DemocracySpace.org

Is anybody listening?

I came across this story a few days ago, and I thought it would be something you all would enjoy/appreciate/be inspired by/be touched by.

I was sitting on my couch last Friday night, with my roommates' dogs, Dakota and April, eating my quesadilla for dinner, watching the Newshour with Jim Leherer, and this story about an English class at the Village Academy High School in Pomona, California, came on. The students, after reading “The Great Gatsby” and contemplating the American dream, began to tell stories about how they felt the economic situation was thwarting their hopes to realize that dream. Their teacher offered to help them create a video through which they could tell their stories and then send it to the presidential nominees. They called it, “Is Anybody Listening?” (See video below.) President Obama mentions the students and their video in his speech on education, which you can see in the Newshour clip.

The students bared their souls -- their hopes, their fears, their worries. I sat on my couch, quesadilla in hand, sobbing. But, the students' action represents the story of democracy. As a result of this video, they realized they have the ability to help others and were empowered to create what they call the Village Project. Through this project they help students connect with services, or just give generously from what they have. It’s a sobering story, and a sobering video, but shows democracy at work in the lives of young people.

I hope you are as inspired by their stories as I was.

Here's to good works

Last week, I wrote about one especially resonant exchange at the Harwood Institute's Public Innovators Summit, held August 1-3 in Stevenson, Washington. Now, as promised, I'd simply like to share links to a few organizations with which I wasn't too familiar before attending the summit. It was great to learn about the good works being done by these organizations, as well as to re-connect with others whose work I already knew. I only wish we could mention every one of them here ...

Ashoka is a global association of social entrepreneurs. Its website says that, since 1981, Ashoka has supported more than 2,000 social entrepreneurs in more than 60 countries as Ashoka Fellows. Ashoka "envisions a world where Everyone is a Changemaker: a world that responds quickly and effectively to social challenges, and where each individual has the freedom, confidence and societal support to address any social problem and drive change."

We all hear a lot about giving peace a chance, but the Center for Global Nonviolence is advocating a much more in-your-face ideal: nonkilling. Based on the work of Glenn D. Paige (whose 2002 book is available as a free download at the center's website), nonkilling political science suggests that, contrary to popular assumptions and centuries of history, killing fellow humans is not a normal part of the human condition. This movement, according to Paige, "seeks to direct attention beyond 'peace' and even 'nonviolence' to focus sharply upon the taking of human life."

The Five Freedoms Project is dedicated to the freedoms outlined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Its website says the Five Freedoms Project "provides local school leaders with the leadership development, coaching and support they need to address two of America’s greatest challenges — improving the performance of our public schools, and strengthening the quality of our civic discourse."

Everyone knows about Goodwill, but the work of Goodwill Industries of San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin Counties goes far beyond its network of 17 neighborhood retail stores with its commitment to creating solutions to poverty and training people for living-wage jobs.

The Heat and Warmth Fund of Michigan (THAW) helps people pay their utility bills but also encourages folks to change how they use energy and advocates for long-term solutions to energy issues. THAW partners with Detroit radio station WWJ in an annual Winter Survival Radiothon to raise money for Detroit residents' essential heat and lighting costs.

The Omidyar Network - founded by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and his wife, Pam - makes grants and investments based on a belief that every person has the potential to make a difference. Although I didn't know the name of Omidyar, I know the work of some of its grantees, including Witness (musician Peter Gabriel's project to help human rights defenders use videography to record abuses and pursue justice) and Digg, which allows people to categorize and prioritize the vast quantities of content on the Internet.

Revenue Watch Institute promotes the transparent, accountable and effective management of oil, gas, and mineral resources for the public good. RWI and its partners work in about 30 nations worldwide to help countries avoid "the resource curse" of corruption that sometimes accompanies great resource wealth. From its website: "With effective revenue management, citizen engagement and real government accountability, natural resource wealth can drive development and national growth. RWI provides the expertise, funding and technical assistance to help countries realize these benefits."

Rural Development Initiatives "is a catalyst for community vitality in rural areas. We work with rural leaders and volunteers to expand the knowledge, skills and networks for building communities that foster opportunity, thrive and endure."

Survivor Corps started as an organization to help land-mine survivors, and it's now a global network of people helping each other to overcome the effects of war and violence. Its credo: "Working together, we rise above our injuries and give back to our communities." Founder Jerry White was on ABC's "Good Morning America" last week to discuss the organization and his new book. (Video here.) Jean Feraca, another summit attendee, will welcome Jerry as a guest on her radio show Here On Earth this Tuesday, August 12.

Friday digest-open thread 6/27/08

Welcome to the second official weekend of summer. From coast to coast, we have reports of people working together to strengthen the democracy whose 232nd birthday we'll mark next Friday. Here's an email we received today from Carolyn Lukensmeyer of AmericaSpeaks:

One of our current projects that I am particularly excited about is a workshop that AmericaSpeaks, Demos, and Everyday Democracy are convening in late July. We are inviting 40+ key people from the fields of deliberative democracy, electoral reform and community development to develop an agenda for expanding democracy to be presented to the new president in November.

More and more people are recognizing this is a unique moment in American politics and that it is essential that we seize the opportunity to become more of the country we really want to be. We have the possibility of demonstrating that transparency, inclusion, and accountability, key principles underpinning the foundation of our democracy, can be realized.

That realization is happening at the local level, too. In Burlington, Vermont, a Thursday luncheon with the theme "Vermont Leadership at the Crossroads" drew about 40 people who are eager to promote and pursue a new, more diverse leadership style for the state. The guest speaker, civic entrepreneur Hal Colston (founder of Good News Garage and NeighborKeepers), told of a vision where, by 2018, the state's aging, mostly homogenous leadership would meet regularly with upcoming minority leaders to forge new levels of trust and understanding between races and class groups.  "That apparently sounded pretty good to his audience, which applauded warmly at the end," Tim Johnson of the Burlington Free Press wrote today. " Why wait till 2018, someone then asked. Why not start now?" Wanda Hines, co-coordinator of the Burlington Legacy Project and head of the Social Equity Investment Project - which sponsored the luncheon - confirms that people are eager to get moving. "After the event was over nobody wanted to leave," she wrote in an email today. "Instead the majority stayed discussing what could be, where do we sign up and when do we get started."

Community members in Colorado Springs, Colorado, are looking ahead, too. Today marks the kickoff of Dream City: Vision 2020. "The aim of the project is to give everyone living here - kids, construction workers, artists, teachers, military personnel, engineers, retirees - a greater role in shaping our future," Warren Epstein writes in The Gazette. The first phase is  inspiration, he adds, centered on a Dream City 2020 website, "which will give you many opportunities to participate. Whether you'd like to give your two cents about what our community needs or you'd like to find a place for your classroom or organization in Dream City, you'll find it there." Epstein was among a team of Colorado Springs people at our recent Making Every Voice Matter national conference in Denver, and we are eager to see where citizens and the plan's partners - which include the newspaper, Leadership Pikes Peak, the Pikes Peak Library District, and the Cultural Office of the Pikes Peak Region - go with this project.

And in California (plus one at the NCDD conference in Texas), Antiraciscm.com has a full schedule of its White Ally Learning Lab workshops this summer and fall. Some W.A.L.L. experiences are one day; some are weekend events; all will help participants get the tools to recognize privilege, overcome racism, and pave the way for a better, more socially just world. CoAction also plans a summer reading group club around Understanding & Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century Challenge to White America by Joe Barndt. We'll post more info on that when we get it. You can see a preview of the book here.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court made one of its most anticipated rulings of the year, deciding 5-4 to overturn a Washington, D.C., handgun ban. Many politicians from both major parties hailed the ruling as a 2nd Amendment victory, but Dawn Turner Trice of the Chicago Tribune expressed some reservations in her column today, writing that in the ruling, "five members of the court edited the 2nd Amendment. In essence, they said: Scratch the preamble, only 14 words count. In doing so, they have curtailed the power of the legislatures and the city councils to protect their citizens." (More here.)

