Category Archives: current issues

Join us April 24th for Text, Talk, Act on Mental Health – Part II Electric Boogaloo

Posted on by
Reply

creating solutions

As you know, NCDD is part of the collaboration running the Creating Community Solutions national dialogue effort aimed at tackling mental health issues in our communities. We have been supporting the effort in many ways, including collaborating on the “Text, Talk, Act” nationwide text-enhanced dialogue last December.

We are pleased to announce that another installment of the Text, Talk, Act conversation will be taking place this April 24th.

The Text, Talk, Act to Improve Mental Health conversation will be an hour-long event that uses text messaging to get people talking about mental health and encourage them to take action. The hope is that through this event, young people (and not-so-young people!) can have a conversation with their peers and give voice to an issue that can otherwise be difficult for them to speak about.

Last year’s event was a big success, with an estimated 2,000 people participating in the conversation (600 phones). Participants described the event this way:

We encourage NCDD members–especially those of you based at universities and high schools–to participate in this important effort. On April 24th, you can dial in and participate in the conversation, or better yet, you can convene your own dialogue event on mental health and use the Text, Talk, Act event as a starting point for your own conversations. We would love to see NCDD members hosting their own conversations, and if you do, we ask that you register your event so that it can be listed on the Creating Community Solutions dialogue map.

It’s easy to get plugged into the event by following these simple steps:

  1. At any time on April 24th, gather 3-4 of your friends, family, classmates, students, and/or colleagues;
  2. Text “start” to 89800; and
  3. Receive polling and discussion questions via text messaging while having a face-to-face dialogue with your group.

Learn more by visiting www.creatingcommunitysolutions.org/texttalkact. You can also watch and share the informational video on the campaign.

We hope to see many of you join in this important nationwide conversation on April 24th!

TTA-II-Infographic

New Findings on Special Interests & Democracy

Posted on by
Reply

Sandy recommended an important article today from Journalist’s Resource that details the results of recent empirical research on special interest groups’ influence on our democracy. The findings suggesting that interests groups contribute more to polarization than previously thought offer significant reason for us to pause and reflect as engagement practitioners. This must-read article is below in full, and you can find the original here.

Extreme voices: Interest groups and the misrepresentation of issue publics

by John Wihbey

The public’s ignorance on issues of policy and politics is frequently lamented — and little understood. On tests of civic knowledge, the results are often dismaying, although research suggests that asking about local and national issues can yield different results. Some of this ignorance may have a socio-economic basis. There are access to knowledge and media access issues that make the cost of understanding prohibitive for some. But one broader and more charitable way of interpreting this ignorance is as follows: Citizens are busy, and issues that are not salient or relevant in their daily lives are “costly” — in terms of time and effort — to comprehend. A 2013 study in Political Communication, “Self-Interest and Attention to News Among Issue Publics,” confirms that “individuals are more likely to follow news that affects their self-interest” — what academics call “selective exposure.” Why learn the tax code when you only fill out a simple return each year? What real advantage is it to know the names of all nine Supreme Court justices? Why spend precious time on development issues in South Asia when there are experts to take care of that? That’s why we have representative government, the argument goes, and advocacy groups on every conceivable issue to help figure out the details and produce policy. The people who really care about a given issue will organize a response.

That’s one political theory. For this theory to work in practice, however, there must be a basic match between some larger segment of the people and the strong, narrowly focused groups who shape the agenda. Otherwise, highly motivated groups just distort democracy, pushing agendas far more extreme than others who care about the same issue would favor. For a half-century now, political scientists have studied the behavior of what are called “issue publics,” or the groups who care about discrete issues. Think of issue publics as concentric circles of increasing interest, with the innermost circle as the actual “pressure group.” Hovering in the background, there remains a long-running debate about whether certain “special interests” corrupt the system, or whether the contending of interests in the public arena actually constitutes the very essence of democracy.

A 2013 study published in Public Opinion Quarterly, “Extreme Groups: Interest Groups and the Misrepresentation of Issue Publics,” looks to empirical evidence to help settle some of these debates, testing whether members of motivated groups are “giving voice” to wider public communities or pushing their own unrepresentative agendas. The authors — political scientists Ryan L. Claassen of Kent State University and Stephen P. Nicholson of the University of California, Merced — state that the prior “literature on issue publics has optimistically concluded that widespread political ignorance is not a problem for democracy because those affected by specific issues are well informed, involved, and represented.”

