The University of Minnesota recently hosted Sam Daley-Harris, founder of RESULTS. Sam was on a book tour for the 20th edition of Reclaiming Our Democracy, and I prepared for the dialogue between us following his talk.

The University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs hosted Sam Daley-Harris, founder of RESULTS, on October 9, 2013. Sam was on a book tour for the 20th edition of Reclaiming Our Democracy, and I prepared for the dialogue between us following his talk by finding out more about RESULTS and the recently formed Citizen Climate Lobby which uses its methodology. Citizen Climate Lobby is a grassroots effort to address climate change through a tax on carbon emissions.

RESULTS, founded in 1981, shows the extraordinary capacity for action that it is possible to develop in citizen advocacy for policy change. RESULTS has been highly successful in efforts on global poverty-reduction, promoting micro-lending and, working with UNICEF, child survival strategies like vaccinations.

When the organization began lobbying for micro-finance, fewer than one million poor people had access to a micro-loan. By 2011 that number had grown to more than 124 million. After receiving the Nobel Prize in economics in 2006 for micro-lending, Mohammed Yunus said that "No other organization has been as critical a partner in seeing to it that micro-credit is used as a tool to eradicate poverty and empowerment of women than RESULTS."

In his introduction to the new edition, Yunus argues that RESULTS is "not about advocacy by mouse click or lighting up Facebook and Twitter." Rather, "it is about providing a powerful structure of support... uncovering and then lighting up the unquenchable desire in each of us to make a difference in the world." Daley-Harris himself details 13 principles of action which he believes make "citizen empowerment and transformation work," like developing a focused agenda, building relationships with media and policy makers, and "partnership not partisanship."

These are valuable insights. But it is also possible to look at the RESULTS method and its practices as a civic laboratory which highlights three large obstacles to effective collective action everywhere, and also points toward approaches which can be generalized into lessons for making democratic change in society as a whole. These are the obstacles:

• The problem of a narrow focus on disseminating information. This is the result of expert-centered approaches to action which devalue the intelligence and contributions of lay citizens.



• The problem of polarizing politics. This emerges from a good-versus-evil framing of issues which has spread widely, partly as a result of the telecommunications revolution.



• The problem of "feel good" activities. This grows from a therapeutic culture which substitutes emotional states for effective, strategic action to create democratic power.

In this post, I describe the problem of a narrow focus on disseminating information and point to remedies based on interactive, relational organizing for public work. In subsequent posts I will take up the other obstacles and alternatives.

Disseminating information. Daley-Harris tells the story of Marshall Saunders, a businessman who saw Al Gore's documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth. He joined more than 1,000 people in a training for a slide show based on the documentary and presented it 43 times in San Diego. "He soon realized that the material was almost exclusively focused on the problem," writes Daley-Harris. It also "included very little on what people could do about it." As a result, Saunders worked with Daley-Harris to adapt the RESULTS method to the challenge of climate change.

The story illustrates the difference between information dissemination and what is called relational organizing. RESULTS' method emphasizes building sustained relations with policymakers and shapers of public opinion such as editors and journalists. RESULTS also involves highly interactive processes. For instance, on the monthly conference call, part of its method, prominent experts present information for a few minutes, but their time is carefully kept in check. Most time is kept open for questions, comments and interactions.

Information dissemination is the dominant approach to the climate change issue generally, as John Spencer and I described last year in our Huffington Post piece, "Civic Science -- Beyond the Knowledge Wars." We quoted the leading scientific journal, Nature, which declared that in the face of climate change denialists, "Climate scientists must be ever more energetic in taking their message to citizens."

Embedded in this framework are two assumptions: the task is to present objective truth, "the science," to uninformed and largely passive citizens and, related, scientists are not citizens in their work.

In turn, these embody what the African intellectual Xolela Mangcu calls technocratic creep across all of society. Technocratic creep creates professional identities separated from civic identities. It embodies instrumental rationality which holds "why" questions as a given and focuses on efficiency of means. It holds a view of scientific knowledge as objective truth rather than as power resources which need to be in relationship to other kinds of knowledge for effective action.

Technocratic practices also emerge when citizens organize for educational change. Thus, the collection on effective organizing for school change edited by Marion Orr and John Rogers, Public Engagement for Public Education, shows the pattern. As the political theorist Luke Bretherton puts it in a review,

What comes across time and again in the essays is the hostility 'non-experts' provoke. Orr and Rogers point to how public engagement with education challenges and demands a move beyond technocratic, top down, one-size-fits-all, centralized and procedural reform initiatives to draw on a wider variety of experience, knowledge and a diversity solutions in order to solve common problems.

The problem of information dissemination and the technocratic culture in which it is rooted can only be countered on a large scale by democratic transformation of professions. There are signs of such transformation, as Albert Dzur documents in a new blog, "Trench Democracy," for Boston Review on participatory innovation. As Dzur describes, "democratic professionals are making real-world changes in their domains piece by piece, practice by practice... they are renovating and reconstructive schools, clinics, prisons and other seemingly inert bodies"

RESULTS and the Citizen Climate Lobby help to illustrate the crucial importance of such work in making effective change.

