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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.

Friday digest-open thread 1/4/08

The presidential campaign of 2008 has already been under way for a year, but voters are finally having their say. (Or at least some of them: The New York Times had a good article earlier this week on how the Iowa Caucus - often praised as the ultimate in direct democracy - actually excludes many Iowans since there's no provision for absentee voting.) Now it's on to high-profile contests in New Hampshire next Tuesday, South Carolina on January 15, Nevada on January 19, and "Super Tsunami Tuesday," when 21 states vote on February 5. By that point at the latest, we will likely know who is going to be locked in the longest and most expensive general election campaign in U.S. history.

Is this any way to pick a president? The National Association of Secretaries of State is promoting a major reform to the presidential primary system starting in 2012. Under the NASS plan, Iowa and New Hampshire would retain their early status, but every other state would primary or caucus under a system of rotating regional primaries held the first Tuesday of March, April, May, and June. That way, the general election season would be pushed back to its traditional start at the quadrennial party conventions, and a system now drowning in big money and media might return to some semblance of sanity.

Reform aside, the big headline out of the Iowa Caucus was how a record turnout of Democrats - bolstered by Independents and a few Republicans - chose an African-American man, Barack Obama, as their favorite. Many reporters are noting that it's interesting and hopeful to see such a result in a state that is 95 percent white; other commentators - including Christopher Caldwell in The Financial Times and Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic Monthly - suggest that race is less a factor in Obama's chances than a generational shift. At his blog, Peter Levine writes how the Iowa results may signal a landmark year for youth civic engagement as well as a rise in a civil, deliberative style of campaigning.

In other news, check out the Study Circles Resource Center website for new stories of sustainable government in New Hampshire and sustainable employment in Wisconsin.

Movement Vision Lab is online

Our friends at the Center for Community Change have launched their Movement Vision Lab, an online space dedicated to promoting new ideas for the future, especially around a vision of "an active and inclusive society, a community based economy, and global justice." As the website explains, "The Movement Vision Lab collects ideas from across the United States and the world, from grassroots organization and think tanks and researchers - and you!"

The website has two key parts: an "Idea Lab" where people can read, rate, and add resources for 14 issue areas and a blog where, each week, a new topic will be in the spotlight. (This week's is Race and Racial Justice.) Also, check out the short (less than two minutes!) but powerful film showcased on the MVL home page, "A Tale of Power and Vision." (Click the image above to view it.)

The Center for Community Change is also looking forward to a big event in Des Moines, Iowa, next week. Five Democratic presidential candidates and as many as 5,000 Iowans will attend the "Heartland Presidential Forum: Community Values in Action" on December 1. It's being billed as the largest gathering of likely caucus goers before Iowa holds its first-in-the-nation presidential caucus on January 3, 2008. CCC is putting on the event with Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement and a host of local partners.