To assess this, Claassen and Nicholson analyze results from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (CCES) — comprising a representative sample of 36,500 people — and look at the views of 10 groups and their issues: AARP and social security privatization; unions and minimum wage; the Sierra Club and global warming; NARAL and abortion; National Right to Life and abortion; the Christian Coalition and gay marriage; the VFW and the Iraq War; the American Legion and the Iraq War; the Parent Teacher Association/Organization and education; and the NRA and gun control. By sorting among the citizens surveyed who have a “characteristic that is relevant to the interest group’s policy area,” Claassen and Nicholson attempt to compare the relative strength of views between active group members and inactive members of specific issue publics.

The study’s findings include:

  • The data furnish “consistent evidence that group members hold policy attitudes that are distinct from their counterparts in a broader issue public.” Distortion is a very real problem. In fact, the evidence suggests that a “policymaker guided by interest group representation, rather than a more comprehensive survey of issue public opinion, might actually come down on the wrong side of an issue in most cases.”
  • “Taken together, the results suggest that the policy distortion produced by interest groups may ultimately stem from those who are different, and more extreme, in their opinions, self-selecting into groups.”
  • These dynamics likely tilt the wider direction of U.S. politics: “Opinion distortion wrought by interest group representation is likely to contribute to political polarization more generally. When policymakers rely on interest groups to communicate the positions of issue publics, they perceive greater polarization than they would if they had a more accurate measure of issue public opinion.”

“A uniformly active issue public would ensure that the voices of those for whom the issue matters most are heard,” Claassen and Nicholson conclude. “But issue publics are not uniformly active. More problematic, those active in interest groups hold positions that are more extreme than, and often at odds with, the positions of less active members within the issue public.”

Related research: The findings line up with studies on what scholars call the phenomenon of “group polarization,” whereby like-minded individuals who affiliate tend to become more extreme in their positions over time. Recent research on political polarization, which has dramatically increased in the United States in recent years, has focused on the deep roots of the phenomenon as well as potential solutions. Further, scholars are studying whether or not the Internet is magnifying these trends more broadly.

Original article URL:  http://journalistsresource.org/studies/politics/polarization/extreme-voices-interest-groups-misrepresentation-issue-publics?utm_source=JR-email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=JR-email#sthash.psRnh1at.dpuf

Improving Deliberation on Health Care

Posted on by
Reply

We wanted to share this thought-provoking commentary on a recent study on health care opinions conducted by our friends and partners at Public Agenda and the Kettering Foundation. As our nation continues to grapple with reforming our health care system, we in the engagement community have a special role to play in helping our communities decide how to tackle the big questions of reform. We hope you’ll take a moment to read the commentary below or find the original PA blog post here.

PublicAgenda-logoAs is evident in “Curbing Health Care Costs: Are Citizens Ready to Wrestle with Tough Choices?“, there are disconcerting contradictions and inconsistencies in Americans’ views on health care that indicate the need for continued public information and deliberation. Several of these contradictions are worth noting, as they may hold a key for developing successful approaches to engaging the public in policies and practices that enable quality care and controlled cost.

Disconcerting contradictions and inconsistencies in Americans’ views on health care indicate the need for continued public information and deliberation.

As the report notes in its introduction, the current cost crisis is certainly not new, yet public consciousness and a sense of urgency have begun emerging only in the past five years. The reasons are many: unlike all other consumer services, the majority of health-care costs are indirect, handled through a third-party payer. Out-of-pocket costs were historically an issue only for the poor, uninsured and underinsured. The rest of the nation remained fairly protected and blissfully unaware. But those days have passed.

Many of the findings in this study ring true with our own at the American Institutes for Research and our Center for Patient and Consumer Engagement. Recent deliberations across the country that we conducted for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found similar public interest in information, a variety of perspectives and a desire for a place at the table as solutions are found and implemented. As in the deliberations we conducted, the study participants walked in with both misinformation and an individual, rather than a social, perspective on costs.

It is no wonder that health consumers, who are informed more by direct marketing than science or policy analysis about health care, indicate in this study their belief that specialists and renowned hospitals justifiably cost more. Our own 2010 study found that most consumers believed that more care, newer care, and more expensive care was better. However, this study also shows the extent to which patients understand that doctors may order too many tests and treatments because they are financially motivated to do so.

These results, along with other similar findings, need to bolster the efforts now underway to engage consumers and patients in cost payment reform at a variety of levels.

There are many encouraging signs from this study, however, that need additional fostering. Our own experience echoes the experience in this study of witnessing a shift in perspective as participants become informed, an eagerness to learn more about the issue of health-care costs, and a sense of duty in “wrestling” with the complexities of health-care costs.

