Registration Open for 4th Int’l PB Conference, May 20-22

This year is going to be a great year for conferences! Of course we want our NCDD members to join us at our 2016 National Conference for Dialogue & Deliberation, but we also want to encourage our members to consider registering for the 4th International Conference on Participatory Budgeting in North America this May 20th-22nd in Boston, MA.

This year’s PB conference is especially exciting because it will coincide with the voting phase of the City of Boston’s award-winning youth participatory budgeting process, which adds an extra focus on young people’s participation in deliberative processes to the gathering. Regular registration is only $225 before the early-bird deadline on April 8th, but registration fees operate on a sliding scale that you can learn more about at www.pbconference.org.

Here is how PBP describes the conference:

The 4th International Conference on Participatory Budgeting in North America, organized by the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP), will take place in Boston, Massachusetts, USA during the voting phase of their award-winning, city-wide, youth PB process.

The conference is a space for participants and organizers of PB processes to share and reflect on their experiences so far, alongside interested activists, practitioners, scholars, elected officials, and civic designers.

The PB Conference will be organized around three themes this year:

  • Youth power through PB: PB in schools, youth-only processes, and nearly every other PB process in North America uniquely gives real power to young people – as young as 11! What can we do to encourage even more youth leadership with PB?
  • PB in practice: What is working well? What has been less successful? What improvements can be made in the way the process is implemented? How can we do better and be more effective with existing PB processes and how can we put more processes in place across North America and around the world.
  • Measuring impact: How do we define a good PB process? What are the best ways to define success in this context? What are innovative, effective tools and methods we can use to assess the impact of processes that are currently underway as well as to shape new PB processes.

Conference participants will also have the chance to take advantage of a full-day introductory or advanced training on participatory budgeting before the conference May 20th from 9:30am-4pm. The regular registration rate for the trainings is $250, which is separate from conference registration.

The PB Conference promises to be a great gathering to learn more about one of the fastest-growing methodologies in our field, and we hope to see some of our NCDD members there! You can learn more and register for the conference at www.pbconference.org.

Hal Saunders – Tribute to Democracy Giant

Hal Saunders died on March 6, after a struggle with cancer.

I first met Hal in 1989, when he asked me to participate in a third task force, on civil society, in the off-the-record, high-level Dartmouth Conference. Dartmouth was a dialogue between the Soviet Union and the United States which began in 1960. Again and again it brought leaders of the two countries back from the brink of disaster by creating a space where they could get a reality check. Hal once told me Dartmouth "was where the Soviets gave the speeches they had in their desks and believed in, but couldn't say in public."

For a decade Hal co-chaired a Task Force on Regional Conflicts, some of the time with Yevgeny Primakov, former head of the KGB and then Prime Minister of the Soviet Union. The task force addressed hot spots in the Middle East and elsewhere. In 1990 Hal went on staff of the Kettering Foundation, which sponsored the Dartmouth Conference, as director of the foundation's international programs. No one could possibly have been better.

He had a remarkable history. In 1961, Hal Saunders joined the staff of the National Security Council and served as Mideast expert for both the Johnson and Nixon administrations -- during the Six-Day War of June 1967, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy." In 1978, President Carter appointed him Assistant Secretary in the State Department for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs. He helped set up the legendary Camp David meeting which brought Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt, together with Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of Israel and Jimmy Carter together for 12 days of secret talks. The Camp David talks laid the foundation for the historic Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty.

On November 4, 1979, in the early morning hours, he took a call from the American embassy in Iran and for two hours heard from frantic officials about the takeover of the embassy. For the next 444 days he worked to free the American hostages.

I worked with Hal as the Soviet Union underwent dramatic transformation. And I turned to him when we created the "Reinventing Citizenship" initiative with the Domestic Policy Council and Bill Galston, President Clinton's domestic policy advisor. Our aim was to develop strategies for overcoming the government-citizen gap. No one had more wisdom about how to get things accomplished in government bureaucracies. In 1994, at a Kettering international meeting in Puerto Rico, we discussed the effort and his own work.

