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Friday digest-open thread 5/16/08

"One city ... thousands of voices heard ... democracy is here." That's the message of the winning video from the Indianapolis Neighborhood Resource Center, which took the $1,000 prize this week in Everyday Democracy's "Making Every Voice Matter" YouTube video contest. Using dozens of photos, music that moves from dramatic to energetic, and inspiring quotes about outcomes, the INRC entry shows how change is happening in neighborhoods throughout Indianapolis. As Everyday Democracy deputy communication director and operations manager Carrie Boron wrote on our website, "The video shows that all kinds of people are having a voice in improving Indianapolis neighborhoods. And it demonstrates that by employing simple production techniques, a community can use video to showcase its work in a medium accessible to lots of people." Read more here.

Everyday Democracy got another major media mention this week, this time in an essay, "Where Racial Healing Happens," from Rob Corcoran in the Christian Science Monitor. Quoting a friend who told him that "change happens from the bottom," Rob writes, "And he's right: Ordinary people are coming together to do extraordinary things. Healing conversation is already under way. In hundreds of local efforts across the US, diverse groups of citizens are bridging the traditional boundaries of race, class, and culture. Thousands have engaged in dialogue, symbolic acts of reconciliation, and collaborative problem solving. Organizations such as Everyday Democracy and Hope in the Cities (a project of Initiatives of Change) are facilitating this." Read it all here. Rob is national director for Initiatives of Change in the United States.

The past two weeks have been horrible ones for natural disasters including the cyclone in Burma and earthquake in China. A discussion at the Skoll Foundation's Social Edge website has been asking social entrepreneurs and community organizers to think about both how people can help affected areas now and what they'd do if a disaster hit their area. For example, author Jill Finlayson asks, "Are there grant applications or proposals for programs that you need funded that you can pull off the shelf and submit after a disaster?  Having these written in advance can enable you to promptly take advantage of funds that become available (before interest and support wanes), without having to start from scratch or take time away from the critical response efforts at the point of an emergency." Read more and join the conversation here.

Everyday Democracy executive director Martha McCoy spoke Thursday at the United Way's annual national conference in Baltimore. Her talk focused on "Engaging the Community, Building Community Knowledge." Also Thursday, United Way president Brian Gallagher outlined a new 10-year campaign focused on halving the number of high-school dropouts and working families that are struggling financially. "The country is at a crossroads right now," Gallagher said. "I've never felt a time in my career where there's this combination of enough pain, feeling of a lack of progress, feeling like we've stalled, combined with a next generation of leadership demanding change." Gallagher took questions about the goals in this live discussion at the Washington Post website.

Don't forget: There's now less than a week to catch the early-bird rate for Everyday Democracy's national meeting June 12-14 in Denver. Go here for more info, including the entire conference program now available in pdf form.

Water cooler this week!

Just a reminder: This Thursday, April 17, we'll have the latest in our series of water cooler live blog sessions. This week's event will focus on Communities Creating Racial Equity, the new project that Everyday Democracy is coordinating with nine innovative communities nationwide. CCRE representatives are especially encouraged to attend, but anyone interested in ending institutional racism - especially on the local level - is invited. All you need to do to take part is join us right here at DemocracySpace between 1 and 2 p.m. Eastern.

Also, don't forget that this Wednesday, April 16, is the deadline for entries in our YouTube Making Every Voice Matter video contest. Get all the details here.

Friday digest-open thread 4/11/08

Have you had enough talk about race yet? We haven't either. So mark your datebook for next Thursday (April 17), when we'll be holding our more-or-less monthly water cooler from 1 to 2 p.m. Eastern right here on DemocracySpace. The topic will be how communities like yours are working to create greater racial equity. No RSVP necessary. Just show up and blog with us!

Following Martha McCoy's post yesterday about how big media may be missing the mark on its coverage of race, we posted the following discussion question on the Everyday Democracy page at Facebook: Do you think the media is getting a clue to the idea that substantive change will come not from talking about race relations but about racial equity? The discussion board is here, so if you are on Facebook, please join our group and weigh in on that topic. (Your comments are welcome here as well.) Meanwhile, in a response to Martha, Michael Weiksner wonders at e-thepeople whether it's wise to focus on problems like poverty through a strictly racial lens.

Writing at The Democracy Movement, Everyday Democracy senior associate and Deliberative Democracy Consortium executive director Matt Leighninger tells how, in civic-engagement programs originally launched to talk about race, many participants have come to question traditional assumptions. For example, he says, "they question the notion that racism is just an easily identifiable, individual sin – that we are all either racists or non-racists. When people take a closer look, they usually begin to see racism as a blurry spectrum, a series of individual and institutional biases that get progressively more inaccurate and damaging." Read more here.

