A community initiative · Cornwall, New York
Blazing a path forward together.
Some problems belong to all of us. Every community has them. The ones where everybody holds a piece of the answer and nobody holds the whole thing. Where the people who would be affected, the people who know the subject, and the people who could actually do something about it have never once been in the same room at the same time. Just imagine, what could we accomplish, if we actually worked on it together?
The Cornwall Collaboratory is a place to bring these folks together to resolve complex issues through a collaborative process. They come together, for a couple of hours, with the same facts in front of everyone, and somebody whose only job is to keep the work moving. And the best part – we are offering this as a public service. It is free to Cornwall.
Collaboratory defined
This is a platform for working things out together.
“Collaboratory” joins two words, collaboration and laboratory. A computer scientist named William Wulf coined it in 1989 to describe a center without walls, where people could work on hard problems together no matter how far apart they were.
Ours has walls. It has a stage, and seats, and a screen on the wall of a ninety-year-old theater in Cornwall-on-Hudson – The Storm King Theater.
The idea is the same. A collaboratory is not a meeting and it is not a hearing. It is a workroom. People come in with different information and different interests, and they leave with a plan none of them could have written alone.
We call each one a Collab for short. A Collab is the group of people working on a shared problem, with shared goals, and shared outcomes. It usually takes one workshop. Sometimes it takes a few. Start with one and see where it takes you.
The problem we are addressing
Something has changed in how we talk to each other.
It has happened in towns all over the country and it has happened here too. We read different things. We hear about each other before we hear from each other. By the time we end up in the same room, most of us already think we know which side everyone is on. We stigmatize each other before one word is spoken.
That is not any one person’s doing. It built up over years, in a thousand small ways, and all of us had a hand in it. The spread of misinformation on the Internet has only made the problem worse.
Meanwhile, the ways we have to work through a hard question are not built for it. A public meeting gives everyone a few minutes and a microphone. A comment period collects opinions one at a time, from people who never hear each other. A survey counts us. None of them were designed to help a room full of people with different interests build one thing together, and none of them are the worse for it. They were built for other jobs and they do those jobs just fine.
So here is the opportunity.
Put the people who care about a problem in one place. Give everyone the same facts to start from. Give them enough time to actually get somewhere, and somebody whose only job is to keep the work moving and make sure the quiet people get heard. That is the role of the facilitator.
When you do that, people surprise each other. Positions soften into interests. Somebody says the thing everyone was thinking. A trade-off nobody wanted to name gets named, and then it can be dealt with.
None of that is complicated. It is just rare. It does not have to be. Instead, let’s make it a habit!
Building a great collaboratory
Nobody gives anything up.
A Collab takes no authority away from anyone. The Town Board still votes. The Village Board still votes. The school board, the planning board, the Chamber of Commerce, every one of them keeps every bit of the say it had the day before.
What a Collab offers is the time and space to explore a complex problem or issue through structured activities and guided discussions to come to a resolution, and a co-created action plan that comes with the reasoning attached. Plans that are co-created by those actors and stakeholders who will be directly impacted by their outcomes – that’s how you design a thriving community!
That is the whole offer. We convene the collaboratory. We publish what comes out of it. The decisions stay exactly where they have always been.
- It is not a government body. No office, no seat, no standing before any board.
- It does not decide anything. What comes out of a Collab is worth what the people in it made it worth, and no more.
- It does not take sides. The Collaboratory does not campaign, endorse, or lobby for its own findings.
If you serve on a board or a committee and you have an issue that needs more than a meeting can hold, this is yours to use too. Sponsor a topic. Sit in a collab. Bring the question you have not been able to get through. That is not a conflict. That is the point.
How to start a Collab
From an idea to a plan we can all read.
- 1
Bring the issue
Someone names a problem worth working on, why it matters, what a good outcome would look like, and who ought to be there. Every issue comes forward with a community organization behind, serving as its sponsor.
- 2
Build the collaboratory
The sponsor and the facilitator work out the available days to workshop and build the guest list together: the people it affects, the people who know the subject, and the people who could actually do something about it.
- 3
Do the work
Everyone starts from the same facts. Then the collab gets to work on what people need, where the trouble really comes from, what each choice would cost, and what could be done. Ideas and feedback are curated and synthesized into an action items and next steps.
- 4
Share what we found
A written summary and a proposed plan go to the sponsoring organization and get published here. Where the collab agreed, we say so. Where it did not, we say that too. Then the Collaboratory steps back.
Workshops are two hours, on Wednesday evenings from 6:00 to 8:00. Some issues need longer, and some need more than one evening. We will talk that through with you.
Anyone can start this
Bring an issue. Find an organization to stand behind it.
Any one of us can name a problem. What we ask is that a community organization put its name next to it: the Town or Village Board, a municipal committee, the school district, the Chamber, a religious institution, a civic group, a neighborhood association, or a local nonprofit.
The reason is simple. A collaboratory takes a room, an evening, and a group of people’s attention, and there is only so much of that to go around. When an organization says yes, it is telling us that this is something a group of people share, and not one person’s frustration. That one step keeps the work pointed in the right direction.
It is not a high bar, and it is not meant to be.
Do not have a sponsor yet? That is where most people stop, and you do not have to. Start the form anyway, tell us who you have in mind, and we will help you find the right door to knock on.
Find a sponsor →How we work
What we promise each other.
- Everyone starts from the same facts. A short plain-language primer kicks off every workshop and will be posted here for anyone to read.
- The work stays visible while it happens. Ideas go up on a shared board on the theater screen as people say them. Anyone there can write their own words down. Nothing gets quietly reinterpreted later.
- What comes out gets published. The summary and the proposed plan go up on this site the same day they go to the sponsor. Where the collab did not agree, that is written down with the same care as where it did.
- Nobody has to pretend to agree. A Collab that ends with honest positions clearly explained has done its job.
- We say who was there. The list of participants is published, along with anyone we invited who could not make it.
- The facilitator takes no fee for Cornwall. Jason Burnham holds no office, is no longer on any committees, and has no party affiliation.
Whether a workshop is filmed, livestreamed or shared afterward is the sponsoring organization’s call, and theirs alone. When a workshop involves Town or Village government, or when the outcome would touch the whole community, we encourage sponsors strongly to open it up. But the Collaboratory does not make that decision for them.
The collaboratory
A ninety-year-old theater on Idlewild Avenue.
The Storm King Theater opened in 1935 and has been the middle of village life, on and off, ever since. It went dark for a long stretch. It is open again now, brought back as a nonprofit and a place for the whole community, and its owner has offered it to serve as the home of the Cornwall Collaboratory.
There is a reason she offered it, and it is a good story.
What should Cornwall work on together?
Issues can be brought forward now. The first workshops will be scheduled in early 2027.