Here is an excerpt from my travel log.

San Juan San Juan, Puerto Rico, January 31 10:06 am

Hal Saunders and I ate breakfast on the hotel terrace, surrounded by lush flowers, with the ocean sounding in the background. Small, graceful black birds lit all around us.

I gave an update on Reinventing Citizenship. Hal had many thoughts about how to connect key people in the foreign policy "democracy promotion" networks. Ramon Daubon, a terrific guy, once the Latin Ford Foundation director will be here. He now is at the Agency for International Development, trying to change US approaches to democracy aid in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Beyond foreign policy, Hal's counsel on our initiative was wise and to the point as always: keep it relatively loose and uninstitutionalized for as long as possible and in as many ways as possible. Look for ways to create relationships and energy around the key concepts.

Hal's own work is fascinating. He has grants for the conflict resolution project Kettering has undertaken in Tajikistan, where civil war in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse has left a seventh of the population as refugees. Working with the Institute for Oriental Studies in Russia, they've been able to create a vibrant forum bringing together the warring parties in the country around the tasks of ending the war and resettlement; and also "constitution-building," understood as a political process not simply writing a constitution. Hal gives little "sermonettes" in the middle of meetings -- drawing undoubtedly on his mystique as someone who helped bring Sadat and Begin together in Camp David, and his other many achievements. One sermonette was on the need to see constitutional reform as connected to creating a political dynamic across different factions and ethnic rivalries.

I remarked, it must be an amazing and immense gratifying thing to see possibilities for settlement, ending of war, and society-building in a society that is so wracked with suffering and violence.

Hal said simply, "yes."

I last saw Hal and Carol, his wife, at a Kettering international gathering last July. He wasn't well. But he was, as always, passionately curious about democracy developments, including in South Africa - Hal had long worked with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa). Idasa, until its recent end, was one of the great democracy promoting organizations in the world. My wife, Marie Ström, directed their democracy education work for nearly twenty years, and I worked with it on many projects.

Hal combined calm, strategic, big picture thinking with a wonderfully generous, relational approach. He also had a passionate commitment to dialogue as a way to humanize and work through even the most intractable conflicts. This commitment came from his experiences.

Hal was a great theorist and practitioner of deliberation in our time. He created the Sustained Dialogue Institute which involves college students across America in working through conflicts.

I have tremendous admiration for Hal and his legacy, in the trenches of democracy across the world.

Fond Memories of Hal Saunders

I’m so sad to share this news with the network, but our long-time member Harold Saunders passed away yesterday at the age of 85. Hal had an incredibly distinguished career – I can’t even begin to do it justice. He developed and practiced the process of Sustained Dialogue, a “public peace process” to transform racial and ethnic conflicts.
 He authored four books on peace building and dialogue. He worked with Kissinger, President Carter, and so many others. He became the Director of International Affairs at the Kettering Foundation. And he was just an all-around incredible human being.

Many of us were privileged to know him, as he always attended the NCDD conferences and interacted with all of us with an open heart and an amazing attitude of humble curiosity and camaraderie. He participated in a panel of field leaders at our 2004 national conference in Denver, and spoke again at our 2008 conference in Austin. Please join me in mourning the loss of our friend and colleague. Contributions in his memory can be sent to the Sustained Dialogue Institute. You can read more about Hal’s incredible work in the Kettering Foundation’s write-up below or read the original here.


kfHarold H. Saunders, assistant secretary of state in the Carter administration and the recently retired director of international affairs at the Kettering Foundation, who spent more than 20 years in high foreign policy positions in the United States government, died on March 6, 2016, at his home in McLean, Va. He was 85.

The cause of death was prostate cancer.

“Hal Saunders served with distinction under six U.S. presidents and was a significant figure in America’s international affairs for more than 50 years. We were fortunate to have had his good counsel for much of that time,” David Mathews, Kettering Foundation president, said. “In addition, we will remember his interest in young people. He reached out to college students and built a network devoted to sustained dialogue, one of the primary themes of his work in recent years.”