Reclaiming Our Democracy, and I prepared for the dialogue between us following his talk.]]>

The president's best instincts, in contrast, embody a larger politics combining material concerns with people's larger interests in a world of beauty and meaning which they help to build.

The president's best instincts, in contrast, embody a larger politics combining material concerns with people's larger interests in a world of beauty and meaning which they help to build.

A thin "mass politics" runs through progressive history, reducing interests of the people to a demand for "more." "More" was a favorite term of Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor, which reproduced the logic of consumer society. It defines people by their needs and wants -- neglecting their capacities for public creation.

There is an alternative, what can be called a politics of bread and roses, relevant to education in a time of rapid change.

Mass politics appears in the new proposals from the Obama administration on education. The proposals don't reflect the president's best insights.

In visionary moments, the president voices the heart of the democratic faith, the conviction that our democracy is enlarged by the talents and intelligence of everyday citizens. Reflecting on the limits of community organizing, Obama wrote in 1990 that "Most [community organizers] practice... a 'consumer advocacy' approach, with a focus on wrestling services and resources from the outside powers that be. Few are thinking of harnessing the internal productive capacities... that exist in communities."

In a similar vein, Obama marked the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington by honoring the "ordinary people... the seamstresses, and steelworkers, and students, and teachers, maids and pullman porters" who came by the hundreds of thousands. "Change does not come from Washington but to Washington," he said, "built on our willingness, we, the people, to take on the mantle of citizenship."

Obama's sense of the potential greatness of everyday citizens also animates education at its best. But it is not included in Obama's most recent higher education plan.

The plan is to create a Report Card that rates colleges on measures such as tuition, graduation rates, debt, numbers of lower income students enrolled, and incomes of alumni, tying financial aid to the ratings.

The plan addresses some real issues -- rising costs, graduation rates, access, and debt. But if ever there is a case when "change needs to come to Washington not from Washington," this is it.

The case of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind" is instructive. It eroded the power of educators and students, parents and communities to make change. Moreover, in the case of Obama's education plan, focusing on the earnings of graduates threatens to further erode the role of education in preparing students for active citizenship -- clashing with the administration's own priorities, announced on January 10, 2012, with a new policy of educating for "college, career, and citizenship."

It is worth remembering two different strands of labor history. Gomper's answer to what labor wants -- "we want more and when it becomes more we shall still want more" -- thinned out the meaning of workers' politics. Gompers reflected the "mass politics" which Obama himself once incisively criticized in pointing out limits of community organizing. Mass politics, as the historian Steven Fraser describes in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, is based on the concept of the "new man... existentially mobile, more oriented to consumption than production, familiar with the impersonal rights and responsibilities of industrial due process."

The president's best instincts, in contrast, embody a larger politics combining material concerns with people's larger interests in a world of beauty and meaning which they help to build. This was the theme of the Lawrence Textile Strike, uniting dozens of immigrant communities in 1912. The strike frontally challenged Gompers' reductionist view of the worker. It was led by women and settled on terms favorable to the workers.

The phrase, from a speech by Rose Schneiderman, "the worker must have bread, but she must have roses too," inspired the poem, "Bread and Roses," by James Oppenheim,

"As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing, Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"

Popular mythology holds that striking women carried signs with the slogan. Its practical wisdom --- that everyday citizens are concerned with both immediate needs and larger meanings -- animated the great labor, cooperative, educational, cultural and farmer movements of the New Deal, as well as the civil rights movement which Obama eloquently praised.

Today, "Bread and Roses" wisdom is evident in citizen views about higher education surfacing in Shaping Our Future forums on the purposes of higher education, held across the country over the last year. Shaping Our Future was launched by the American Commonwealth Partnership and the National Issues Forum at the National Press Club September 4th, 2013, with support of the administration. Undersecretary Martha Kanter spoke eloquently about the importance of a rich education that emphasizes broad thinking and skills of citizenship. Since then we convened more than 120 forums across the country bringing together college students, parents, faculty, employers, retirees, policy makers and others to deliberate about higher education's roles.

The forums show a gap between how lay citizens, outside the policy making arena, think about higher education, and the debate among policy makers. "Facing a more competitive international economy and relentlessly rising college costs, leaders say now is the moment for higher education to reinvent itself," writes Jean Johnson in Divided We Fail, a report on the findings. In contrast, while participants were aware of practical problems like rising costs and debt, they also "spoke repeatedly about the benefits of a rich, varied college education...where, in their view, students have time and space to explore new ideas and diverse fields."

In a recent blog in The Huffington Post , Johnson quotes a woman participant: "If you have a higher education background, you've had opportunity to be exposed to different cultures, different lifestyles, different religious, different belief systems, and you have a...heart and a mind that are both opened."

Lay citizens, in short, understand the need for "hearts and minds to be opened" for challenges ahead, and that colleges are crucial to that opening.

Indeed, they may be a sleeping giant, ready to awaken.

