The Public Value Canvas is a tool that change agents can use to help them navigate the difficult process of improving social conditions while ensuring the new status quo, or envisioned future, is worth the costs. This canvas is a visualization that can be thought of as “the big picture”: it brings together several important aspects of the problem and the change process so that users can develop and evaluate their idea for change, making sure all parts are aligned. Critically, this big picture will change over time: improving social conditions is a dynamic process in which understanding evolves, priorities shift, teams gain and lose members, resources become available or disappear, and interventions are tried and found wanting. Creating change is not a linear process but a recursive one, frequently requiring change agents to double back and repeat steps.

Conceptually, the starting point for most change initiatives is the conviction that something is wrong and needs fixing. This is the Problem, the current, unsatisfactory state of things: unhoused people living on the street, a lack of safe places where children can play, a food desert, or too many unsafe apartments owned by slumlords. However, it is also important to remember the issue will appear differently depending on the perspective of those looking at it—in an area with high homelessness, small business owners may perceive the problem differently than those living on the street, or a team of outreach workers, or the staff of a shelter.

Among those looking closely at the Problem will be the Team, the core group shepherding the process by which the old status quo is hopefully changed into a new and better one. This strategic team should be small enough to coordinate and make decisions effectively, yet it must collectively possess, or be able to mobilize, the different capabilities and key assets necessary to achieving the initiative’s goals. As mentioned, this group’s perspective will help define the issue to be worked on, as well as extending or limiting the range of imagined interventions, so a broad, diverse membership is ideal. Members may be selected by a civic leader from different government agencies, nonprofits, corporations, and from within the affected community, and they may join or leave as the project’s needs shift or other circumstances change. (Note that in some cases, a team may exist before a particular problem is targeted, in which case the composition of the team will likely determine the issue to be selected, rather than vice versa.)

Another critical element in this process is the Environment. Visually, the Canvas represents the Environment as enfolding all the other elements, since it is the context within which the Problem exists, the Team is selected and operates, and the change process happens. The Environment may include broad, global trends (such as a pandemic, supply chain issues, and a new respect for essential workers) as well as features of the regional and local contexts (such as state funding for the environment, a city’s process for approving new development, or distrust of the police within a neighborhood). One reason it is important to know the local terrain well is that the Team will likely be assembled from among interested local groups and organizations. In addition, while the Team will probably look at initiatives elsewhere that successfully addressed similar issues, understanding the local Environment and its particular opportunities and limits is crucial to successfully intervening in the problem. It is also important to know the historic causes of the issue and about previous attempts to address it.

The Envisioned Future is the destination: the new status quo that the initiative hopes to bring into being, where conditions are improved and the community is somehow better off than before. To use the homelessness example, the anticipated future could be a city where no one sleeps on the street because permanent housing is prioritized by the government. A clear vision of the intended destination is necessary to guide the change agents and bring others on board—but this vision may also shift over time (for instance, as the problem comes to be understood differently, or as ambitions are scaled back because funding for the initiative is limited).

Central to the idea of public value is that the Envisioned Future is not only achievable but worth the cost—which is where the Public Value Account comes into play. This element of the Canvas helps show whether the change to the status quo has real, articulable benefits to society, ones that outweigh any losses of resources, freedom, and so on. It does this by enumerating the pros and cons of the change initiative: the material benefits and the less tangible ones (such as gains in justice or equity) that accrue to society, and the costs in money, personnel, convenience, and liberty. As wonderful as the Envisioned Future may sound, it can’t justify every possible expense. Just as a business creates a balanced budget for new initiatives to show how expected revenue should pay for outlays, so the Public Value Account is a ledger that lists all likely positives and negatives resulting from the change.

At the center of the Canvas is the Public Value Proposition. This is a single sentence articulating the heart of the change initiative: the problem, the proposed intervention, the target beneficiaries, and what they stand to gain from the change. The Proposition represents not only the ends but also the means of moving from the status quo to the envisioned future—the activities that will deliver the positive benefits of the Public Value Account. Arriving at this sentence obviously requires a great deal of fact-finding about the problem, brainstorming ways to make it better, and back-and-forth within the team about the best way forward. Once all has been distilled into the Public Value Proposition, however, it can serve not only as an “elevator pitch” for the initiative but as a hypothesis for change, to be tested and refined during the rest of the process. One example: “If the city prioritizes funding permanent housing for unhoused people, it could significantly cut the number of people sleeping on the street and in shelters while increasing the effectiveness of other interventions for those individuals.”