RECONOMICS Institute is a 501(c)(4) not-for-profit professional association that trains and certifies public and private leaders worldwide. Most of our training takes place online, but communities can schedule training for small groups at our office in Washington, DC. Larger groups can be trained on-site in the community.
Our best-known offering is the PLACE DOCTOR certification program. An example of the global micro-credentialing trend—documented in this BBC article—we certify individuals who are involved in regenerating economies, societies and natural resources.
What community or region doesn’t want a higher quality of life, more economic growth, or more ability to recover quickly from adversity?
Given the universal desire for revitalization and resilience, one would think that that there would be training and certification for such practitioners. Surprisingly, that hasn’t been the case, until recently.
RECONOMICS Institute has filled that gap. It’s the global professional organization of revitalization and resilience professionals. Why are they needed?
Every year, all around the world, state, provincial, and national government dole-out billions of dollars to help redevelop and revitalize communities, or make them more resilient.
But virtually all of these well-meaning programs forget to include training that helps the communities make the most of these funds. They seem to think that writing checks is all that’s needed to revitalize a place.
They assume that community leaders understand the process of creating resilient prosperity. They’re wrong. As a result, the return on most of these public investments is dismal.
Such training costs almost nothing compared to the cost of redevelopment projects, yet it can double or triple the resulting jobs and economic growth. This is where certified PLACE DOCTORS come in.
It’s not just public-sector money that goes to waste. Private developers and real estate investors lose billions annually on redevelopment projects that aren’t properly supported by the local community.
Local leaders generally have no idea how to capture and perpetuate the momentum of these projects. This is shocking, when you consider how hard they work to attract those projects in the first place.
PLACE DOCTORS plug this crucial knowledge gap.
Storm Cunningham is Executive Director.
Our global team is led by author and consultant Storm Cunningham.
For two decades, Storm has been a keynoter and workshop leader at planning, sustainability, community regeneration, economic resilience, and natural resource restoration conferences worldwide.
George Ochs, Managing Director of JP Morgan, says: “Storm Cunningham is the world’s thought leader on community revitalization and natural resource restoration.”
Many credit Storm’s groundbreaking 2002 book, The Restoration Economy (Berrett-Koehler), with accelerating today’s explosive global growth of regenerative, resilient redevelopment. Storm’s 2008 book, Rewealth (McGraw-Hill Professional) further accelerated the trend with case studies of leading-edge practices.
His 3rd book is RECONOMICS: The Path To Resilient Prosperity (January 2020). It’s a guide to healing economies, societies and nature for policymakers, real estate investors and entrepreneurs.
RECONOMICS is the first book on achieving crisis recovery, economic revitalization and community resilience together. That sort of fits Storm’s early background as a Green Beret SCUBA medic, and is also good synopsis of what RECONOMICS Institute is all about.
What People Are Saying
To help you understand some of the comments below, we should explain that the most important element our students learn
when they read our core text, RECONOMICS, is the
RECONOMICS Process, which includes the 3Re Strategy.
“Two books, The Restoration Economy and Rewealth, strongly influenced my approach to community economic development. So, when RECONOMICS was published, and the RISING PLACES Practitioner program was announced, I enrolled immediately. It was the perfect next step in my career growth!“
CEO, CrossRoads Concepts & Consulting; former Director, Southern Idaho Rural Development Shoshone, Idaho, USA
“The RECONOMICS Process raises the bar for community and regional revitalization. It’s a powerful package, succinctly capturing the process that we have doggedly tried to identify over time, not always knowing the next step.
It brings a holistic dimension to redevelopment, inextricably linking vision and task.”
Eric Bonham, P.Eng.
Former Director
BC Ministry of Environment &
BC Ministry of Municipal Affairs
British Columbia, Canada
“RECONOMICS transformed
our latest project,
which uses the 3Re strategy.”
Dumas F. Lafontant, Director
Lower Roxbury Coalition
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
“RECONOMICS should be mandatory reading for all
Mayors, Chief Executives and Directors of Planning
in cities and regions.”
Rick Finc, Principal
RFA Development Planning, Edinburgh, Scotland
Why Link Revitalization With Resilience?
Hundreds of billions of dollars are already budgeted for
resilience by local and national governments worldwide.
For instance, Jamaica alone has $451.2 million budgeted for
climate resilience, just in fiscal year 2020/21.
Soon, the bill will be over $1 trillion globally, with no end in sight.
For this NOT to trigger a global economic debacle,
it’s essential that resilience investments revitalize economies:
simply protecting them isn’t enough.
Linking revitalization with resilience has the happy fringe benefit of increasing funding for resilience, thus creating a positive feedback loop of resilient prosperity for all.
“RECONOMICS hits the nail on the head!”
– Nalin Seneviratne
Director of City Centre Development,
Sheffield City Council, Sheffield, England
“RECONOMICS is a must-read for every mayor, resilience activist, planning commissioner and urban redevelopment professional who has been frustrated in their attempts to revitalize a place.
It succinctly describes why most revitalization plans fail, analyzes what’s missing and provides a simple, easy-to-follow strategic process for success.”
– Kevin L. Maevers, D.Mgmt., AICP
President, Arivitas Strategies, LLC, La Quinta, CA; Vice Director of Policy, IES, California Chapter, American Planning Association