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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.

January book roundup

It's time for our more-or-less monthly roundup of recent books of interest to people who are working, organizing, and educating for positive community change. This month's selections include Acting Civically; Why Community Matters; and Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes. You can get these books at your local bookseller, or online, or at the links offered with each.

Acting Civically is a book by Tufts University professors Susan Ostrander and Kent Portney, who bring many scholars to campus to talk about civic engagement through Tufts' interdisciplinary Civic Engagement Research Group (CERG).In reviewing the book, Mark Warren, associate professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, wrote, "Educators, civic activists, and community organizers should pay close attention to the pioneering work by Tufts University and community actors discussed in this book." Carmen Sirianni, professor of sociology and public policy at Brandeis University, added, “(This collection of essays) will be of interest not only to scholars and students, but also to practitioners and activists who seek to develop robust partnerships between universities and communities." (Ordering info.)

In Why Community Matters, Nicholas V. Longo explores the relationship between educational reform and democratic renewal. Harry Boyte, codirector of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, Hubert H. Humphrey Institute, University of Minnesota, wrote of the book: "Longo's Why Community Matters is an outstanding work that unearths unknown connections between Hull House and Highlander Folk School, two pivotal community-rooted sites in America in the twentieth century, and their contemporary offspring, the Neighborhood Learning Community in St. Paul, Minnesota. It brings all these to life with vivid stories, gripping history, and a compelling interpretative framework that recasts 'education for democracy' in citizen centered terms. This is a book of abundant hope, expressed through voices of new immigrants, organizers, young people, and educators of all kinds." (Ordering info.)

Not new, but just brought to our attention, Katya Andresen of Network for Good mines winning corporate strategies to great effect in Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes. A former journalist, Katya shows how nonprofits and social entrepreneurs can ethically and effectively use the same techniques used to sell soap, socks, and cigarettes. (Ordering info.) Katya also writes a blog on nonprofit marketing.

Do you have other books to suggest? What have you been reading for business or pleasure, or both? Please let us know in the comments. Thanks to Nick Connell and Eric Rigaud for their suggestions.

Does your town have 'heart & soul'?

The Orton Family Foundation is inviting communities of fewer than 50,000 people in four New England states (New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts,
and Vermont) and four Rocky Mountain states (Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming) to apply for grants of up to $100,000 to help fund planning initiatives that reflect the town's "heart and soul." Two communities from each region will be chosen.

From the Orton website:

The Orton Family Foundation helps citizens and leaders of small cities and towns identify and express their community’s heart and soul—those attributes citizens hold dear and that connect individuals to one another and to the community as a whole. When they are fully understood, these heart and soul attributes can be used to shape and drive decisions that protect and enhance local character and values even as change occurs.

According to a FAQ that accompanies the foundation's request for proposals, planning projects will include "an open, in-depth listening and visioning process characterized by broad, direct citizen engagement." Find out if your community fits the profile by reading the RFP here and the FAQ here. The application deadline is March 3, 2008.