This is the third of five strategies proposed to achieve the goals of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities. See Monday’s post for an overview.
Strategy 3: Invest in Face-to-Face Public Deliberation
Today I focus on a particular recommendation in the Knight report, number 13, which is: “Empower all citizens to participate actively in community self-governance, including local ‘community summits’ to address community affairs and pursue common goals.”
Face-to-face discussions of community issues have been found to produce good policies and the political will to support these policies, to educate the participants, and to enhance solidarity and social networks. In the terms of the Knight Report, they turn mere information into public judgment and public will. I’m still moved by the Australian participant in a planning meeting who said, “I just can’t believe we did it; we finally achieved what we set out to do. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done in my whole life, I suppose” (quoted in Gastil and Levine 2005, p. 81).
I agree with the Report: “As powerful as the Internet is for facilitating human connection, face-to-face contact remains the foundation of community building.” The whole array of online communications contribute to civil society, but dedicated online deliberative spaces–despite some potential for improvement–have been basically disappointing so far. The open ones are subject to pathologies that you don’t often see in the physical world. For example, the White House open government forum on transparency was almost hijacked by proponents of legalizing marijuana (PDF, p. 9). In a face-to-face setting, especially in a discrete physical community, it would be very difficult to swarm a public session in that way.
In order to make real-world deliberations work, several conditions must be met. There must be some kind of organizer or convening organization that is trusted as neutral and fair and that has the skills and resources to pull off a genuine public deliberation. People have to be able to convene in spaces that are safe, comfortable, dignified, and regarded as neutral ground.
There must be some reason for participants to believe that powerful institutions will listen to the results of their discussions. They may be hopeful because of a formal agreement by the powers that be, or even a law that requires public engagement. Or they may simply believe that their numbers will be large enough–and their commitment intense enough–that authorities will be unable to ignore them.
There must be recruitment and training programs: not just brief orientations before a session, but more intensive efforts to build skills and commitments. Ideally, moments of discussion will be embedded in ongoing civic work (volunteering, participation in associations, and the day jobs of paid professionals), so that participants can draw on their work experience and take direction and inspiration from the discussions. There must be pathways for adolescents and other newcomers to enter the deliberations.
We have examples:
- Bridgeport, CT–an old port and manufacturing city of 139,000 people–was a basket case in the 1980s. It was hard hit by the loss of manufacturing jobs, crime, and the flight of middle-class residents to the suburbs. The city literally filed for bankruptcy in 1991. The next mayor was sentenced to nine years in federal prison for corruption. The schools were so troubled that 274 teachers were arrested during a strike in 1978.
Bridgeport is now doing much better, to the point that its school system was one of five finalists for the national Broad Prize for Urban Education in both 2006 and 2007. A major reason for Bridgeport’s renaissance is active citizenship.
In 1996, a local nonprofit group called the Bridgeport Public Education Fund (BPEF) contacted organizers who specialize in convening diverse citizens to discuss issues, without promoting an ideology or a particular diagnosis. No one knows how many forums and discussions took place in Bridgeport, or how many citizens participated, because the 40 official “Community Conversations” were widely imitated in the city. But it is clear that at least hundreds of citizens participated; that many individuals moved from one public conversation to another; and that some developed advanced skills for organizing and facilitating such conversations. A community Summit convened in 2006–fully ten years after the initial discussion–drew 500 people. The mayor, the superintendent, the city council, and the board of education had agreed in advance to support the plan that participants developed. [See Will Friedman, Alison Kadlec, and Lara Birnback, Transforming Public Life: A Decade of Citizen Engagement in Bridgeport, CT, Case Studies in Public Engagement, no.1, Public Agenda Foundation, 2007; and Elena Fagotto and Archon Fung, “Sustaining Public Engagement: Embedded Deliberation in Local Communities,” an Occasional Research Paper from Everyday Democracy and the Kettering Foundation, 2009]
So far, I have described talk, but the civic engagement process in Bridgeport involves work as well. Each school has an empowered leadership team that includes parents along with professional educators. The professionals take guidance from public meetings back into their daily work. People who are employed by other institutions, such as businesses and religious congregations, also take direction from the public discussions. Meanwhile, citizens are inspired to act as volunteers. The school district has a large supply of adult mentors, many of them participants in forums and discussions. In turn, their hands-on service provides information and insights that enrich community conversations and improve decisions.
