DemocracySpace.org

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.

Friday digest-open thread 4/18/08

It's time to announce the spring selection for our Everyday Democracy Book Club. Join us here at Democracy Space at 1 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, May 15, as we'll meet with Everyday Democracy senior associate Matt Leighninger to discuss his book The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule Is Giving Way to Shared Governance - and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same. In the book, Matt - who also is executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium - tells how communities all across the nation are seeing how officials and citizens can work together to address pressing issues.

This will be a great opportunity to share stories of "shared governance" and learn from other communities (and Matt's considerable expertise). Order the book from your local bookstore or online, and be sure to mark your calendar for May 15. And if you missed our last book club with Frances Moore Lappé, you can read the transcript here.

Speaking of the DDC, thanks to Joe Goldman for his tip on this recent article on Politico.com, in which e-democracy advocate Steven Clift asked this timely question: “Isn’t it interesting that the best-designed government websites are those collecting your taxes, while the worst sites are those giving you a say on how your taxes are spent?” The article tells how many other governments are way beyond ours in offering the public a chance to comment on legislation, submit petitions, and more. For example, write authors Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifr, "In England, anyone can submit an e-petition directly on the 10 Downing Street website, and the most popular ones are featured on the site’s home page. More than 7 million people — one in 10 British citizens — have signed one of those petitions since the site’s launch in the fall of 2006."

Next week, Everyday Democracy will be holding the first of two Learning Exchanges for the nine communities involved in our Communities Creating Racial Equity initiative. Two important articles on this topic crossed our desks this week. Education Week had the bad but not unsurprising news that the academic achievement gap grows fastest for bright African-American children, particularly in schools with higher black populations, "where test scores are lower on average, teachers are less experienced, and high-achieving peers are harder to find."

Meanwhile, criminal injustice is in the spotlight in the current issue of the alumni magazine for Brown University, where economics professor Glenn Loury has been working to bring greater attention to the fact, as author Beth Schwartzapfel wrote, "that the number of black men incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails—a number wildly disproportionate to their representation in the general population—reflects the social dishonor to which African Americans are still subject today, a dishonor with roots in U.S. slavery." Click here to read "A Nation of Jailers."

The good news is that many communities are proactively deciding to address racial inequity, often with the help of resources from Everyday Democracy. If you caught yesterday's water cooler, you learned how Lynchburg, Virginia, successfully held the action forum for its first round of "Many Voices - One Community" dialogues on race and racism this week, and how activists from New Haven and Stratford, Connecticut; Jacksonville, Florida; Syracuse, New York; and Memphis, Tennessee are being - and leading - the change they want to see in their communities.

Next week at DemocracySpace: We'll have news from communities walking the walk for Earth Day and two days of live blogging from the CCRE Learning Exchange. If you like what you read here, you can get it delivered right to your email box by subscribing via the link atop the right-hand side of the page.

Happy Passover to our Jewish readers!

SPLC: 888 hate groups in U.S.

The Southern Poverty Law Center released its annual "Year in Hate" report this week, and it wasn't good news. From the news release:

Led by three states on the southern border, the number of hate groups operating in America has swelled by 48 percent since 2000, a staggering increase mainly attributable to the anti-immigrant fervor sweeping the country ...

... The latest annual count by the SPLC found the number of hate groups operating in America rose to 888 last year, up 5 percent from the 844 groups in 2006 and far above the 602 groups documented in 2000.

At the same time, new FBI statistics suggest a 35 percent rise in hate crimes against Latinos between 2003 and 2006. Experts believe that such crimes are typically carried out by people who think they are attacking immigrants.

"Hate groups continue to successfully exploit the immigration debate to their advantage, even though the immigration issue has largely disappeared from the presidential debate," said Mark Potok, editor of the SPLC's Intelligence Report, an investigative journal that monitors the radical right. "The fact is that they've been aided and abetted by mainstream pundits and politicians who give these haters a platform for their propaganda."

Other hate groups continue to target blacks, gays, and immigrants. Read the full release here.

