Building America's new front porch.

By organizing at the grassroots, David Burwell promotes a national vision of community.

Once upon a time homes had front porches. People could go outside, sit on their porch, speak with their neighbors, and keep an eye on the community. Nowadays, widened roads and central air conditioning have nearly eliminated front porches from America's landscape, and gone with them is a certain sense of community that they spawned.

David Burwell, chief staff executive, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy (RTC), Washington, D.C., believes America needs a new front porch. His solution: trails. "We want to make trails America's new front porch," he says, "a new place for people to have a social life, a new form of public space where you can meet people - your neighbors - in a nonthreatening manner."

RTC's mission is to fill this need by converting abandoned railway corridors into a multi-use, interconnected, nationwide trail system. As of last month, RTC members had converted 10,000 of the nation's 160,000 miles of abandoned railway corridor into trails.

Building membership

RTC envisions itself as the trade association for groups and individuals concerned about greenways - or open space, alternative transportation, and trails. These three focuses form the foundation for a membership-building strategy to which many association executives may relate. By forming strategic partnerships with various organizations serving the constituencies concerned with one or more of the three focus areas, RTC both advances projects central to its mission and attracts new members.

"We sell our mission to other organizations that would benefit from it," Burwell says. For example, a bicycle association may be a member of RTC because rail-trails are good for the bicycle association's industry. In this case, RTC's goal may be to attract that association's individual members - the bicyclists - into membership, making them not only trail users but advocates. "By selling our mission to other associations, their members want to become members of our organization also. People will support an organization if they believe in what it is doing and feel they are capable of accomplishing its goals."

And for RTC, members and volunteers are inseparable. More than 72,000 members strong, RTC recognizes that its members are the volunteers who will bring the dream of a coast-to-coast trail system to fruition. "When we started [RTC in 1985], trails were a local issue," says Burwell, referring to the disconnected groups that organized trails primarily in their communities. "What RTC tries to do is raise the stakes - by making trails a national and not local issue." For Burwell this means serving the membership by recruiting national media to cover local trail projects, working with Congress and various agencies on behalf of local trail groups, and providing technical assistance to members - giving them all the information they need to make the project successful.

"Our goals are similar to those of any trade organization," Burwell says, "to give our membership a sense of the national implications of the success or failure of their industry, to instill in our membership the national importance of what they are doing locally - historic preservation, community building, and sustainable development."

Motivating members

Given his experience with the rails-to-trails project, Burwell can attest to the importance of keeping association volunteers motivated. "The greatest pitfall in grass-roots organizing is defeatism," he says. "Volunteers tend to get discouraged easily." The key to keeping them encouraged is repetition, Burwell adds. "Continuously let them know that there are no killer issues. At RTC we promote and showcase successfully completed rail-trail projects. This demonstrates that things that seem impossible are not - other people have accomplished them."

Another challenge is keeping volunteers motivated when their project is complete, says Burwell. Rail-trail development is organized into numerous local projects. "When a project is over, we try to keep the local trail group together and continuously involved, perhaps by getting them to be volunteer leaders on another project in the next county or town," he says. "We constantly tell them that their work is important," thereby keeping them focused on the national vision of a nationwide trail system and instilling a sense of responsibility to help.

Managing it all

Trails are narrow and long. Often several jurisdictions must agree. to build a trail. But that decision is minute in the trail-building process. Next, ownership of the corridor must be determined. If the corridor is privately owned, it must be made public before any work can proceed. "Once the corridor is in public ownership, you're halfway there," says Burwell. All told, the process can take four to five years. "It takes a lot of staying power for a volunteer to work that hard for that long," says Burwell. That's where RTC comes in. "We try to demonstrate that we have all the resources necessary to make the trails work, including the lobbying arm necessary to get the land turned over and to get the local funding," he explains.

In addition to giving a national voice to local projects, RTC also plays a major role in keeping the organization's mission in the forefront. "A strong vision is the best management tool," contends Burwell. "We created a vision of the organization that we could sell like a product. For the first five years we were selling the hope of a trail system. Now that some trails are operational, members are seeing the system emerge, and now expectation replaces hope."

Management Maxims

* You can only accomplish what you can finance.

* Don't wait for everyone to be on board. Identify who's ready and work with them.

* Innovate: It is the only strategy for which there is no defense.

LaRonda R. Miller is editorial assistant for ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT.