About Us
The Smart Growth Leadership Institute is dedicated to helping state and local elected, civic and business leaders design and implement effective smart growth strategies.
We believe that plans, policies, codes and regulations should encourage healthier neighborhoods; promote quality investments; eliminate red-tape; provide incentives to level the playing field for developers; foster active citizenship; and, safeguard the future for our children.
We believe that the best community leaders have long-term vision and the necessary people skills and know how that will motivate their community and inspire citizenship. The best community leaders can leverage the demands of future growth and new development to help shape a built-environment that creates neighborhoods and fosters community.
We also believe that leadership can be learned and that learners make the best leaders.
At the Smart Growth Leadership Institute, we assist communities seeking to implement smart growth, we support leaders with training programs and resources, we help local governments develop smart growth implementation strategies and provide them with the necessary tools and technical assistance to help move their communities from visions, to plans to execution. We also work to help shape state and local initiatives to level the playing field for smart growth and develop policies and strategies that will promote resilient economies for all our communities.
The Smart Growth Leadership Institute is a project of Smart Growth America, a coalition of national, state and local organizations working to improve the ways we plan and build the towns, cities and metro areas we call home. The coalition includes many of the best-known national organizations advocating on behalf of historic preservation, the environment, farmland and open space preservation, neighborhood revitalization and more.
We are based in the nation's capital and are a non-profit 501(c)3 organization founded in 2003.