Harry Boyte, Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a Senior Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, coordinated the American Commonwealth Partnership which worked with the White House and Department of Education in 2012 to strengthen the public purposes of higher education.

Flying back from South Africa where I spend several months a year, the weekend before the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, I was struck by similar lessons in the freedom movements of both societies that need recalling. In both countries, the agent of change threatens to shrink like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.

In today's usual accounts, movement leaders take on gigantic, even superhuman proportions. Martin Luther King gave a speech and Congress abolished segregation. Nelson Mandela got out of jail and negotiated the end to apartheid. This top-down narrative has counterparts in today's view that government and politicians are the drivers of change. What is lost is a particular kind of citizen politics -- pluralistic and majoritarian, grounding great moral visions in daily, practical realities. This is the politics which fuels real democratic change.

In the early morning hours of August 28th, I heard King in the room next door practice "I Have a Dream." I was stretched out in a sleeping bag on the hotel floor of my father, who had just gone on staff as King's special assistant in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC.

King called the nation to "rise up [and] live out the true meaning of its creed" that all are created equal. The speech paralleled South Africa's Freedom Charter eight years before in 1955, which became the manifesto of the anti-apartheid movement.

Both statements eloquently channeled civic energy. While working as a field secretary for SCLC, I saw this first hand in the movement's community organizing, nonviolent protests, church rallies, citizenship education classes, songs, sermons and many other expressions, Southern blacks, oppressed for generations, became civic role models for the nation.

In South Africa, the Freedom Charter emerged from a parallel, vast public deliberation, the Congress of the People, which took shape in houses, flats, factories, kraals, on farms and in outdoor rallies. The Congress movement re-imagined the society in radically democratic ways. Thousands of volunteers publicized the C.O.P, educated the people, and got their views on what should be included in the Charter. They created a "million signatures campaign."

Both King's Dream and the Freedom Charter advanced inclusive visions. The Charter begins, "We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white." These words insured a nonracial cast to the movement, challenging both the racist apartheid regime and black nationalists who proposed "to drive whites into the sea."

King's speech similarly envisioned that "one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood." He also countered divisive politics. "Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline."

Both movements had profound moral aspects, but it is a mistake to see them as simply moral crusades. They embodied a down-to-earth citizen politics aiming to win over the broad middle of society.

Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington, principle tutor of King in nonviolence, posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom this month, strongly held this view. It came to trenchant expression in his 1965 essay "From Protest to Politics."

Describing post-segregation problems facing the black community like unemployment, inferior housing and education, crime and despair, Rustin argued that to address these required building a movement with even wider support.

He challenged "moderates" who believed that dismantling legal segregation was the final goal. He also countered "militants," those he called the "no-win" tendency. "These are often described as the radicals of the movement but they are really its moralists," he said. "They seek to change white hearts - by traumatizing them. Frequently abetted by white self-flagellants, they may applaud Malcolm X because, while they admit he has no program, they think he can frighten white people into doing the right thing."

Neither moderates nor militants would produce much change in Rustin's view. The movement for equality required far ranging reforms if it was to address successfully problems like unemployment, education, poverty in the ghettos and the need to redefine work itself. But detailed programs needed to be owned by the movement.

Citizens' political power was at the heart of Rustin's strategy. Such power could only grow from interracial alliances of blacks with labor unions, churches and synagogues and others. It required a shift in tactics from "direct-action techniques" to "the building of community...power bases." His disagreement with Black Power and other forms of black nationalism was that they alienated needed working class allies.

In recent years, as government moved to the center of the liberal imagination, citizen politics receded. At the 2012 Democratic convention many argued that "government is the one thing we all belong to," as the opening video put it. Rep. Barney Frank proposed that "there are things that a civilized society needs that we can only do when we do them together, and when we do them together that's called government."

Proposals to mark the March anniversary with a new push for government programs overlook polarizations around government's role, which must be addressed effectively if the middle is to be won over for changes.

In South Africa similar dynamics are at work, but the need for active citizenship is much more widely discussed. Thus, a group of leading figures, the Dinokeng Scenario Team, convened by leaders including Graςa Machel, married to Mandela, former Black Consciousness leader Mamphela Ramphele, Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndugane, and Rick Manell, analyzed the state of the nation and proposed alternative possibilities in a recent report, South Africa at a Crossroad.

They describe the shift away from citizens. "Before 1994, citizen activism was strong in South Africa. Today, citizens are largely disengaged and increasingly dependent on the government to provide everything." In response, the group argues that "citizens need to take ownership and ask themselves: What are we doing as citizens to become agents of change... to build the future that we envisioned at the dawn of our democracy?"

The report calls for a new "Citizens Charter" process that in effect re-imagines South Africa again as a land that truly belongs to all, black and white.

The idea is worth considering on this side of the ocean.

Harry C. Boyte is a Visiting Professor at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa and, in the US, Co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College, and a Senior Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

Both movements had profound moral aspects, but it is a mistake to see them as simply moral crusades. They embodied a down-to-earth citizen politics aiming to win over the broad middle of society.