(Washington, DC) Today, at the National Press Club, CIRCLE is leading a significant conference on federal policy and civic skills. Some 70 federal officials, academics, and nonprofit leaders will participate, including 25 who have speaking roles as part of an elaborate program. We will also release a detailed new study of civic skills, showing who has skills, who lacks them, how they are changing, and why they matter.

I think that Dorothy Height’s funeral will be exactly simultaneous with our conference. The President and other luminaries will eulogize her across town while we are in the National Press Club. I am sorry that we have lost Height, yet it seems appropriate to discuss civic skills on a day devoted to celebrating her life. No one among the great leaders of the Civil Rights Movement–and perhaps no one in American history–better understood the importance of our topic.

As early as 1952, when Height was invited to teach in India, she described her expertise as “the philosophy and skills of working with people in groups.” A decade later, she led mixed groups of white and African American women in Mississippi who deliberated and worked together to address injustice. This is only one example in a lifetime of such difficult and successful work.

Height knew that the main purpose of activism and service was not to benefit those served, but to strengthen the capacity of the servers for democratic self-governance. As she said, “Without community service, we would not have a strong quality of life. It’s important to the person who serves as well as the recipient. It’s the way in which we ourselves grow and develop.”

She also understood that opportunities to develop civic skills are highly unequal (a form of injustice that we describe in today’s release). She said, “We have to improve life, not just for those who have the most skills and those who know how to manipulate the system. But also for and with those who often have so much to give but never get the opportunity.”

Height’s lifelong institutional home was The National Council of Negro Women. In her words, its “great strength is that it builds leadership skills in women.” She launched the Dorothy Height Leadership Institute as part of the Council, and today it keeps her light aflame by developing the civic skills of young people.

Please join Tisch College and CIRCLE for this two-day gathering of educators and activists to explore the theory and practice of citizenship. Through interactive sessions, we will focus on “citizenship” as creativity, agency, and collaboration–not as a form of membership that separates those who are in from those who are out.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

We invite proposals for 90-minute “learning exchanges,” which may include short panel presentations with plenty of time for conversation, moderated discussions, workshops, readings, planning sessions, or other types of events. A list of potential topics is below, but we welcome all proposals that fit broadly and creatively within the key theme of the conference, Civic Studies, Civic Practices.

Please use this this form to submit your learning exchange concept. Once you’ve submitted your proposal, we will be in touch to discuss your proposal, answer any questions you might have, or help you flesh out your concept. Proposals should be submitted by a group of at least two people. Teams of scholars and practitioners are preferred.

TOPICS

Citizens and Citizenship – What sort of citizens do we want? What knowledge, actions, and beliefs are important for strong citizens? What actions have citizens taken to actively engage in democratic practices? What institutional structures promote meaningful and engaged citizens? What knowledge, skills, and attitudes could transfer to global citizenship? Which may not? How does in-group and out-group status both define and limit citizenship?

Scale – How can strong/successful civic practices be scaled up and out? Is this a useful focus for civic work?

Civic Studies – Is this a useful field? What are its characteristics, boundaries, and limits? What is its potential theoretically and practically?

Political Reform – What changes in laws and policies are needed to strengthen active citizenship? What should we do to achieve those changes?

Civic Practices – Sessions on particular practices or methods, which may involve – for example – community organizing, media production, deliberation, reflection, or service.

Civic Education – How can we begin to address civic education in an era of education spending reduction, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top?

PARTICIPANTS

Scholars, students, activists, educators and others interested in this topic are welcome to use this form to register or to submit a presentation proposal.

TIMING

July 23, 10 am through July 24, 4 pm

LODGING

Participants are responsible for their own lodging. Tufts dormitory rooms can be rented by the night in the summer. Please use this link to reserve a room

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

The Civic Studies, Civic Practices Conference concludes the second annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tisch College. This intensive, two-week interdisciplinary seminar brings together advanced graduate students, faculty and practitioners from diverse fields of study for challenging discussions about the role of civics in society.