In Lynchburg, Virginia, where the Community Dialogue on Race and Racism has brought more than 600 people together with the goal of dismantling racism, the local newspaper asked city council candidates: "Explain whether you feel issues of racial inequality do or do not continue to persist in Lynchburg. Specify what, if any, role is played by the city government in those issues. Further specify whether you feel the dialogue is an effective way of dealing with concerns related to race." You can read their answers here. Wouldn't it be great to see local editorial boards nationwide ask probing questions about racism as campaigns unfold this year?

The Human Rights Commission in Jacksonville, Florida, is launching a new series of study circles on racism this month. Visit the City of Jacksonville website to learn more and register. Jacksonville and Lynchburg are among the nine partners in Everyday Democracy's Communities Creating Racial Equity  initiative. Many more communities are engaging on the issue through resources such as our Facing Racism in a Diverse Nation discussion guide. Click here to learn more.

Update - Friday afternoon: Everyday Democracy staff member Molly Holme Barrett has passed along word of a show set to air on MSNBC at 9 Eastern /8 Central tonight. (Check your local listings.) “Meeting David Wilson” depicts the journey of 28-year-old David A. Wilson - a black man from New Jersey - to North Carolina to meet 62-year-old David B. Wilson, a descendant of the white Southern family that owned his ancestors during the slavery era. See more here. The program will include a 90-minute live discussion of racial issues in America.

Update - Monday, April 14: Peter Levine wrote this post at his blog Friday afternoon citing both Martha's post and a recent one by Rich Harwood on the changing narratives and need for action in our conversations on race.

A new race narrative emerges

“For we know now, that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t have enough money to buy a hamburger?”
- Martin Luther King, Jr., in his address to strikers in Memphis,Tenn., March 18, 1968

This past Sunday, CBS News Sunday Morning had a segment on race relations in Memphis. They highlighted some of what has happened there in the 40 years since Martin Luther King’s assassination. Their coverage shows just how hard it is to convey the realities of race in our society.

I don’t want to bash CBS News – after all, it’s good that they’re giving attention to race, and to the great work being done by the Common Ground coalition in Memphis (and with whom we’re proud to work). But the CBS story makes a good case study of the limits of the old paradigm of talking about race. I think of it as the “can’t we all just get along” paradigm.

Sunday Morning made a typical mistake – they conveyed that the main problem with race is that people pre-judge and fear one another.

Of course, that is a problem, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. By focusing only on that, we get a distorted view of the problem. We don’t get to the root of the matter.

Over the past 15 years of grass-roots work, we’ve had the chance to witness a transformation in how people think about race. More and more people are digging deeper, to understand and tell a more complete narrative about race. It’s one that is likely to get us somewhere.

This deeper understanding is coming from researchers and scholars. But it’s also coming from black, white, and brown residents of communities that are trying to make a difference in poverty, jobs, education, and health care. (And in the case of Memphis, it’s coming from journalists, nonprofit leaders, public leaders, faith communities, and the grass roots.) 

They’re seeing and talking about what The Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change calls  “persistent disparities between people of color and white Americans in almost every quality-of-life arena, the most basic being income, education, and health.”  They’re analyzing the “subtler, racialized patterns in policies and practices… that generate differences in well being… " (For a free download of this accessible Aspen report, click here.)

To be sure, it will require new language to cover this story. It’s more difficult to tell the story of institutions and policies than it is of individuals. That's part of the reason CBS got stuck in the old paradigm. When they covered “white flight” from Memphis or disparities in graduation rates, they needed to provide context.  We all need to understand the policies and arrangements that helped create those situations. Without that context, it is too easy to assume that everything will somehow get better when we all get along. 

This is where the work of today’s Memphis comes in. The Common Ground program will provide opportunities for all kinds of people to build trust, dispel stereotypes, and create multi-racial coalitions. But they’re going beyond that. They’ll provide opportunities to examine the disparities, understand where they come from, and take steps to do something about them.

As Harlon Dalton says in his great book, Racial Healing, “If we are to make good on the promise of racial healing, we have to build a future in which there are  no permanent winners and permanent losers, in which race and social position have no correlation, and in which true equality is the norm rather than the exception. In short, we have to transform the very meaning of race.”

A new race narrative is emerging in the United States - one that is not just about individuals or relationships, but about working together democratically to create systemic change. It may be that in 2008 we are finally ready to hear Dr. King’s words and to act on them.

Martha McCoy is executive director of Everyday Democracy.

From the pop culture files

Welcome to the latest in a series of occasional posts on popular books, music, films, and more that might be of interest to people working on community change.