These results, along with other similar findings, need to bolster the efforts now underway — funded by both federal agencies and private foundations — to engage consumers and patients in cost payment reform at a variety of levels, ranging from cost-effectiveness conversations when deciding treatment with a doctor to engagement at clinics and hospitals considering new forms of payment systems, such as bundled payments.

Critical to the effort is the need for consumers to demand that cost and quality remain on the table together. Accountable Care Organizations, Patient-Centered Medical Homes, and a variety of new models for care are seeking both reduced costs and increased quality, and many are committed to involving patients and consumers in their efforts as the ultimate end-users of their work. We can only hope that a similar spirit of engagement can be found in public policy settings. Our patients have much to add to those discussions.

A Look Inside an NDN Conversation

Posted on by
Reply

Our friends at the Interactivity Foundation recently published reflections from Dennis Boyer on his experience convening a conversation on poverty as part of the National Dialogue Network - one of the winners of the 2012 NCDD Catalyst Awards. We thought it was a great look inside the NDN process and wanted to share it with you. You can read the full article below or find the original on the IF blog by clicking here.

NDN logo

The National Dialogue Network (NDN) spent over a year planning and organizing the initial phases of a national dialogue on a topic of public concern, relying on practitioners within the public participatory sphere to assist and comment. Cooperating practitioners assisted in selecting and framing the concern of the first NDN dialogue project: poverty.

I first heard of the effort at the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation(NCDD) conference in Seattle, Washington in the Fall of 2012. It was my intent from the outset to personally facilitate a small group discussion for the project. I had advocated for a national discussion of either climate impacts or the role of money in political campaigns, but was satisfied that the chosen concern of poverty would provide a useful experiential basis for national dialogue.

By late Summer of 2013 the NDN was actively soliciting practitioner participation in facilitating “Phase 3” of the project: local discussion of the materials developed on questions surrounding poverty and wealth. I facilitated one such discussion in Iowa County, Wisconsin, a rural area about an hour’s drive west of Madison. Three of my participants had prior experience in public discussions sponsored by the Interactivity Foundation (IF) and one of those had participated previously in public discussion of material produced by Kettering Foundation/National Issues Forum (KF/NIF).

The NDN discussion materials are very different than IF discussion reports or KF/NIF discussion guides. IF reports usually pose six to eight contrasting conceptual policy possibilities and KF/NIF guides usually focus on three somewhat more developed policy approaches that often reflect some alternatives and some middle ground. When asked how to outline how IF’s approach differs from KF/NIF, I usually explain IF’s possibilities as discussion starters close to the origin point of the deliberative continuum, with KF/NIF materials representing more concrete ideas somewhat further out that continuum. NDN materials, on the other hand, may represent a location even closer to the deliberative origin point, calling upon discussants to explore some very basic thinking that shapes public impressions of the topic of concern.

I retain a spirit of openness toward the usefulness of all three approaches in their respective roles and harbor a belief that robust democratic governance discussion might harness all three in turn—and follow with approaches further out the continuum.

NDN poverty materials encourage some very basic personal introspection and group interaction that more developed policy materials might not. It is often the case that public conversation neglects the feelings and values that go into our impressions of a policy concern. Many deliberative practitioners seek to restore civility to public conversation, but in doing so may make participants more circumspect. NDN materials represent a move away from detachment and passionless pondering.

In that sense they reminded me of IF President Dr. Jack Byrd’s developmental materials on “Fairness” and “Freedom and Responsibility”. My own facilitative experience with Dr. Byrd’s materials have allowed me to see how participant exploration of the personal and experiential side of basic ideas that underlie social and political relationships opens many participants up to deeper understanding of their own positions, the positions of others, and the opportunities for common ground. My NDN discussion experience also exhibited these positive benefits.

The Iowa County NDN discussion group was not very representative of national demographics. We were very white (with one American Indian participant), somewhat older, more likely to be married (all were), and somewhat more clustered in lower-middle income brackets. By the same token, there were some indicators of diversity: a good mix of partisans and independents, backgrounds in different faith communities and secular outlooks, and broad life experiences (foreign travel, volunteer service, etc). Half claimed to have experienced economic deprivation at some point in their lives. All had family members or friends who had resorted to food stamps or public assistance at some point.