We'll skip the Friday digest next week in order to celebrate the Fourth of July. But watch DemocracySpace next Thursday for an opportunity to say what everyday democracy means to you.

The next civil rights frontier?

Last week, we blogged about Loving Day, marked every year to acknowledge the U.S. Supreme Court's, June 12, 1967, Supreme Court decision that legalized interracial marriage in the United States.

This week, all eyes are on California, where same-gender couples won a major victory in what may be this century's major civil rights issue: whether or not to allow gays and lesbians the freedom to marry. From the Associated Press:

Wearing everything from T-shirts to tuxedos and lavish gowns, hundreds of same-sex couples rushed to county clerks' offices throughout California to obtain marriage licenses and exchange vows as last-minute legal challenges to gay marriage failed. All 58 counties began issuing licenses Tuesday following an order from the state's highest court.

While few Americans would publicly question the right of interracial couples to wed in 2008, plenty of resistance remains to same-gender couples tying the knot, and Massachusetts and California are the only two states permitting same-gender marriage. Even Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama - the product of an interracial marriage - prefers civil unions (now the law in several states) to marriage rights for same-gender couples. And Republican candidate John McCain, who seems to be featuring an interracial family on his website's page on "Human Dignity and the Sanctity of Life," has this statement on the same page: "The family represents the foundation of Western Civilization and civil society and John McCain believes the institution of marriage is a union between one man and one woman."

Still, a May 2008 Pew Research Center poll found that a majority of Americans ages 18 to 29 now favor gay marriage, and opposition to the idea is dropping across all age categories. It seems likely that a few decades from now, our grandchildren will take it for granted that two people in love can marry, no matter what their race or gender and no matter what state they live in.

Dreaming big for our schools

Have you heard of TED? It stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and it's the name of an annual conference where some of the world's top thinkers and doers in all fields - not just those named above - are challenged to give "the talk of their lives" in 18 minutes. Each year, three of them are awarded this $100,000 prize, along with the chance to pursue their wish to change the world. One of the 2008 winners, writer Dave Eggers, won with this wish:

I wish that you - you personally and every creative individual and organization you know - will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area, and that you'll then tell the story of how you got involved, so that within a year we have 1,000 examples of innovative public-private partnerships.

The 2007-2008 school year is winding down, but it's not too soon to think about ways you could help fulfill this wish for a school in your community. A new website, Once Upon a School, is powering this wish by recording the 1,000 examples. So far, they include a school literary magazine in San Francisco, an "ImagineSCIENCE" partnership between the Rochester (New York) Institute of Technology and the Rochester City Schools, a book drive for a New Orleans school that's still rebuilding its classroom libraries three years after Katrina, and an Indiana scientist who developed a classroom presentation called "My Beautiful Bucket of Brains."

You have until October 31 to get involved with a school near you and help meet the challenge of 1,000 success stories. Three projects will earn their originators a free pass to the 2009 TED Conference in California. Click here for more information on Once Upon a School.

Friday digest-open thread 6/6/08

Today is the 40th anniversary of the death of Robert Kennedy, which seems to be passing more quietly than the April anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination. Nick Bryant, author of The Bystander: John F Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality, penned this remembrance of the president's younger brother for BBC News. He starts with Kennedy's own reaction to Dr. King's death, and how he stood on a flatbed truck and appealed for calm, saying, "What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black." Two months later, Kennedy was assassinated, too. The video above recounts both Kennedy's speech and his killing.

Last month, more than 400 people in Jacksonville, Florida, took part in a Dinner With a Difference and got a taste of dialogue-to-action study circles on race and racism. Jacksonville's Project Breakthrough received more publicity recently when six dialogue participants sat down to tell of their individual experiences in the full round of study circles that recently concluded in Jacksonville. Here are their stories.

The Girl Scouts of America are stepping up efforts to welcome more Hispanic girls into their activities. Ari B. Bloomekatz of the Los Angeles Times wrote in a story this week:

Reflecting an increased effort by the Girl Scouts to attract young Latinas and their mothers, the Spanish Trails Council in Montclair is offering a bilingual camp for the first time this summer. The one-day "Las Divas de Hoy" will be held twice over the summer. Many of the planned activities are the same as other Girl Scouts camps -- painting nails, crafts and fashion shows -- but there will also be salsa dancing and flower arranging. Most important, said Idalia Silva, the council's community partnership manager, is that Spanish will be the predominant language.

