{"id":17412,"date":"2016-09-22T09:07:39","date_gmt":"2016-09-22T13:07:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17412"},"modified":"2016-09-22T09:07:39","modified_gmt":"2016-09-22T13:07:39","slug":"a-new-model-for-citizen-engagement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17412","title":{"rendered":"A New Model for Citizen Engagement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Myung J. Lee, the executive director of Cities of Service<\/a>, and I have an article<\/a> in the Stanford Social Innovation Review that is\u00a0free to read or download until\u00a0November 17.<\/p>\n

We define citizen engagement as a combination of deliberation (communicating and learning about issues), collaborative action, and the working relationships that form during\u00a0such interactions. We summarize a growing body of literature that finds that citizen engagement–so defined–is crucial to addressing the\u00a0most stubborn social problems.<\/p>\n

But the harder question is always: How can\u00a0America get more civic engagement? Who would be motivated to expand the number and breadth of active citizens or to make\u00a0their work more consequential?<\/p>\n

In the SSIR piece, we propose one answer. Municipal governments have much to gain by enlisting more citizens in more consequential civic work. This serves\u00a0their self-interest. Furthermore, many cities already\u00a0have thousands of citizens involved in organized volunteering efforts.\u00a0Volunteering, by itself, does not have the positive effects that we find from citizen engagement understood more broadly. But all those volunteers are expressing a willingness to take action. Municipal governments are capable of\u00a0turning\u00a0ordinary volunteering into opportunities for deliberation about issues, collective action, and sustained relationships (including relationships among\u00a0government officials and\u00a0other citizens in their communities).<\/p>\n

One of several ways that governments can achieve this shift is by helping\u00a0citizens to set measurable targets for change at the community level and providing them with the data they need to\u00a0assess progress. Unpaid citizens are not responsible for achieving these\u00a0outcomes\u00a0on their own; they collaborate with city employees and people from other sectors and hold each other accountable.<\/p>\n

In the article, we offer several promising examples of what we call “impact volunteering” in US cities. We\u00a0highlight cases\u00a0from the Cities of Service network–which I strongly endorse–but our\u00a0argument is meant to apply\u00a0more broadly as well.<\/p>\n

Citation: Myung J. Lee and Peter Levine, “A New Model for Citizen Engagement,” Stanford Social Innovation Review<\/em>, fall 2016, pp. 40-45.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Myung J. Lee, the executive director of Cities of Service, and I have an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review that is\u00a0free to read or download until\u00a0November 17. We define citizen engagement as a combination of deliberation (communicating and learning about issues), collaborative action, and the working relationships that form during\u00a0such interactions. We summarize […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deliberation","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17412"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17429,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17412\/revisions\/17429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}