“He tackled some of the greatest challenges of our times –  protracted conflict, destructive relationships, weak governance, dysfunctional democracy and the need for a new world view,” Dr. Mathews continued.

After serving as a U.S. Air Force lieutenant and in the Central Intelligence Agency, Saunders joined the National Security Council staff in 1961 and served through the Johnson and Nixon administrations as the council’s Mideast expert, a period that saw the Six-Day War of June 1967, the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the Kissinger shuttles. He was appointed deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs in 1974, director of intelligence and research in 1975, and was appointed by President Carter to be assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs in 1978.

During his tenure as assistant secretary, Saunders was a principal architect of the Camp David Accords and the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. In the early morning hours of November 4, 1979, a call was patched through to his home from Tehran, and over the next two hours he listened to the overrun of the American Embassy. For the next 444 days, Saunders worked tirelessly to free the American hostages, culminating in their release on January 20, 1981.

For his contributions to American diplomacy, Saunders received the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Service, the government’s highest award for civilian career officials, and the State Department’s Distinguished Honor Award. After leaving government service in 1981, he was associated with the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution for 10 years before joining the Kettering Foundation as director of international Affairs. In 1981, he also became U.S. co-chair of the Task Force on Regional Conflicts for the Dartmouth Conference, the longest continuous dialogue between American and Soviet citizens.

Harold H. Saunders was born in Philadelphia on December 27, 1930, and attended Germantown Academy there. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University in 1952 with a bachelor’s degree in English and American Civilization and received a doctorate in American Studies from Yale University in 1956. He was president of his class at Princeton, later served on the Board of Trustees at Princeton and received the Class of 1952’s “Excellence in Career” award.

Over the past 35 years, Dr. Saunders developed and practiced the process of Sustained Dialogue, which he described as a “five-stage public peace process” to transform racial and ethnic conflicts. He was the author of four books, co-author of another and co-editor of still another, all dealing with issues of international peace.

In 1999 he wrote A Public Peace Process: Sustained Dialogue to Transform Racial and Ethnic Conflict. That experience led to his founding the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue (now the Sustained Dialogue Institute), which he served as chairman and president until his retirement on December 31, 2015. He is also the author of The Other Walls: The Arab-Israeli Peace Process in a Global Perspective (1985), Politics Is about Relationship: A Blueprint for the Citizens’ Century (2005), and Sustained Dialogue in Conflicts: Transformation and Change (2011).

Through IISD/SDI he moderated dialogues among citizens outside government, from the civil war in Tajikistan to deep tensions among Arabs, Europeans, and Americans and all factions in Iraq. More recently, he had been collaborating with established organizations in the U.S., South Africa, Israel and the Americas to embed sustained dialogue in their programs.

Dr. Saunders was the recipient of many awards. From Germantown Academy, he received its first Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002. He was given Search for Common Ground’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004 and the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Annenberg Award for Excellence in Diplomacy in 2010.

He had served on the board for the Hollings Center, the executive committee of the Institute for East-West Security Studies and on the boards of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, Internews,  and Partners for Democratic Change and had been a member of the International Negotiation Network at the Carter Presidential Center. He served on the governing council of the International Society of Political Psychology, which presented him the 1999 Nevitt Sanford Award for “distinguished professional contributions to political psychology.”

He taught international relationships and conflict resolution at George Mason University and at Johns Hopkins University’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Academy of Diplomacy and a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.

He was awarded honorary degrees of doctor of letters by New England College, doctor of international relations by Dickinson College, doctor of humane letters by the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and doctor of arts, letters, and Humanities by Susquehanna University. He was an elder in the Presbyterian Church and had participated in a Roman Catholic-Reformed Churches dialogue.

Dr. Saunders’ first wife, the former Barbara McGarrigle, died in 1973. He is survived by his wife of 25 years, Carol Jones Cruse Saunders, a son, Mark and daughter-in-law, Robin Stafford, daughter Catherine, a step-daughter, Caryn Hoadley, and her husband, Brad Wetstone, three grandchildren and two step-grandsons.