The 2008 Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz claimed the prize "for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life." Díaz's debut novel was hailed on its release last fall for its genre-bending mixture of literary styles, described by A.O. Wilson in his review in The New York Times as "a multigenerational immigrant family chronicle that dabbles in tropical magic realism, punk-rock feminism, hip-hop machismo, post-postmodern pyrotechnics and enough polymorphous multiculturalism to fill up an Introduction to Cultural Studies syllabus."

I haven't yet read Oscar Wao, but we offer props to the Pulitzer judges for recognizing a book that celebrates the United States as it is today: a gloriously alive, magnificently messy salad bowl of careening cultures that still usually manage to move toward unity. Here's an interview with Díaz in which he describes his literary influences and the decade-long process (following a widely praised first book, Drown) of finding the novel he wanted to write.

If you're looking for a slightly silly, slightly sweet movie tribute to community life and interracial friendships, check out the recent film Be Kind Rewind, probably currently playing at a bargain movie house near you. The basic plot is that Mike (played by Mos Def) is minding his boss' video store in Passaic, New Jersey, when his best friend Jerry (Jack Black) gets into a freak accident that magnetizes his body. After Jerry manages to erase all the VHS tapes in the store (there are no DVDs), Mike and Jerry decide to make amends by filming their own versions of films including Ghostbusters, Rush Hour 2, and Driving Miss Daisy. Soon, people are lining up outside the door to request remakes of their favorite films.

The subplots are even more intriguing. Neighborhood kids love to hang out at Be Kind Rewind, not so much for its movie selection as for the repartee with Mike, Jerry, and store owner Elroy (Danny Glover). Mike and Jerry acquire a sidekick, Alma (Melonie Díaz), from the dry cleaners down the street, and she helps not only add female casting to the remakes, she challenges the young men to consider the depth of their relationship. The owner of a nearby modern video emporium comes to the rescue at a critical juncture. There's even a historic preservation thread as the city of Passaic has designs on tearing down the video store - perhaps the boyhood home of jazz great Fats Waller - to build upscale condos. Be Kind Rewind was written and directed by Michel Gondry, who also made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He definitely has a gift for offbeat, fun, and soul-warming films.

Have you read any good books lately? Seen any good films?

One view of life on the border

Immigration is a complex topic, and one that has produced more heat than light in recent years. This little video, Arivaca, shows the impact of immigration on one small border town in Arizona - and it's the winner of the Movement Vision Lab's Video Contest on Community Values & Immigration.

It may be that not everyone in Arivaca shares the sentiments expressed in this video, but the views of the people in this film are just as much a part of the national debate on immigration as those seen and heard daily in the traditional media. Everyday Democracy has resources for communities that want to find better ways to talk about immigration and the impact it is having on your community and our nation. Click here.

We also are accepting entires into our first-ever "Making Every Voice Matter" video contest showcasing communities that are talking the talk, then walking the walk on issues ranging from racial equity to education to immigration to growth and sprawl. The deadline - April 16 - is coming soon. Click here for more details on how to enter.

Film highlights challenge of community building

Julie asked us here last October what we were reading or watching that resonates with our community building experience.

Last weekend I saw a great German movie, The Counterfeiters, which recently won an Oscar for top foreign film. It’s a layered story about the complexities of building community in the most trying circumstances. Although the setting – a concentration camp – was anything but democratic, the film made me think about how each of us brings our own ethics and values, our singular histories and motivations, and our individual stories to our community work.

Set in Nazi-era Germany, and based on a true story, the movie shows what happens to a group of criminals, artists, and bankers detained in a concentration camp when they’re forced to produce fake British pounds and American dollars. The scheme was an attempt by the Third Reich to destabilize the economies of the allied forces. It failed when one of the men, Adolf Burger, refused to enable the Nazis and repeatedly sabotaged the operation.

The story’s tension sets up because, in return for their services, the men conscripted to fake the currency are moved to better living conditions within the camp. Master counterfeiter Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch at first is glad to have a better chance at survival. But in time, he grows to love his follow prisoners, and he faces choices about whose interests to protect – his own, those of a few, or those of the group. None of the choices is clear-cut.

Although the circumstances in The Counterfeiters are extreme, I’ve seen a similar dynamic play out in towns around the country as people forming community coalitions struggle to build trust and clarify which interests broad-based engagement can best address. Sometimes a good movie reminds me how complex human beings are, how difficult their work for the common good is, and how much patience and respect we who learn with communities need as we watch the process unfold.

How has your work with people in your community drawn on conflicting values? How have you resolved differences to find common ground and direction?

