Remember the story of Stone Soup in which a hungry community starts with an empty pot and ends up with a feast?

The ingredients were vegetables, meats and seasonings; the technique was cooperation—plus some heat and a bit of stirring. No one element could serve the community as well as the product of their combined efforts. The whole was far greater than the sum of its parts.

Public television stations are using the same technique of cooperation to address problems that can only be solved when a community comes together to share talents and resources. Two stories illustrate the power of this approach.

Utah learns to preserve precious water
Utah Education Network a statewide educational technology consortium, spearheaded a community partnership to help citizens understand the critical need to preserve water in the nation’s second driest state. UEN-TV’s director of instructional services, Laura Hunter, led the network’s participation in Water Wise Utah.

Under grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to educate and encourage Utahns to protect their water, UEN worked with KUED, Utah’s PBS station; KUER, The University of Utah’s public radio station; the University of Utah Marriott Library; and the Utah Museum of Natural History.

The television and radio stations broadcast locally and nationally produced programming with companion blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds and additional resources.

The Water Wise Utah website still offers resources to help teachers, learners, families, individuals and organizations understand how to protect this precious liquid asset—and why. The website provides lesson plans, activities, and links to local, regional and national resources related to all aspects of water.

Central to the campaign was a traveling exhibit created by the museum using photographs and commentary from a book by University of Utah professor Craig Denton. Before sending the exhibit to a community, partners met with community stakeholders and leaders—schools, chambers of commerce, libraries, nurseries and others—to offer support and encourage local participation. The partners also provided promotion and outreach.

Water Wise Utah kept 35,000 teachers informed about workshops and programs, engaged thousands of students and reached many more Utahns through programming, events, activities, publicity and promotion. UEN won a prestigious national award for its outreach and community impact, but a report released by CPB said that "the most important accomplishment was the formation of the partnership itself."

Hunter found that "Partnering through [the grant] just enhanced all of our individual efforts." There was "a greater level of trust in sharing information and trying something, and understanding where each other’s coming from... That has a long-lasting impact."

Hunter says Water Wise Utah not only helped raise awareness of water use, it helped them develop a model that is being adapted to other partnerships to tackle other community matters, from financial literacy and internet safety to an "homage to fromage," which celebrates the science of cheese.

Missouri addresses the mortgage crisis
In St. Louis, it was the danger of communities eroding from the mortgage crisis that galvanized public media. While individuals faced losing their homes, entire communities faced falling values as the number of vacant houses increased.

Amy Shaw, vice president of education and community engagement at St. Louis’s public television station KETC-Channel 9, said CPB approached the station in May 2008 about creating a model of how public broadcasting could leverage their competencies to mobilize the community about the mortgage crisis. To make a significant difference, KETC knew they had to do more than air a story about the crisis; they also had to engage partners who knew what was happening in the community.

The station worked with 25 regional partners, including United Way of Greater St. Louis, Federal Reserve Bank, Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis, Catholic Charities, and Beyond Housing, to create a multiplatform initiative to raise awareness of the crisis and connect residents to foreclosure prevention resources through United Way’s 211 call service (see box below).

KETC created an online space loaded with resources and produced and aired short promotional messages, longer magazine-style story segments, and two hour-long live audience town hall-style talk shows, which they also streamed online. KETC’s content partner, the St. Louis Beacon provided deeper coverage as an online news source.

KETC distributed high-definition flip cameras in the community and invited people to shoot their own stories of the mortgage crisis, some of which were aired online. They used wordpress.com to create the online space, which Shaw described as "simple, elegant and free!" They communicated through press releases, radio interviews, discussions, presentations, e-blasts, blogs, online chats, Twitter feeds, Facebook and YouTube.

"Use every tool you have and engage people where they already are," advises Shaw.

They used every tool their partners had, too.

Funding came from the CPB Public Service Media Economic Response Initiative, but they also relied on each partner to contribute in-kind support.

Said Shaw, "By focusing on the issues, we got lots more bang for the buck and got the story and message out with modest funding."

During the campaign, calls to United Way’s 211 help line increased 450 percent and an additional 8,200 people sought help. Many St. Louis residents were able to refinance their mortgages and keep their homes.

KETC’s efforts serve as a model for how public broadcasters engage their communities around substantive issues. The initiative is now being replicated in the 32 markets hardest hit by the mortgage crisis.

Recipes for success
As with Stone Soup, there’s no precise recipe for creating the perfect partnership, but in developing their projects, Amy Shaw and Laura Hunter developed successful frameworks that can be put in place for other projects.

Among her "key principles of replicable and sustainable community engagement initiatives," Amy Shaw lists these lessons learned:

• Select highly relevant, critical, urgent, top-of-mind issues.
• Clearly articulate the project’s purpose with quantifiable outcomes.
• Convene and mobilize influential and committed community partners.
• Provide evidence of positive results, since results generate conversation leading to further action.

Laura Hunter offers these three keys to success:

• Establish tiered role responsibilities, which eliminates micromanaging.
• Know your organization’s strengths and stick to what you do best.
• Watch out for "scope creep"; nurture new ideas, but stick to original goals.

These models offer inspiration and directions for developing cooperation, stirring the pot and applying heat (well, energy, anyway). Is your community hungry?

For more information, visit the projects’ websites at waterwiseutah.org and stlmortgagecrisis.org.

Stone Soup is an old tale in which strangers trick starving townspeople into sharing their food. The story is the basis for many popular children’s books, often told as a lesson in cooperation, especially amidst scarcity.