Monthly Archives: June 2012

community engagement and economic well-being

I am in Chicago for meetings at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service and then the Spencer Foundation. The last time I was here, it was to speak at the Chicago Donors Forum conference on community engagement. The Forum’s report on the conference is well done. The best parts are quotes from other speakers, such as Agustin Flores, age 19, who stole the show with a great talk about the life-changing experience of challenging Mayor Rahm Emanuel over student transportation fares. But I’m quoted, too:

“Community engagement is just as important as education, criminal justice, or urban development, because we cannot tell what to teach, what should be illegal, or how to develop a community without engaging people.” …

“There are no panaceas, no silver bullets; and community engagement doesn’t work for all purposes,” said Peter Levine. “But there are great examples of impact.” Perhaps the most powerful example in these hard economic times is how active community involvement and political engagement lead directly to greater economic success, fending off unemployment and creating conditions for the acquisition of jobs—in the city, the region, and the state.

“We found a correlation between social capital or civic health in states and major metropolitan areas and their resilience against unemployment, once various economic factors were controlled,” Levine said. He outlined the chain of benefits communities derive from active engagement:

“Participation in civil society can develop skills, confidence, and habits that make individuals employable and strengthen the networks that help them to find jobs.”

“Middle school and high school students who participate in service-learning during class or who serve in school government succeed much better academically than peers with similar backgrounds. Many individuals owe their employment to fellow members of social or civic groups or have learned their most marketable skills in national and volunteer service.”

“Trust is a powerful predictor of economic success because people who trust are more likely to enter contracts and business partnerships, and because confidence in others is a precondition for investing and hiring.”

“Communities and political jurisdictions with stronger civil societies are more likely to be governed well. Active and organized citizens can demand and promote good governance and serve as partners to government in addressing public problems.”

“Community engagement can encourage people to feel attached to their communities, increasing the odds they will invest, spend, and hire there. A related hypothesis holds that the strength of local civic infrastructure, such as the availability of civically committed religious congregations, and the availability of local associations and informal venues such as barber shops, boosts attachment and investment in a community, which in turn increases civic engagement and local economic investment.”

“I am a community engagement guy,” said Levine, expressing confidence that subsequent studies will find that community engagement translates into gains in health and environmental protection as well as economics. “I have studied and practiced that my whole career. I happen to believe that a full and flourishing human life requires community engagement.”

exciting changes at AmericaSPEAKS and the National Institute of Civil Discourse

texting kids to Do Something

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(Washington, DC) Earlier today, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, I heard a presentation about Do Something‘s text-messaging campaign. Apparently, teenagers are about 55 times more likely to respond to a suggestion to volunteer or take another civic action if it comes in a text rather than an email.

To know whether the different medium is really the cause of the difference in outcomes, I would want to know a bit more about the data. It could be that the kids who receive texts are different to start with–after all, they are the ones who shared their phone numbers, instead of (or in addition to) their email addresses. But it rings true that texting is more effective than email at reaching teens, if only because email doesn’t work at all.

The next question is whether that is because of some intrinsic difference in the two media that makes texting better. For instance, maybe shorter is better, or maybe receiving a message on a phone catches your attention. The alternative explanation would go like this: We keep inventing new electronic modes of communication. Each one quickly gets overused by organizations, to the point that anyone who can tune it out, does so. Working adults can’t yet ignore their email because some of the messages they get are important. But teenagers can and do ignore their email. Because text messaging is not yet so heavily overused, it’s still worth reading every message. Soon that will change, at which point we’ll all have to talk about how to reach teens through the new mode.

Elinor Ostrom, 1933-2012

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I was very sad to read this morning that Elinor Ostrom has died. Lin ran the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, where she was also Distinguished Professor and Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science in the College of Arts and Sciences and professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

Lin won the 2009, Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences and was chosen in 2012 for Time magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She was a MacArthur “Genius” award winner, former president of the American Political Science Association, and recipient of our own Tisch College research prize, which she is receiving here:

I find I have blogged about her or her work 23 times already. For example:

My first visit to the Indiana Workshop (April 2004). Lin had established the Workshop in the 1960s as a weekly brown-bag seminar. The seminar never skipped a week, but the Workshop expanded into an international center for research, education, and outreach.
Arguing against Stanley Fish, I used Lin to show that there’s no tradeoff between scholarly excellence and public engagement. She was on her way to winning the Nobel for insights that she gained through public engagement.
I listed her among several other exemplary “academics who promote democracy.”
I plugged the book Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, edited by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, in which I have a chapter.
I announced Lin’s visit to Tufts.
I claimed her Nobel Prize for “civic studies.”
I announced a special issue of the journal The Good Society about Ostrom, with contributions by my friends Harry Boyte and Karol Soltan, and my own essay entitled “Seeing Like a Citizen: The Contributions of Elinor Ostrom to ‘Civic Studies.’”

Lin started as a graduate student of Vincent Ostrom, who survives her. She was a woman, an untenured “trailing spouse” in the one-college town of Bloomington, and she studied unfashionable topics, like local governance. Her perspective ran counter to dominant trends in modernity, especially the idea that centralization brings efficiency. She had profound respect for ordinary people’s wisdom, but that didn’t turn into pious enthusiasm. Instead, she tested hypotheses about collective action with the utmost rigor, using laboratory experiments, data from field work on several continents, and rational-choice models. The result was a glorious achievement that will long outlive her–but we’ll miss the warm and and kind human being.

Arab students’ speech at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem