Monthly Archives: May 2015

How Can We Reduce Costs and Still Get the Care We Need? (NIFI Issue Guide)

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The National Issues Forums Institute published the Issue Guide, How Can We Reduce Costs and Still Get the Care We Need?, in April 2015. This guide is to help facilitate deliberation on the issues around the entire US healthcare system.

NIFI_HealthcareCostsFrom the guide…

Americans have good reason to worry about the high costs of health care. Medical bills are the leading cause of personal bankruptcy. Nationally, health care spending threatens the nation’s long-term solvency. We urgently need to find ways to make our health care system financially sustainable.

Health Care: How Can We Reduce Costs and Still Get the Care we Need? clarifies this difficult challenge and offers three options to address issues through changes in the way hospitals and doctors function, end of life care, unhealthy lifestyles, smoking habits, employee wellness, health insurance, childbirth procedures, the pharmaceutical industry and reforms in Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. It’s a balanced, open-minded look at the entire healthcare system—one that moves the discussion beyond the current political debate.

The Issue Guide presents three options for deliberation:

Option One: “As a Nation and as Individuals We Need to Live within Our Means”
The problem is we spend more than any other developed country on health care without questioning whether more is always better. Reining in spending is a matter of tightening our belts and sticking to a budget even if it means sacrifice.

Option Two: “Make Health Care More Transparent, Accountable, and Efficient”
The biggest driver of health care spending is the design of the US health care system- or rather the lack of design. The system needs regulation or incentives, or both, to instill financial discipline and end greed and abuse.

Option Three: “Take Responsibility for Lowering Health Care Costs by Focusing on Wellness”
Our own unhealthy behaviors- smoking, excessive drinking, drug abuse, lack of exercise, and more- are driving up health care costs. Collective and individual efforts in improve healthy behaviors are the key to lowering costs.

More about the NIFI Issue Guides
NIFI’s Issue Guides introduce participants to several choices or approaches to consider. Rather than conforming to any single public proposal, each choice reflects widely held concerns and principles. Panels of experts review manuscripts to make sure the choices are presented accurately and fairly. By intention, Issue Guides do not identify individuals or organizations with partisan labels, such as Democratic, Republican, conservative, or liberal. The goal is to present ideas in a fresh way that encourages readers to judge them on their merit.

Issue Guides are generally available in print or PDF download for a small fee ($2 to $4). All NIFI Issue Guides and associated tools can be accessed at www.nifi.org/en/issue-guides.

Follow on Twitter: @NIForums.

Resource Link: www.nifi.org/en/issue-guide/health-care

New Film Documentary, “Seeing the Forest”

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In the 1990s, many communities in central Oregon were torn asunder by the “War of the Woods.” Environmentalists had brought lawsuits against the U.S. Forest Service for violating its own governing statutes. For decades, timber companies had been allowed to clear-cut public forests, re-seed with tree monocultures, and build ecologically harmful roads on mountain landscapes.

Environmentalists won their lawsuit in 1991 when a federal judge issued an injunction that in effect shut down timber operations in the Pacific Northwest of the US. While the endangered northern spotted owl was the focus of much of the debate, the health of the entire ecosystem was at risk, including the Pacific salmon, which swim upstream to spawn. 

There is often no substitute for litigation and government mandates, and the 1991 litigation was clearly needed.  But what is really interesting is the aftermath:  Rather than just designating the forest as a wilderness preserve off-limits to everyone, the Forest Service instigated a remarkable experiment in collaborative governance. 

Instead of relying on the standard regime of bureaucratic process driven by congressional politics, industry lobbying and divisive public posturing, the various stakeholders in the region formed a “watershed council” to manage the Siuslaw National Forest. Twenty years later, this process of open commoning has produced a significant restoration of the forest ecosystems, implicitly indicting the previous forest management regime driven by politics and the formal legal system.

This story is told in a wonderful thirty-minute film documentary, “Seeing the Forest,” produced by writer and filmmaker Alan Honick, with support from Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.  Honick writes how the public lands in Oregon contained most of the remaining old growth forests outside of protected parks:

These were complex and ancient ecosystems, particularly on the west side of the Cascades, where the moisture from Pacific storms gave rise to rich and diverse temperate rainforests. Hundreds of species of animals and plants depended on this habitat to survive.

For 40 years, these forests were logged with the same industrial methods practiced on private land. Vast swaths were clearcut, then densely replanted with monocultures of the fastest growing trees. When they reached sufficient size, they were scheduled to be clearcut and replanted again, in an ongoing cycle considered sustainable by those who employed it.

The aftermath of the 1991 litigation could have been simmering hostility and litigation, which would likely flare up again.  It was based on the old, familiar narrative of “jobs vs. the environment,” a debate that government was supposed to mediate and resolve. 

In Oregon, however, it was decided to develop a “Northwest Forest Plan” that inaugurated a new space and shared narrative.  The Siuslaw Watershed Council invited anyone with an interest in the forest to attend its open, roundtable meetings, to discuss how to manage the forest and resolve or mitigate the competing interests of timber companies, environmentalists, recreational fishers, local communities, hikers, and others.  Outcomes were based on consensus agreement.

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what will Snapchat do to politics?

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Joanthan Mahler reports that “Snapchat, America’s fastest-growing smartphone app, [has] hired Peter Hamby, a political reporter for CNN, to lead its nascent news division.” Snapchat has more than 1oo million users, including many Americans between the ages of 18 and 31. Mahler quotes President Obama’s former senior strategist Dan Pfeiffer: “There is no harder riddle to solve in politics than reaching young Americans who are very interested in the future of their country but don’t engage with traditional news.” By entering the political news business, Pfeiffer thinks, “Snapchat may have just made it a whole lot easier to solve this riddle.”

Snapchat’s potential to increase young adults’ involvement with politics is one reason that the news about Peter Hamby is interesting. The other reason is an apparent contradiction. Snapchat is famous for extreme brevity. A “Snap” lasts on your phone or other device for no longer than 10 seconds. Hamby, as Mahler notes, wrote a report for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center about–as it turns out–the damage that Twitter’s brevity and speed has done to American politics. I quote from the final section of the report:

No one is complaining about the revolutionary gateway to news and information that Twitter provides. But plenty of people in politics are anxious about the way the Twitter conversation thrives on incrementalism, self-involvement and snark.

“It made me think smaller when I should have been thinking bigger,” said Sam Youngman.

“Twitter just gives you an outlet for when you’re bored,” said another reporter who traveled on the Romney plane. “It’s just stupid shit you are not thinking about the ramifications of.”

John Dickerson [Slate writer and CBS Political Director], hardly a new media curmudgeon, called Twitter “a mess for campaign coverage.”

“It makes us small and it makes us pissed off and mean, because Twitter as a conversation is incredibly acerbic and cynical and we don’t need more of that in coverage of politics, we need less,” he said.

…

“I still don’t know how reporters sit and watch a speech, and live tweet a speech, and also have the bandwidth to listen to what candidates are saying, and actually think about it and absorb it so they can right a comprehensive story afterwards,” said Liz Sidoti of the Associated Press.

…

“I don’t think the Twitter culture helps anybody create great journalism,” said Garrett Haake. “If you’re trying to be the first person that put it out at 140 characters, you’re probably not thinking about the broader context in which you want to present something.”

… Dickerson’s take: “If I were running an actual news division, I would probably ban people from Twitter in some way.” That Dickerson, one of the more forward-thinking and tech-savvy reporters in the business, would even consider such an idea speaks to how frustrated many campaign veterans are with today’s shoot-first-and-update-later style of political journalism.

Hamby’s paper for the Shorenstein Center is the exact opposite of a tweet. It is leisurely, anecdotal, sprinkled with character sketches, and 95 pages long. It doesn’t start with a gripping thesis or end with a sharply defined message but gradually unfolds an argument for the value of long-form journalism through the quoted opinions of others. You could almost say it exemplifies “negative capability,” John Keats’ phrase for not letting one’s own views determine how one sees the world.

Snapchat doesn’t exactly seem built for negative capability. So it is fascinating to speculate how a gifted writer of long-form journalism who decries the trivialization of politics will use this tool to cover the 2016 election.

The post what will Snapchat do to politics? appeared first on Peter Levine.

Anger

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I was recently struck by a comment from a 60s activist. Reflecting on the 60s experience in Doug McAdam’s Freedom Summer, he said something about how society saw activists at the time as angry – but they never stopped to ask why they were angry.

Anger is, I suppose, something of an uncouth emotion.

It can lead to violent verbal, emotional, or physical outbursts. It can lead to damage and harm – perhaps importantly, misdirected damage and harm.

It can leave a wake a devastation akin to a natural disaster.

“Anger is a corrosive emotion that can run off with your mental and physical health,” says Psychology Today.

The American Psychological Association is somewhat more generous, admitting that “anger can be a good thing,” but warning that “excessive anger can cause problems.”

Yet there is something undeniably valuable – something importantly good – about anger.

David Adams, psychologist and coordinator of the Culture of Peace News Network, argues that anger can play an important role in social action, that “anger is the stimulus that initiates action.”

One study out of Rutgers takes this argument a step further, looking at The link between moral anger and social activism.

“Some individuals who have experienced anger as a result of growing up under a system(s) of injustice to transform their anger into moral anger and subsequently into activism,” the study says. “Individuals who experience moral anger often perceive their anger as righteous and justified, linked to something greater than individual self-interest.”

If the opposite of anger is complacency – I’d rather have anger.

But it’s not enough to have the anger – to recognize that others are angry. We need to ask where that anger comes from, understand what drives that anger.

Chuck Palahniuk, in an oft-quote scene from Fight Club, writes, “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

There’s something about that line which resonated deeply with many in my age range, but there’s something critical I always felt Palahniuk left out.

We were lied to, yes.

But it wasn’t just the lie that one day we’d all be millionaires. It was the lie that all our problems had been solved.

That the social movements of the 60s had wrapped everything up nice for us. That we lived in a post-racial society where any kid could grow up to be president and where everyone would be accepted for who they are.

Things were supposed to be perfect now.

But we’ve watched our friends die. We’ve watched unarmed black men die. We’ve watched social injustices stay deeply entrenched while the powers that be utter soft explanations.

We’ve been raise to believe that we we’re nearing utopia, that we would all enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact.

And we’re very, very pissed off.

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Community Organizing and the Next Stage of Democracy

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Mike Miller, long time organizer and intellectual leader in community organizing, and Aaron Schultz, a theorist of the field who also is a practitioner, have edited a collection entitled People Power: The Community Organizing Tradition of Saul Alinsky (Vanderbilt University Press). Like the recent death of Ed Chambers, director of the Industrial Areas Foundation community organizing network which Alinsky founded, the book prompts reflection on the strengths and limits of community organizing and also on "what comes next?"

The book describes Alinsky's methods and those of associates who adopted and modified his approach, including Fred Ross, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta in the United Farm Workers, Chambers, Nicholas Von Hoffman, Dick Harmon, Ernie Cortes, and Johnny Ray Youngblood in IAF, Wade Rathke of ACORN, and Heather Booth of the Midwest Academy, among others.

"When people are organized, they move to the central decision-making table...on the basis of power," Alinsky said in a 1969 interview. "[They] say, 'We are people and damn it you are going to listen to us." This idea comes through all the variations. As Miller and Schutz put it, "Community organizing brings powerless and relatively powerless people together in solidarity to defend and advance their interests and values" (p. 2).

Through community organizing millions of people in the US and other countries have developed hope and power. I greatly appreciate this collection and its wisdom. At the same time, People's Power highlights how much we need to open up for work, debate, discussion, exploration new approaches and strategies for democratizing change in institutional and professional life.

Education, government, businesses, health, the media and cultural institutions like museums, historical societies, orchestras, dance and theater groups and associated professions need to be re-imagined as human creations which can be re-created in democratic terms. This means a shift from seeing them simply as "targets," in the language of organizers. But it is easier said than done.

Miller, in his introductory piece, contrasts community organizing with "elite democracy," based on elections, and "strong democracy," based on participatory governance mechanisms like advisory groups. Community organizing, he says, is part of "'civil society democracy' which emphasizes the importance of voluntary associations outside the formal structures of government...without a vibrant and strong civil society, money and the self-perpetuation of elites will be the controlling factors in government" (p. 42).

There are reasons for the map. Schutz in an essay in Educational Theory, "Power and Trust in the Public Realm" (2011), compares the "power-building" methods of community organizing with what he sees as the idealized and apolitical approach of progressives like John Dewey who sought to create democratic schools. Schutz argues the latter reflected "experiences of restrained dialogue in the new middle-class realms of the college seminar, professional association, and emerging forms of child-rearing" (p. 491).