Read more here, and see the Girl Scouts' Spanish-language website here.

The Associated Press reported today that young Americans view Barack Obama's race as an asset and a non-issue. Martha Irvine writes: "For young voters, Rosa Parks' refusal to sit at the back of a bus in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 is schoolbook history. Even the racially charged 1992 riots in Los Angeles are a distant memory. The United States is far from a blueprint for racial harmony, but for today's young adults — all born after segregation was outlawed in the mid-1960s — race is not the issue it once was."  Read more here.

In other election-year news, Michael Waldman (author of the new book Return to Common Sense: Seven Bold Ways to Revitalize Democracy) writes in this Newsweek essay that the United States can build on the enthusiasm of this year's record-breaking primary voter turnouts by enacting public financing of congressional campaigns; eventually abolishing the Electoral College; and ending voter registration "as we know it," granting the right automatically to every citizen. After all, he notes: "Former presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter chaired a commission that concluded, 'The registration laws in force throughout the United States are among the world's most demanding … [and are] one reason why voter turnout in the United States is near the bottom of the developed world.' Today, some 50 million eligible American citizens are not on the rolls."

What news stories piqued your interest this week? Please offer your comments below. The Friday digest will be back two weeks from today, after Everyday Democracy's Making Every Voice Matter national meeting next week in Denver.

Tracking tales of civic revival

PACE - Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement - presented preliminary findings from its study of "How Local Governments Are Reinventing Civic Engagement" at a webinar today. "There's a lot going on, and it's coming from many directions," said lead researcher Mike McGrath, who shared these examples:

California is home to a groundswell of activity, ranging from Oakland's Neighborhood Law Corps to the renaming of Ventura's Marketing and Public Affairs Division as the Civic Engagement Division. In Palo Alto, the city council adopted public engagement as one of four priorities for 2008. The 1978 Proposition 13 property tax revolt in California created a climate where local governments faced with hard budgetary choices have had to seek greater citizen consensus on decisions.

In Sarasota County, Florida, several foundations teamed to create a nonprofit called SCOPE (Sarasota Openly Plans for Excellence). As its website says: "The idea for SCOPE emerged following a series of discussions among a broad-based group of Sarasota County residents concerned about the county’s future. After several informal meetings, a diverse group of community leaders came together to discuss the idea of undertaking a visioning or community goal-setting process." Since its founding in 2001, SCOPE has held citizen study groups on a wide array of issues, including affordable housing, family violence, traffic congestion, and  many others. See more about SCOPE's work here.

Dubuque, Iowa, was in sorry shape in the mid-1980s after the John Deere tractor company left town, but a series of visioning processes held since then have helped turn the former industrial town into a community that's pursuing riverfront development, a revitalized downtown, and greater broadband connectivity. A city that actually once had a "Will the last person to leave Dubuque please turn out the lights?" billboard now calls itself "the masterpiece on the Mississippi" and boasts the highest job-growth rate in the state.

Other communities mentioned included Portland, Oregon; Chicago, Illinois; Greeley County, Kansas; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Worcester, Massachusetts, where neighborhood teams use handheld computers and digital cameras to record code-enforcement eyesores and public safety problems. The PACE team also gave props to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which has worked with Everyday Democracy as it has addressed community growth, sustainability, and education issues via its long-running Portsmouth Listens program.

McGrath noted how it pays to go well beyond the usual suspects (a.k.a. "stakeholders") in engaging the public. Many homeless people in Ventura, California, live in the river bottoms when the weather is dry and aren't keen to move into the indoor shelter during the rainy season. Through a community conversation on the issue, an artist who lives near the river suggested that the homeless people establish a camp. With help from a nonprofit and city resources, "River Haven" is a self-regulating, self-policing community of homeless people.

Today's PACE presentation left participants with a sense that although a robust civic revival in the United States seems to be well under way, there's plenty of work to be done to create a more coherent national movement. Some questions include:

What's better - temporary processes for public engagement, or permanent structures? If the former, should they be run by city employees or outside facilitators? If the latter, how can such structures be sustained? Should more decisions be made and implemented at the neighborhood level? Should citizen participants be selected randomly or by interest level? Can we develop a new language to better describe these new forms of shared governance, as well as minimum standards to guide everyone doing the work?

Kudos to the PACE team for its work. Anyone who wants a copy of the report can request one via email.

Remember: Matt Leighninger's book The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule Is Giving Way to Shared Governance - and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same - cited in today's PACE presentation - is the selection for the Everyday Democracy Book Club, which will be meeting right here at DemocracySpace on Thursday, May 15. Join us at 1 p.m. Eastern that day for an hour of live discussion on the sort of examples and questions raised at today's webinar.

Welcome to the Learning Exchange

About 50 people have gathered in East Hartford, Connecticut, this week from around the country to join in the first of two Learning Exchanges for Communities Creating Racial Equity. Everyday Democracy executive director Martha McCoy (below) greeted us by saying that the program is "a step in a dream we've had for a long time."

Formerly known as the Study Circles Resource Center, Everyday Democracy began focusing on racism during the 1992 civil disturbances in Los Angeles after the Rodney King beating. But in the 16 years since then, America has changed the way we talk about racism, McCoy said.

Early discussions were driven by King's plaintive question, "Can't we all just get along?" At first, it was enough for tens of thousands of people to come together in communities nationwide to talk about racial differences. Eventually, however, communities - and SCRC - understood that real change had to come on the institutional and policy level. Today, Everyday Democracy helps lead the effort to turn community organizing and dialogue into substantive change.  "We're working on two of the leading edges in the country," McCoy said: racial equity and making democracy work better.

CCRE participating communities include South Sacramento County, California; New Haven and Stratford, Connecticut; Jacksonville, Florida; Hopkinsville, Kentucky; Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland; Syracuse, New York; Burlington, Vermont; and Lynchburg, Virginia. Today at the conference, communities will tell their stories, discuss structural racism, and learn tools for evaluation and communication. Tomorrow, participants will look forward to the next six to 12 months of work, using markers of progress we'll identify this week (and backed by action grants that Everyday Democracy will award via generous funding from the Kellogg and Mott Foundations).

And along the way - via DemocracySpace, our website, and other tools - we'll share much of the communities' progress with you so that cities and towns beyond the initiative can take what we're learning and make it your own.

Engagement: just business as usual?

As seen on our Everyday Democracy website, the city council in Palo Alto, California, chose public engagement as one of its top four priorities for 2008 and will meet March 17 to outline its plans for involving the public more this year and beyond. In her article, Palo Alto Online reporter Becky Trout examines how one city is looking to its citizens to create a democracy that works for every one, every day.

It's worth reading the article at the original website to see the reader comments and realize that not everyone is sold on the idea that the public ought to be more involved in government, or that the effort isn't a waste of time and money. "More gobbledygook from rich, retired Palo Altans with too much time on their hands," one reader wrote. "Business as usual -- with more meetings," another opined. Another voiced concerns about handing over government to "gadflies who have no life of their own and show up at meetings with their pet peeves and idiosyncratic causes."

Sound familiar? How can Palo Alto officials and organizers address these views and citizens' understandable skepticism? How does your community do it?

At Everyday Democracy, we know that there's a big difference between what has traditionally passed for public engagement - public hearings, town hall meetings, focus groups, surveys, and the like - and the more inclusive, active methods we encourage. To really create a thriving culture of civic engagement, a community must:

• identify a pressing issue;
• gather a diverse group of organizers, who can recruit the widest possible array of participants;
• hold multi-session discussions (often called study circles) that allow people to fully explore and understand one another's perspectives;
• and create a strong and doable plan for action - working across many parts of the community, from government to schools to neighborhoods to businesses to faith groups - once the discussion phase concludes.

This is something that we've helped hundreds of communities do. If you'd like to see how to get started, read our guide to "The basics of dialogue to change."