Burial is private. A memorial service will be held at a future date.

In his memory, contributions may be made to his Sustained Dialogue Institute.

You can read the original version of this Kettering Foundation remembrance at www.kettering.org/blogs/harold-saunders-1930-2016.

Bourdieu in the college admissions office

In the college admissions office of a very highly respected liberal arts college, the admissions officer asks the prospective applicants what they think they might like to study. The first two teenagers say “business,” which is not in the curriculum of this college. Presumably, they and their families want them to get ahead, they see business as the path to success in America, and they assume that attending a highly selective and famous college is a step to business leadership.

Meanwhile, other families in the room also want our kids to get ahead. But we know that there is quite a different pathway that involves intentionally not studying anything as practical and applied as business. If you’re on this path, you know that the right thing to value is a liberal arts education. That will always mark you as someone desirable to employ at businesses and other organizations run by fellow graduates of elite liberal arts colleges.

Paging Dr. Bourdieu, who would explain that a ruling class reproduces itself by defining a certain habitus, or structure of values, that is difficult to acquire and that identifies its bearers as members of the ruling class. The purpose, then, of a highly selective liberal arts college is to transmit the habitus.

That is a hard diagnosis to avoid when sitting in an admissions office. I think there’s a lot of truth to it, although I’d note some complications.

First, there are many paths to wealth, power, and social standing. It’s been said that Washington is full of Harvard grads working for Ohio State grads, and if there’s still truth to that, it’s because America has many centers of power–financial, industrial, military, and political. Bourdieu’s theory may apply more neatly to the France of the grandes écoles than to our stratified–but polycentric–nation.

Second, what you learn from a liberal arts education has incalculable value. It’s not like mastering court etiquette so that you can mingle with aristocrats. You’re learning quantum mechanics, Japanese history, psychometrics–and Bourdieu. These attainments contribute to a good life. They also encourage a range of careers. Many liberal arts graduates just use the habitus to rise in the social hierarchy, but others are inspired to work in kindergarten classrooms, refugee camps, and monasteries. It’s interesting to speculate why the ruling class has chosen rites of passage for its young that are not efficiently designed to produce new rulers. There’s a lot of leakage, as some graduates voluntarily choose not to compete for the top of the social hierarchy.

Third, by rewarding proficiency in the liberal arts, we create incentives to practice these arts at all stages of life. Meritocracy is a highly problematic concept–that is the main theme of this post. But it isn’t an empty idea. Students in a seminar room in a highly selective liberal arts institution really do practice the liberal arts at a remarkably high level. That is not because of their native excellence, but because they–and the adults who care about them–have spent the 18 years before college honing their skills. These kids have worked very hard, and so have their parents and teachers. Many of their peers haven’t made it to the elite colleges because they haven’t performed as well. One outcome is to mark a ruling class by giving them a set of difficult attainments, a habitus. Another outcome is to produce truly excellent scientists, poets, and teachers.

Finally, the people who run these institutions are not intentionally invested in reproducing a ruling class. At least at the level of conscious, deliberate intention, they are motivated by love of the liberal arts and by a sense that the college adds value and provides opportunities for upward mobility. They don’t want to admit and educate only the children of alumni and others like them. They are actually pleased to see students attain the habitus when their parents were far from having it. Diversity, inclusion, equity, and upward mobility are among the highest notional values of these institutions. Such values inspire the educators and administrators and legitimize the whole business. The result is a somewhat diverse actual student body in an institution that still pretty well fulfills the function that Pierre Bourdieu diagnosed.

Scholars and Scholarship with Ties to Communities (Connections 2015)

The four-page article, Scholars and Scholarship with Ties to Communities by Ellen Knutson and Ileana Marin was published Fall 2015 in Kettering Foundation‘s annual newsletter, “Connections 2015 – Our History: Journeys in KF Research”.

