(Providence, RI) I don’t come here very often, but I’m developing a habit of ruminating about America whenever I walk around this city’s historic core. Not only did Providence play an important role in our founding, but there is something classically American about the old houses near Brown University. They were built in the same style that was current in Britain at the time–“Federalist” is just the American version of “Regency”–but their white picket fences and front lawns belong only in this country. Their classical details evoke the ideals of a young commercial republic.

It’s an ambiguous legacy. I have previously described John Brown, who built one of those fine houses and helped to found Brown University as well as the United States, and who could rightly be called “slave trader … and patriot.” It was one of his descendants, I believe, who built the John Carter Brown Library over whose ionic marble lintel is chiseled the word “Americana.” As I walk, I think of two other Providence figures: Roger Williams, prophet of peace and religious toleration and founder of the city, and Ruth Simmons, the current President of Brown University. Dr. Simmons, 12th child of Texas sharecroppers, leads the institution that John Brown founded with slave money.

This time, I arrived in Providence on a Peter Pan bus that carried its share of lost souls. In the bus depot, people looked strung out. I had come from an intense conference in which many participants were alarmed and furious about the state of our democracy. Even before the conference, I had been thinking about urban America and the startling evidence of exclusion. People whose ancestors came to America as John Brown’s property are now filling our state prisons literally by the million. No other country imprisons so many.

Yet Brown and its surroundings represent freedom and excellence. Those buildings are very fine; and quite diverse people walk among them, use their resources, and even find distinguished places within them. I feel more alienated than usual from “Americana,” and that feeling is mixed with nostalgia, because once I had a less complicated relationship to the Republic and its early history. But I refuse to give up on the ideals of Roger Williams and Ruth Simmons or the beautiful communities that Americans have–sometimes–built.

(Providence, RI): I’m in this lovely city for meetings with professors who conduct community-based research. Meanwhile, CIRCLE has entered the 21st century by rebuilding our website so that it runs off a database and is no longer simply a set of hand-built html web pages. Every document that we have published is now entry in the database, and it’s much easier to find things. Lacking a budget for web design, we did this with in-house staff time (thank you, colleagues) and very cheap WordPress software. WordPress was built for bloggers but is flexible. In the place of blog entries, we enter working papers, fact sheets, press releases, and the like.

(Portsmouth, NH) I’ve been in New Hampshire for a meeting to help launch something called the Democracy Imperative. The participants are a mix of professors, college administrators, and activists based outside of universities. It is fairly diverse in terms of race and ethnicity, training, and profession. I knew about 10 of the 34 participants quite well before I came, and I knew everyone at least a little by the end of the second day. There are many overlapping networks and mutual friends.

It has been an intense meeting with much positive emotion and collaborative work. By the end of the second full day, the room was covered with big sheets of handwritten notes, action steps, mission statements, concerns and hopes. As is common at such meetings, we went around the large room and asked everyone to reflect on the meeting so far, in preparation for the third and final day. One after another, people spoke of their gratitude for the gathering, their commitment to the common cause, and their enthusiasm for the process. It struck me that if any participants had been disgruntled–or even a little dissatisfied–they would have been hard pressed to express those concerns, once 10 or 20 other people had spoken in emotional and positive terms.

Even though participants are not required, paid, or otherwise rewarded for attending, they have come under intense pressure to pledge support for the group. That pressure comes from the group itself. One could view such pressure as oppressive–as the tyranny of the majority. But participants in our meeting have the option of quiet, polite exit after the conference disbands. Thus one can view consensus as a form of democratic pressure or power that elicits contributions to a collective enterprise without threats or payments. (Jenny Mansbridge’s Beyond Adversary Democracy is the classic text on such power.)

(Manchester, NH) A study by Lois M. Quinn (pdf) dramatizes the suffering of poor urban Americans in 2007–and exemplifies useful scholarship at an urban public institution. On behalf of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Employment and Training Institute, Quinn describes one zip code, 53206, where:

62% of the men in their early thirties are now or have been in state prisons;

The number of incarcerations for “drug offenses only” has risen by 493% since 1993 (but more incarcerations are for assault than for drug offenses);

Women in their 30s outnumber men by 3 to 2;

Housing prices have risen by at least 50% in the last three years;

The average income of tax-filers (a small proportion of the population) was $17,547; 90 percent of these individuals are single parents;

Two thirds of consumer spending is outside the zip code;

Ninety percent of people who declare income from working in the zip code live outside it;

56 percent of people who declare income from working in the zip code are white even though 97 percent of the residents are African American; and

More than three quarters of loans to homeowners are subprime or high interest.

From Census data, we can also tell that this zip code has:

a very high ratio of children to adults;

a median household income of about $20,000 with a median of 3.1 people in each household;

housing stock that is mostly at least 55-65 years old;

almost no immigrants.

Needless to say, there are many other zip codes like Milwaukee 53206.

I am all for Asset-Based Community Development, building on indigenous resources, local leadership, and culture-change. I am suspicious that pouring in money could solve poverty by itself, because the money is usually misapplied by powerful outsiders. However, civic, participatory, grassroots strategies need to work for people in places like 53206–and quickly. That is the test of whether they are worth anything at all.