Schutz argues that "almost universally, progressives [like Dewey]...avoided dealing with the challenges created by the painful, messy, dirty, conflictual, interest-driven, and antagonistic realities" of public life (p. 493). He quotes two teachers in Dewey's famous Laboratory School, Katherine Mayhew and Anna Edwards, who observed that graduates, trained in collaboration, experienced "shock and conflict" when they attempted "to use intelligent action for social purposes" and found themselves "thwarted and balked by the competitive antisocial spirit and dominant selfishness in society" (p. 496).

Community organizers like Schutz have insight into the limits of social change strategies which avoid politics. But their model flattens "power" into a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources. As Schutz argues, "significant social changes...are usually concerned with disagreements over the distribution of limited resources" (p. 503).

Community organizers see two main forms of power, people and money. "Knowledge power," if noted at all, is seen as abstracted from human relationships. Thus Alinsky in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals declared that "Our alleged educational system...[produces people] trained to emphasize order, logic, rational thought, direction, and purpose. . . . [with] a structured, static, closed, rigid, mental makeup" (166).

Alinsky had shrewd insights, but his fatalism about change in knowledge-based systems is disastrous.

Expert-led knowledge power is on the march, embodied in "Big Data," predictive technologies, and movements like translational science. All seek to fix people and problems from the outside, and view everyday citizens as largely ignorant and passive.

As Peter Levine, a leader in the emerging field of civic studies, observes, "impersonal politics" - another name for expert-led or technocratic power - contrasts with the "relational politics" of community organizing. Technocratic politics is delivered from the outside; it is abstract; its purveyors ask "what should be done?" by experts, rather than, as fellow citizens, "what should we do?" When it displaces relational politics, it dis-empowers most knowledge workers themselves. As long time organizer Gerald Taylor has observed, professionals are losing their autonomy and power in many fields.

"Only in relationships can we learn from other people," concludes Levine, "build networks that are sources of power and capacity, and act with agency..[and] seriously ask the question 'What should we do?'" Dewey, despite his aversion to rough and tumble politics, has much to offer here. He understood that knowledge power is not zero-sum but is increased through sharing transactions, calling this "social" knowledge. Though practitioners have to be clear eyed about conflicting interests and structures of unaccountable power in ways which go beyond Dewey, a democratic politics of knowledge also requires organizing broad alliances, making work practices more public, interactive, filled with meaning and developing new public narratives about the democratic possibilities of institutions. This approach is far different than targeting enemies and issue campaigns, the stock and trade of community organizing.

In 1946, Alinsky wrote that "the world is deluged with panaceas, formulas, proposed laws, machineries, ways out, and myriads of solutions." He argued that these displace "the eternal truth of the democratic faith that the solution always lies with the people" (p. 40).

As technocratic politics becomes transformed by a relational politics of civic agency, we will see a rebirth of the democratic faith.

Harry Boyte edits the recent book collection, also from Vanderbilt University Press, Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities, with many stories of institutional and professional democratization.

notes from the Summit on Civic Learning and National Service

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On October 16, 2014, the White House, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University hosted a Summit on Civic Learning and National Service. This invitational Summit brought together 75 higher education leaders, government officials, representatives of civic organizations, and researchers studying civic learning and engagement. The rich conversation brought up many themes and disagreements.

We have posted the Summit Proceedings here. They are based on a review of the notes from the Summit, compiled and summarized by representatives from Tisch College. These are the key seven themes:

  1. Colleges and universities must support democracy. Educating for democracy and generating knowledge to serve democracy were central purposes of the Morrill Land Grant Act, the GI Bill, and the creation of community colleges. The 1947 Truman Commission on Higher Education for Democracy stated that educating for democracy “should come first … among the principal goals for higher education.” But this heritage has largely been forgotten. The public, policymakers, and leaders of higher education now appear to focus primarily on preparing students for a competitive labor market.
  2. Democratic education means engagement with politics, institutions, and contentious issues—by students, faculty, and staff in their capacity as teachers, learners, researchers, and civic actors. Serving democracy means more than service, although service-learning programs contribute to that mission. Colleges and universities should be places of courageous conversations and action, where the most pressing social, economic, and political needs the nation and world are identified, studied, and debated, and where students develop the skills and sense of agency to act on those needs.
  3. Civic learning must move from “elective and available” to “pervasive and expected.” Since the 1980s, many colleges and universities have created impressive centers and programs for civic engagement, community service, community partnerships, and related topics. These special programs represent a valuable network, distributed across the country and connecting higher education to other sectors. However, they remain fairly marginal in academia itself, enlisting especially interested students and faculty. Some of the institutions represented at the Summit have taken the next step by making civic learning pervasive or even required on their campuses.
  4. Colleges and universities should be partners in local problem solving and anchors in democratic communities. Campuses can support reciprocal faculty-community collaborative research, open their doors to the community, and serve as conveners to identify and facilitate change about local challenges.
  5. Civic learning must be measured and assessed. Unless colleges and universities collect data and use it to improve programs and hold themselves accountable for results, civic learning will not be pervasively effective. Better measurement systems would also demonstrate the value of civic learning for employment and thus mitigate the tradeoff between education for democracy and education for work.
  6. Higher education should tackle growing economic and social inequality based on class and social identity. Many students face economic barriers to civic engagement. At a time of rapidly rising college costs, students may have to work at least one job, may have children of their own, and may hold substantial debt. Some possible solutions to those barriers are course credit for public service experiences, loan forgiveness, and connecting civic and career skills.
  7.  Leadership must come from many places, including federal and state policymakers, college administrators, academic departments, students, and also from community-based organizations and business. Many positive steps were proposed at the Summit, from raising the proportion of work-study funds available for community work to changing state or even federal measurement systems to include civic outcomes. Above all, the stakeholders must return the civic and democratic mission of higher education to its traditional high status in American life.

Based on the Summit discussions, we would suggest both an interest in and a need for continued work in two areas:

  • Collective work among scholars and practitioners on what the research shows regarding the nature, scope, and effectiveness of civic learning and engagement in democracy; and
  • Further, focused discussion among educators and policy makers to prioritize specific actions at the campus, collaborative, state, and federal, levels to advance civic learning and engagement in democracy.

Community partners/representatives should be key participants in both sets of discussions

The post notes from the Summit on Civic Learning and National Service appeared first on Peter Levine.

Up to 65% Off on EvDem Resources til May 15!

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We encourage NCDD members to take advantage of a great sale on discussion resources that Everyday Democracy – an NCDD organizational member – is having before they move to a new office space. Check out the announcement of the sale and the move below, or find the original here.

EvDem LogoWe’re downsizing our office space, and we can’t take everything with us! Now through May 15, some of our most popular discussion guides are up to 65% off:

Don’t delay! Supplies are limited, and orders will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.

Order now.

Why the move?

Our lease is up at our current location so we’re moving to a new location with a smaller office footprint than we have now.  Decreasing our office footprint allows us to stretch our resources to serve communities across the country.

Where to?

We’re moving to the CT Nonprofit Center in Hartford, Conn., which is a collaborative of non-profit organizations.  The anchor non-profit is the Connecticut Association of Nonprofits. Our new address will be:

75 Hartford Square West
Hartford, CT 06106

“We are delighted to move to a nonprofit collaborative space in downtown Hartford, where we will be even closer to many of our local and state partners.” –Martha McCoy, Executive Director

When?

May 29, 2015 is our official move date. Until then, we’re very busy packing!

A brief history of Everyday Democracy’s office moves

The original home of Everyday Democracy, then the Study Circles Resource Center, was in Pomfret, Conn., – a small rural town in the northeastern part of the state. Our founder, Paul Aicher, lived there and owned the property where he located our offices.

Seven years ago, we moved from Pomfret to East Hartford, Conn. This move allowed us to focus on our goal of more intentionally incorporating racial equity into our work, to increase the diversity of our staff, and to work closer to an urban area where many of the issues we work with manifest most intensely. Since the move, we have brought eight new staff members on board who are still with us today, and have worked on several initiatives with the local community on issues such as racial equity, food security, immigration, education, community police relations, and others.

Carolyne Abdullah, Director of Community Assistance, said that the move was a big change in office environment: “I experienced a sense of ‘hey, there are other people in the world’ when I first came to work in a 19-story building occupied by many businesses and all kinds of people as opposed to working on one floor with six people in Pomfret.”

Over these past seven years much as affected how we work: Cloud computing allows us to have more robust online filing systems, technology has allowed us to incorporate telecommuting for staff to do their work from home, and the use of digital materials has allowed us to minimize what we keep as inventory on our shelves. All of the above offers us the opportunity to downsize our footprint by using less office space. This means we’ll be able to put more resources into community programs and building partnerships.

You can find the original version of this Everyday Democracy post at http://everyday-democracy.org/news/moving-sale#.VUbQtSFVikq.