Mobilizing community media

An interesting story in today's New York Times tells of the Media Mobilizing Project, a organization that's promoting community journalism in some of Philadelphia's toughest neighborhoods. Noam Cohen writes:

The Brewerytown neighborhood is experiencing an intense struggle with gentrification and street violence — something I could have learned by searching Brewerytown at a news site like Philly.com (recent headlines: “Brewerytown Man Charged With Two Stabbings,” “Firearms, Explosive Devices Found in Brewerytown Home”).

But, in fact, I learned it by hearing the collective news judgment of Mr. (Todd) Wolfson’s group. After a free-flowing discussion about the kind of news they see and read in mainstream outlets, the group of about 15 was encouraged by the class’s three teachers to suggest their own story ideas, a few of which they will turn into five-minute video segments by the end of the eight-week class. A pattern quickly emerged: proposed topics included gun control, violence in schools, as well as crime against cab drivers.

The project got a boost from a $150,000 grant from the Knight Foundation in Miami, which is donating $25 million over five years “for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news.” (Other 2007 recipients include the Chi-Town Daily News, MTV - which has "Choose or Lose" 2008 election street team reporters in all 50 states - and Gotham Gazette.) Click here to learn more about last year's winners and here to read a FAQ about the News Challenge. Cohen continues:

The free classes, which also include Internet training as well as the opportunity to buy a steeply discounted computer, were initially meant for immigrants. But that didn’t sit well with Joyce Haynes, 51, who works in housekeeping at the Gallery, a shopping center on Market Street East. She heard about the classes through the Service Employees International Union, and asked, “It’s a free program. Why is it just for immigrants?”

So while the class is still dominated by immigrants, Ms. Haynes and a few other nonimmigrants have joined as well, and for her report, she and a few others plan to look at the competition for jobs between union labor and immigrant workers.

Organizer Todd Wolfson told the Times that the project aims to help narrow the digital divide as well, by helping greater numbers of diverse people get email, make and post videos, and - most of all - share stories online.

A reminder: If your community has created positive change, we'd love to see a video about it. Click here to learn about Everyday Democracy's Making Every Voice Matter video contest. The deadline is April 16.

Friday digest-open thread 3/7/08

Good news ... the deadline has been extended, and you now have until April 16 to submit a video for Everyday Democracy's Making Every Voice Matter video contest. Win $1,000 and show the world how your community is organizing for change. You can get all the info here. And for inspiration, check out some of the cool social-change videos at QuantumShift.tv.

From WSLS.com via our website comes the news that the new Lynchburg, Virginia, Community Dialogue on Race and Racism has set a new record for participants in a single round of inclusive, action-oriented talks (sometimes called study circles). WSLS reports, "The citywide talks, aimed at improving race relations, have drawn a little more than 500 participants and more than 100 volunteer facilitators. That’s the most ever seen by Everyday Democracy, a Connecticut-based group that’s worked on similar efforts with hundreds of communities across the country." Read more here. Lynchburg is one of the eight participants  selected to engage in Everyday Democracy's Communities Creating Racial Equity project getting under way this spring.

Fon du Lac, Wisconsin, plans to celebrate its cultural diversity tomorrow - Saturday, March 8 - with a new Celebrate CommUNITY event. The full day of fun will take place at the Fon du Lac Recreation Center. "People have come out of the woodwork, out of their Fond du Lac homes to share their food, culture and stories," co-chair Michael Ketterhagen told the local paper. "Diversity is no longer defined by the words 'color' and 'white.'" Read more here.

Complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rose 9 percent to their highest level since 1992 last year, the Associated Press reported yesterday. Analysts say the faltering economy may be one reason for the increase. Meanwhile, the EEOC has launched an ad campaign featuring jazz great Wynton Marsalis speaking out against discrimination in the workplace.

See you next week - and don't forget to Spring Forward on Saturday night.

Questions for the water cooler

A final reminder: our February water cooler on using the Internet to create positive change in your community is set for 1 p.m. Eastern (noon Central-11 a.m. Mountain-10 a.m.Pacific) on Thursday (February 21) here at DemocracySpace. We'll have a special focus on videos since we've just launched our Making Every Voice Matter video contest. All you need to do to take part is show up here at DemocracySpace.To help you get ready, here are a few questions we'll put on the table:

Who's here and where are you from?

What sort of tech tools (videos, website, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, etc.) are you already using to help promote your program and record its successes? What other tools would you like to use?

What are the most important ingredients of a short video? How do you start planning one?

How important is equipment? (Do I need an expensive video camera to do this?!)

What tools do I already have on my computer to help me edit and upload my video?

How can I help my video get wider play and be seen by more people?

What other Web 2.0 tools are communities using to promote their programs, engage new activists, and record their work?

We will take questions from the floor, too, as time permits. See you back here at 1 p.m. Eastern on Thursday!