Bridgeport’s citizens have shown that they are capable of making tough choices: for instance, shifting limited resources from teen after-school programs to programs for younger children. There is much more collaboration today among businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies. Everyone feels that they share responsibility; problems are not left to the school system and its officials. The School Superintendent says, “I’ve never seen anything like this. The community stakeholders at the table were adamant about this. They said, ‘We’re up front with you. The school district can’t do it by itself. We own it too.’” [Friedman, Alison Kadlec, and Lara Birnback]
- Hampton, VA, is an old, blue-color city of about 145,000 people. Like its fellow port city of Bridgeport, 465 miles to the north, Hampton has struggled with deindustrialization, although Hampton benefits from Army, Air Force, and NASA facilities within the city.
When Hampton decided to create a new strategic plan for youth and families in the early 1990s, the city started by enlisting more than 5,000 citizens in discussions that led to a city-wide meeting and then the adoption of a formal plan. “Youth, parents, community groups, businesses, and youth workers and advocates … met separately for months, with extensive outreach and skilled facilitation.” [Carmen Sirianni and Diana Marginean Schor, “City Government as an Enabler of Youth Civic Engagement: Policy Design and Implications,” in James Youniss and Peter Levine, eds., Engaging Young People in Civic Life (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999)]
The planning process ultimately created an influential Hampton Youth Commission (whose 24 commissioners are adolescents) and a new city office to work with them. The Youth Commission sits on top of a pyramid of civic opportunities for young people. There are also community service programs that involve most of the city’s youth; empowered principals’ advisory groups in each school, a special youth advisory group for the school superintendent, paid adolescent planners in the planning department, and youth police advisory councils whom the police chief contacts whenever a violent incident involves teenagers. Young people are encouraged to climb the pyramid from service projects toward the citywide Commission, gaining skills and knowledge along the way. Political engagement is so widespread that almost 80 percent of Hampton’s young residents voted in the 2004 election, compared to 43 percent in Virginia as a whole. The system for youth engagement won Hampton Harvard’s Innovation in Government Award in 2007.
Engagement is not limited to young residents. When Hampton’s leaders decided that race relations and racial equity were significant concerns in their Southern community that was about half White and half African American, they convened at least 250 citizens in small, mixed-race groups called Study Circles. The participants decided that there was a need to build better skills for working together across racial lines, so they created and began to teach a set of courses–collectively known as “Diversity College”–that still trains local citizens to be speakers, board members, and organizers of discussions. [William R. Potapchuk, Cindy Carlson, and Joan Kennedy, “Growing Governance Deliberatively: Lessons and Inspiration from Hampton, Virginia,” in Gastil and Levine, 2005, p. 261]
Hampton’s neighborhood planning process has broadened from determining the zoning map to addressing complex social issues. Planning groups include residents as well as city officials, and each may take more than a year each to develop a comprehensive plan. Like the young people who helped write the youth sections of the City Plan, the residents who develop neighborhood plans emphasize their own assets and capabilities rather than their needs. There is an “attitude of ‘what the neighborhood can do with support from the city’ rather than ‘what the city should do with the neighborhood watching and waiting for it to happen.’” [Potopchuk, Carlson, and Kennedy, p. 264.]
Hampton has thoroughly reinvented its government and civic culture so that thousands of people are directly involved in city planning, educational policy, police work, and economic development. Residents and officials use a whole arsenal of practical techniques for engaging citizens—from “youth philanthropy” (the Youth Commission makes $40,000 in small grants each year for youth-led projects), to “charrettes” (intensive, hands-on, architectural planning sessions that yield actual designs for buildings and sites). The prevailing culture of the city is deliberative; people truly listen, share ideas, and develop consensus, despite differences of interest and ideology. Young people hold positions of responsibility and leadership. Youth have made believers out of initially suspicious police officers, planners, and school administrators. These officials testify that the policies proposed by youth and other citizens are better than alternatives floated by their colleagues alone. The outcomes are impressive, as well. For example, the school system now performs well on standardized tests.
I would draw the conclusion that is also implicit in the title of Carmen Sirianni’s recent book, Investing in Democracy. You can’t get “community summits” and other forms of excellent engagement on the cheap. They take a long-term effort and resources that are normally a mixture of money, policies, and people’s volunteered or paid time.