Everyday Democracy - formerly the Study Circles Resource Center - has resources for communities that want to hold large-scale, inclusive dialogues on sensitive issues including immigration and racial equity. One community - Springfield, Illinois - used its dialogues in part to counter a visit from a white supremacist. Another community - New Haven, Connecticut - will focus on immigration as it takes part in Everyday Democracy's  new Communities Creating Racial Equity project.

Gearing up to work for racial equity

Over the coming months, DemocracySpace will periodically include news about Communities Creating Racial Equity. This exciting new initiative - a project of the Study Circles Resource Center, soon to be renamed Everyday Democracy - will help eight communities across the United States "create and sustain public engagement and community change on issues around racial equity."

With SCRC's assistance (and funding from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and C.S. Mott Foundation), the communities will work to reduce persistent inequality among racial and ethnic groups that show up in education, housing, health care, the justice system, immigration, and jobs. Participating communities also will form a national network and meet together twice (in spring 2008 and spring 2009) to learn from one another.

SCRC staff involved in the program had a webinar today to get updates on key aspects of the program, which is designed to pull together all the tools and ideas SCRC has gathered over a decade-and-a-half of helping communities move to talk about and then take action to create greater racial equity. For example, each community will work with a biracial team of SCRC staff and associates who will visit the community and lend support to community efforts. But even before the partners visit their communities, they will work together to honestly share and hold each other accountable for viewing and doing their work through "a racial equity lens."

Within the communities, SCRC/Everyday Democracy teams will help communities build multiracial leadership, assess current levels of racial equity, and work toward ever greater awareness of anti-racist practices. No matter is too small: For example, organizers will be asked to review meeting times and places to make them as welcoming as possible to people from all racial and ethnic groups.

SCRC staff and associates will also be standing ready to help the participating communities document their work and share their stories with the wider world. Each community will be asked to designate a communications liaison. SCRC staff will help the liaisons approach their local media, use online tools to tell their stories, and help share their experiences with other communities both within and outside the network.

Some of the community teams have already launched their work. Click here to read an article on how Stratford, Connecticut, plans to use a CCRE grant to take a proactive approach to racial tensions, and click here to learn more about CCRE and all the communities involved. If you'd like to hold a dialogue-to-change program in your own community, click here to order or download a copy of Facing Racism in a Diverse Nation.

Friday digest-open thread 10/5/07

Another weekend is upon us. What have you been working on and thinking about this week? This is our weekly news digest and open thread, so please feel free to share events, news, and commentary in the comments below. Your comments are important here!

Two people with ties to study circles in Windsor, Connecticut, have been recognized as 2007 Windsor Bridge-Builders by the town Human Relations Commission. Patricia Gardner and Doreen Richardson received the honors September 27, WindsorJournal.com reports today.

From Dallas Morning News columnist Norma Adams-Wade: "Noted civil and human rights attorney Morris Dees will speak in Dallas at the three-day embRACE conference exploring the danger and impact of racism, classism and oppression. Mr. Dees, who founded and heads the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., is known for successfully challenging hate groups and winning judgments for victims of hate crimes." The event starts at 7 tonight, Friday, October 5, at First Unitarian Church of Dallas, 4015 Normandy Ave. Click here for more info on this and other Dallas-area events.

There's one more week to go until the early-bird registration deadline (October 12) for the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) Skills Symposium will be held November 12-16 in Scottsdale, Arizona. Click here to learn more. (Hat tip NCDD.)

African refugees to Australia and their allies are protesting Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews' claims that they are "a problem and a challenge" for Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald has more here. Reuters Africa reports that Prime Minister John Howard "denied on Wednesday that the decision was a pre-election pitch to immigration-wary voters."

Study circles are under way in Delray Beach, Florida, where participants are sharing personal stories of how race and racism have impacted their lives. Lula Butler, director of the city's Community Improvement Department, told the Sun-Sentinel that circles are "an excellent way to engage the community; people feel safe in small groups. That's how to make a difference, one small group at a time."