Last Thursday night, I boarded a flight from LA to Baltimore. I was coming from Seattle, where I had been meeting with veteran civil rights activists and community organizers, mostly young African American and Latino leaders from big cities. I was on my way to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where I would have conversations with William Kristol and Charles Murray, among others. The LAX-to-BWI flight was my chance for a little sleep between meetings.

Two young people recognized each other as they walked down the jetway to the plane. They had attended the same high school in Baltimore around the same time. The woman asked someone to switch seats so they could sit next to each other. That was bad news for me, because she ended up eight inches behind my head. But it was good news for them. They had so much in common–as I learned during the next five-and-a-half hours. Apartments not far apart, in the general vicinity of Culver City. Jobs in the media industry. Recent breakups. Jewish ancestry. Several drinks later, they were sharing their deepest hopes and dreams. As dawn broke over the east coast, they left the airplane holding hands.

It makes you think about how neat and happy stories feel to the people on the margins, those who are meant only to swell a progress, start a scene or two. The Fatted Calf was not so happy to learn of the return of the Prodigal Son. For every tearful reunion at the top of the Empire State Building, there are dozens of people in the elevator who are just trying to get on with their day. I didn’t begrudge this new couple my night–it was more important to them than to me. But I wished their romantic comedy could have begun elsewhere than in seats 16C and D.

Tonight, I fly to Seattle, Washington, for a meeting at the Gates Foundation. It will be a politically progressive gathering; entitled “The Color of Change,” it is devoted to community organizing by young people from ethnic minorities. After somewhat less than 24 hours on the West Coast, I will take the red-eye flight to the other Washington, our Nation’s Capital, for a meeting at one of the big-three conservative think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute. The topic, again, will be citizenship, albeit from a different perspective (with a focus on formal knowledge, military service, and the incorporation of immigrants) .

I have many thousands of miles and quite a bit of ideological spectrum to traverse between now and Friday evening (when I’ll be back in Boston), so I’m not going to try to blog for the rest of this week.

I’ve been reading the report of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons (PDF). It tells basically a tragic and horrifying story, although it also cites some individual prisons and even whole states that have achieved dramatically better outcomes than others in terms of reducing prison violence and rape as well as recidivism.

One premise is the gigantic scale of our prison industry. “The daily count of prisoners in the United States has surpassed 2.2 million. Over the course of a year, 13.5 million people spend time in jail or prison, and 95 percent of them eventually return to our communities. Approximately 750,000 men and women work in U.S. correctional facilities as line officers or other staff.” (p. 11) These numbers have increased steadily even when crime rates have fallen.

The incarcerated population is highly needy. To mention just one challenge, “At least 300,000 to 400,000 prisoners have a serious mental illness–a number three times the population of state mental hospitals nationwide” (p. 38).

All prisoners are somewhat isolated from society; that is the point. But policies sharpen their isolation in ways that prevent prisoners from successfully re-entering their families and communities later. For example, they are discouraged from talking to family members. The “average cost of a 15-minute in-state long-distance collect call placed from a correctional facility” is high almost everywhere. In Washington State, it is $17.77. “In Texas … the very ability to make calls is severely restricted: ‘Offenders who demonstrate good behavior can earn one five minute call every 90 days’” (p. 36).

Within prisons, a large subclass of inmates is isolated from the rest, indeed, deprived of all human contact by being placed in solitary confinement. On one day in 2000, “approximately 80,000 people were reported to be confined in segregation units.”

Some use of solitary confinement is inevitable, but it is growing much faster than the prison population (p. 52-3). Some prisoners are held without human contact for many months or as long as nine years, and often as disproportionate punishments. “For example, a young prisoner caught with 17 packs of Newport cigarettes–contraband in the nonsmoking jail–was given 15 days in solitary confinement for each pack of cigarettes, more than eight months altogether” (p. 54).

Many prisoners are held in solitary confinement because they are regarded as too dangerous to be managed within a prison–and then released into society. “People who were released directly from segregation had a much higher rate of recidivism than individuals who spent some time in the normal prison setting before returning to the community: 64 percent compared with 41 percent.” (p 55).