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Lynchburg moves toward action

This video captures footage and interviews from participants at the Lynchburg Community Dialogue on Race & Racism Action Forum and Youth Dialogue. The three-day Action Forum was open to all and held in a vacant department store where participants could come and go as they were available. 

The attendees had an opportunity to view and vote on the top two ideas from the recently completed 58 Study Circles. Activities included mini-study circle experiences, video taping of personal stories, viewing of all of the ideas from the Study Circles, and an opportunity to make a personal commitment to individual and/or group action related to reducing racism within our community. The votes from the action forum were then tallied and reported out to the community with the next steps.

The Youth Dialogue was a one-and-a-half day event where teenagers between the ages of 13 and 18 had an opportunity to participate in honest and open dialogue around the issues of Race & Racism. The top ideas from the Youth Dialogue were also on display during the Action Forum for participants to vote and view.

The Action Forum was an energetic, community-wide event that brought together study circle participants, program volunteers, and the community-at-large to celebrate and support the work of the study circles.  The Action Forum represented a significant step on our journey from recognition of a problem to dialogue to action to change.

Leslie King is assistant coordinator of the Lynchburg Community Dialogue on Race & Racism. Click here to visit the program's website and learn more about what's happening in Lynchburg.

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!

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.

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.

Friday digest-open thread 1/25/08

As Martin Luther King Jr. Week winds down, take a few minutes to watch this wonderful video from Delaware-based Hearts and Minds Films. It features clips of Dr. King himself interspersed with children of today speaking his words. It's beautiful stuff ... click on the image above, and pass it along.

In other news:

Nearly 600 people in Lynchburg, Virginia, have signed up to take part in that city's Community Dialogue on Race and Racism. More than 400 of them showed up last Friday for a kickoff celebration. The action-oriented dialogues begin during the first week of February. Lynchburg has been selected as one of eight communities that will partner with the Study Circles Resource Center - soon to be renamed Everyday Democracy - on our Communities Creating Racial Equity initiative.

Also in the Middle Atlantic region, the YWCA of Lancaster (Pennsylvania) also has launched study circles on racism in the nearby community of Lititz, with plans to possibly grow the discussion series throughout Lancaster County. "Study circles are definitely in keeping with the two key missions of the YWCA, as an advocate for women's issues and confronting racism," Dorothy Evans, assistant executive director of the Y, told the Lititz Record.

Lima, Ohio, is a city that pioneered study circles in the early 1990s amid racial tensions after the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles. Now, Lima residents are on edge again following the January 4 fatal shooting of an African American woman during a drug raid in which police officers arrested the woman's boyfriend.

"The shooting has led to much soul searching about the mistrust between minorities and police and what happens to cities when manufacturing jobs move out and drugs move in," Associated Press reporter John Seewer wrote in an article this week. Read it here. Another recent AP story - this one by Ramit Plushnick-Masti - explores the rise in the drug trade in other Rust Belt cities.

Now, go back and re-watch that video.

Friday digest-open thread 12/07/07

Sorry to be so late in posting today. There's plenty to report, so let's get right to it:

Two communities with brand-new dialogue-to-action programs held action forums last night. Click here to read about the doings in Lynchburg, Virginia, where 120 people have been working on racism and racial equity issues. Then check out this story about last night's action forum in Lewiston, Maine, where local youth and their adult allies expressed an interest in building a youth center and getting a youth voice on the school board.

Citizens of Brattleboro, Vermont, held an action forum this week, too, to conclude a round of discussions on poverty. Here's a story that ran earlier this week, before the forum. Just a reminder: Poverty will be the focus of this month's DemocracySpace water cooler, set for 1 p.m. Eastern next Thursday, December 13. Join us online at that time to talk with other organizers who are working to move their communities from poverty to prosperity.

The Iowa Caucus - the kickoff event of the 2008 presidential primary season - is January 3. But today is National Caucus Day, an effort to get people to spend a little time together talking about the candidates and what we seek in our next chief exec. Click here to see if an event is happening near you.

Speaking of the presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Barack Obama gave a major speech on public service this week, saying he'd promote policies - including a vastly expanded AmeriCorps - to help Americans of all ages give back to their communities. The plan would also "invest in the capacity of nonprofits to innovate and expand successful programs across the country." Click here to read the plan in depth.

PublicDecisions.com, which specializes in training for public participation planners and elected officials, has announced a full slate of online classes for the first quarter of 2008. Selections include "Involving Youth in Decision Making," a tongue-in-cheek "Ten Reasons Not to Involve the Public in Your Decisions," and "Managing News Media in Public Involvement." Click here for the full schedule.

The international conference on climate change in Bali reached its halfway mark today, two days after the U.S. Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee passed a bill aimed at cutting global warming emissions by 70 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. The Bush administration remains opposed to mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions, and a House-passed energy bill stalled in the Senate today. But as Katharine Mieszkowski writes at Salon, the American public is now leading the way on the issue and it's looking more likely that the U.S. will be on board when the next treaties are written in 2009. Click here.