{"id":9933,"date":"2012-10-17T15:09:26","date_gmt":"2012-10-17T19:09:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=9933"},"modified":"2012-10-17T15:09:26","modified_gmt":"2012-10-17T19:09:26","slug":"dispatches-from-the-civic-renewal-field","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=9933","title":{"rendered":"dispatches from the Civic Renewal field"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"Carolyn Lukensmeyer\" href=\"http:\/\/nicd.arizona.edu\/administration\" target=\"_blank\">Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer<\/a> is Executive Director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse and founder and former President of <a title=\"America Speaks\" href=\"http:\/\/americaspeaks.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">America<\/a><em><a title=\"America Speaks\" href=\"http:\/\/americaspeaks.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Speaks<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em> I have read the manuscript of her forthcoming book entitled <a title=\"Bringing Citizen Voices to the Table\" href=\"http:\/\/www.wiley.com\/buy\/978-1-1182-3087-9\" target=\"_blank\">Bringing Citizen Voices to the Table: A Guide for Public Managers<\/a>. She summarizes the book in a Nonprofit Quarterly article entitled &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nonprofitcommunity.com\/index.php\/2012\/10\/16\/the-case-for-citizen-engagement\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Case for Citizen Engagement,<\/a>&#8221; writing,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>What if millions of Americans <em>regularly<\/em> came together to deliberate about a wide range of critical national issues like health care, immigration, and education?\u00a0 What if the recommendations they made actually guided the actions of our national policy-makers?\u00a0 &#8230;\u00a0<em>We would be a credible democracy<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Bridget Draxler <a href=\"http:\/\/hastac.org\/blogs\/bridget-draxler\/2012\/10\/09\/civic-engagement-digital-humanities-and-liberal-arts-report-2012-im\" target=\"_blank\">reports <\/a>from the annual conference of<a href=\"http:\/\/imaginingamerica.org\/\" target=\"_blank\"> Imagining America: Artists &amp; Scholars in Public Life<\/a>. She describes exemplary college-based programs that combine real community engagement, liberal arts education, and digital technology.<\/p>\n<p>Harry Boyte, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a leading democratic theorist, argues in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/harry-boyte\/turning-jobs-into-public-_b_1954446.html\">Huffington Post<\/a> that jobs programs can be turned into opportunities for public work. He cites Melissa Bass&#8217;s forthcoming book on the history of national service (which I have also had a chance to read in manuscript). As Boyte says,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The [Civilian Conservation Corps] also helped the nation to regain a view of government as an empowering partner &#8212; not simply &#8220;for&#8221; the people, delivering services, but &#8220;of&#8221; the people and &#8220;by&#8221; the people,&#8221; in Lincoln&#8217;s terms. &#8230; As people made a commonwealth of public goods, they became a commonwealth of citizens.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Citizens deliberating and interacting with public administrators, students making meaning in partnership with local residents, and paid workers seeing themselves as building the commonwealth&#8211;these are three compatible visions of civic renewal offered at an ugly moment. If they&#8217;re not inspiring enough, check out Democracy Prep&#8217;s fourth graders singing &#8220;vote for somebody&#8221;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/2012\/10\/16\/democracy-prep-fourth-gra_n_1970450.html?utm_hp_ref=tw\"> in this article<\/a> that reports our recent study of civic education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer is Executive Director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse and founder and former President of AmericaSpeaks.\u00a0 I have read the manuscript of her forthcoming book entitled Bringing Citizen Voices to the Table: A Guide for Public Managers. She summarizes the book in a Nonprofit Quarterly article entitled &#8220;The Case for Citizen [&hellip;]<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9933","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=9933"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9959,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9933\/revisions\/9959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}