money and time the Forest Service had been spending on appeals and lawsuits over use of the forest is now spent on successful forest projects.
"There was no relationship" between the community and the Forest Service before the stewardship program, said Max Cordova, a local community activist. "This is a big change for the Forest Service. Now we can demonstrate that the Forest Service can engage local people in restoring forest health."
The Navy's Best Manufacturing Practices program received an award for getting industry, government and academia to share manufacturing techniques. The program managed to get contractors, including competitors, to document and share their most efficient techniques for work in areas like industrial production, acquisition programs and logistics. Since 1985, the program has saved the defense and commercial industries $6 billion at a cost of only $2 million a year.
Ernie Renner, the program director, said contractors were skeptical at first that the Navy was trying to help them improve their operations.
"At first the most common comment was, 'You work for the government?'" Renner recalled. "They thought there was a hidden agenda. It took a couple of years to build up our credibility."
The third federal winner, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, encouraged companies to recall defective products in return for a waiver from lengthy and costly government evaluations. The voluntary program has sped up fast-track recalls to an average of seven days. As a result, more consumers now return products that could be harmful, preventing injuries and getting dangerous products out of people's homes.
"This is an issue that has brought enormous grief to tons and tons of families around this country," said David Gergen, editor-at-large of U.S. News and World Report and chairman of the awards selection committee. "The agency that oversees this process has found a way to ask producers to voluntarily remove defective products from the shelves."
Gergen and the judging panel of public policy experts and former government officials chose programs that use innovative techniques to achieve better results. The winners also had to show their techniques could be replicated by other governments. The $100,000 prizes are to be used for expanding programs' work and teaching other public sector organizations how to copy their successes.
The awards program is run by the Ford Foundation, Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and the Council for Excellence in Government.
Local and state winners were:
- Vermont's Reparative Probation Program, which makes nonviolent criminals apologize publicly to their victims and related community members.
- New York's Center for Court Innovation, which allows communities to experiment with new kinds of courts.
- The San Francisco District Attorney's First Offender Prostitution Program, which helps prostitutes build new lives.
- Buncombe County, North Carolina Medical Society Project Access, which provides health care to low-income families through a physician volunteer system.
- North Carolina's Smart Start Program, which helps preschoolers prepare for elementary school.
- California's Puente Project, which helps under-served youth reach college.
- New York's Edwin Gould Academy, a residential foster care facility emphasizing academic achievement and personal development.
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