In 1998, Kettering Foundation and Joffre T. Whisenton and Associates, collaborated to create Whisenton Public Scholars program, for scholars to experiment with and provide research on facets of citizen-centered democracy. The two-year research exchange program encourages scholars, usually faculty and administration, who work with often under-served communities. Knutson and Marin give examples of the research projects that the fellows have worked on in the past and talk about the Whisenton Public Scholars Alumni Research Conference in 2015, which shares some of the outcomes of the whole program over the years. Read an excerpt of the article below and find Connections 2015 available for free PDF download on Kettering’s site here.

KF_Connections 2015From the article…

The Whisenton Public Scholars program is a joint project between the Kettering Foundation and Joffre T. Whisenton and Associates. Participants have primarily included faculty and administrators from schools with a mission to serve minority communities (such as historically black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, and tribal colleges). Many of these institutions have maintained close ties to their communities and focus on developing student engagement. The two-year program encourages scholars to experiment with elements of citizen-centered democracy, such as naming and framing issues and making choices together in the context of teaching, research, and service. Additionally, the research exchange provides space for conducting novel research addressing the fundamental problems of democracy. Since 1998, when the program was created, more than 70 faculty and administrators have participated; the newest cohort met for the first time in July 2015.

The program was designed to investigate ways that faculty from various disciplines at schools closely tied to their communities could institute public scholarship practices. During the first year of the research exchange, participants come together to discuss topics related to public life and democratic self-governance, the role of higher education in democracy, and approaches to research in their communities. They also focus on learning toname and frame issues for public deliberation, the ideas behind public scholarship, and the relationship between institutions of higher education and communities. In order to have a deeper understanding of the concepts introduced in the exchange, participants experiment with putting the ideas into practice through completing field work between face-to-face meetings. The second year of the program is directed by the research projects of the participants. Beginning with the 2010- 2012 cohort, the scholars also joined other research exchanges conducted at the foundation that matched their research interest during this second year.

Four Research Areas
Over the course of the program, the scholars have produced research around the following broad areas:
– Developing curricular or cocurricular activities around public practices and citizenship;
– Framing an issue for public deliberation that is important to their campus, community, or professional groups;
– (Re)discovering the democratic foundations of higher education professions; and
– Articulating public scholarship as it relates to disciplinary concerns.

Many scholars have worked to include deliberative practices in their courses. They represent a variety of disciplines, from teacher education to international business education. For some, this meant including a forum as a pedagogical tool for students to learn about a relevant topic related to the course, while others revamped their complete curriculum to include deliberative elements throughout the course. In Deliberation and the Work of Higher Education, Cristina Alfaro (2000- 2001 cohort) describes how she infused her teacher education courses with deliberation in her chapter, “Reinventing Teacher Education: The Role of Deliberative Pedagogy in the K-6 Classroom.”

Scholars have also worked with students and community members to name and frame issues for deliberation. Three examples of such framing efforts on campuses and in communities are from Nora Antoine (Sinte Gleska University), Xuan Santos (California State University San Marcos), and a trio of scholars from three campuses, Anna Green (Florida A&M University), Brian Anderson (Tougaloo College), and Kevin Rolle (South Carolina State University). Antoine (1998-2000 cohort) framed the issue of community development on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Santos (2013-2015 cohort) is working with youth in his community to support them as they identify and frame issues that affect them. Green, Anderson, and Rolle (2005-2007 cohort) focused their issue guide on fraternities and sororities on HBCU campuses.

About Kettering Foundation and Connections
KF_LogoThe Kettering Foundation is a nonprofit operating foundation rooted in the American tradition of cooperative research. Kettering’s primary research question is, what does it take to make democracy work as it should? Kettering’s research is distinctive because it is conducted from the perspective of citizens and focuses on what people can do collectively to address problems affecting their lives, their communities, and their nation.

Each issue of this annual newsletter focuses on a particular area of Kettering’s research. The 2015 issue, edited by Kettering program officer Melinda Gilmore and director of communications David Holwerk, focuses on our yearlong review of Kettering’s research over time.

Follow on Twitter: @KetteringFdn

Resource Link: www.kettering.org/sites/default/files/periodical-article/Knutsen-Marin_2015.pdf