NDN materials definitely helped these participants tap their empathetic reserves concerning poverty. In the course of the discussion there was increased recognition of how hard it is for those who have not experienced poverty to understand how debilitating it can be. At the same time they were also made more aware of just how different rural poverty is from urban poverty. Until fairly recently the civil society side of dealing with rural poverty had been relatively strong, with extended families, churches, and fraternal groups playing major roles. Many stories were told about personally benefitting from these informal, non-governmental networks. And there was much speculation about what had made rural poverty harsher over the years: industrialization of agriculture, decline of subsistence living skills, declining population and out-migration, and disappearance of manufacturing jobs in nearby urban areas.

One major discussion thread that occurred independent of the materials was the extent to which informal mechanisms to deal with poverty are still workable. Some thought that certain aspects of the subsistence economy could be revived in rural areas. Others thought the complexity and skill needs of an information economy made it very difficult for the rural poor to overcome their disadvantages.

The arguments over these cleavages were not, of course, resolved. But through the exploration of values, experiences, and goals there was a sense that we as a society could do a better job in dealing with poverty. Where I saw the common ground emerge was around the notion of “good outcomes” that most, if not all, participants could share. This seemed to represent a pulling back from political positions and a refocus on a widely held vision of “what could be.”

Raising Democracy from the (Un)Dead: A Year-End Reflection

Posted on by
Reply

GirouxThe end of the year is always a reflective time, and recently, I saw a truly inspiring Bill Moyers interview with cultural critic and scholar Henry A. Giroux, whose insightful critique of the state of democracy and reflections on what is possible for its future remind me why I originally wanted to work in public engagement. Though the book discussed in the interview, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, sets up a rather bleak premise, we at NCDD see our own vision and values in Giroux’s analysis of what democracy could be like – if we work for it. The interview is deep and rich with insight, and we highly recommend that you give it a look.

I’ve pulled out a few key insights that Giroux shares below, but you can watch the full (fairly long) interview on that originally aired on Moyers & Company by clicking here or read the full transcript of the interview here.

The Crisis in Democracy

From the beginning of the exchange, Giroux’s belief in the importance of real democracy comes through loud and clear:

Moyers: There’s a great urgency in your recent books and in the essays you’ve been posting online, a fierce urgency, almost as if you are writing with the doomsday clock ticking. What accounts for that?

Giroux: Well, for me democracy is too important to allow it to be undermined in a way in which every vital institution that matters from the political process to the schools to the inequalities that, to the money being put into politics, I mean, all those things that make a democracy viable are in crisis.

And the problem is the crisis… should be accompanied by a crisis of ideas, [the problem is] that the stories that are being told about democracy are really about the swindle of fulfillment. The swindle of fulfillment is what the reigning elite, in all of their diversity, now tell the American people, if not the rest of the world: that democracy is an excess. [Democracy] doesn’t really matter anymore, that we don’t need social provisions, we don’t need the welfare state, that the survival of the fittest is all that matters, that in fact society should mimic those values in ways that suggest a new narrative.

That narrative, Giroux continues, offers us “the most fraudulent definition of what a democracy should be,” and it is encompassed in “a vicious set of assumptions” which include

…the notion that profit making is the essence of democracy, the notion that economics is divorced from ethics, the notion that the only obligation of citizenship is consumerism, the notion that the welfare state is a pathology, that any form of dependency basically is disreputable and needs to be attacked… How do you get a discourse governing the country that seems to suggest that anything public… [even] public engagement, is a pathology?

Many of us have met resistance or been discouraged in this work because of that discourse of “engagement as pathology.” In many venues civic venues and levels of government, we find those who are skeptical of efforts to involve average people in government and decision making and want to leave things up to experts and professionals instead. This skepticism seems to be based on the internalization of many of our officials and institutions of the “vicious set of assumptions” about democracy the Giroux describes. In far too many cases, especially when it comes to finances, we hear arguments that claim government couldn’t possibly solve difficult problems and involve the public at the same time.

Yet we are involved in this line of work because we know that everyday people working together and forming real relationships is the heart of a robust democracy, and we are committed to helping that work and those relationships thrive. But as Giroux’s “zombie” metaphor suggest, the politics we see today are not those that nurture a healthy civic life:

Moyers: My favorite of your many books is this one, “Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.” Why that metaphor, “zombie” politics?

Giroux: Because it’s a politics that’s informed by the machinery of social and civil death… The zombie metaphor is a way to sort of suggest that democracy is losing its oxygen… It’s losing its spirit. It’s losing its ability to speak to itself in ways that would span the human spirit and the human possibility for justice and equality…

[Zombie politics are] a death machine because, in my estimation, it does everything it can to kill any vestige of a robust democracy. It turns people into zombies, people who basically are so caught up with surviving that they become like the walking dead, you know, they lose their sense of agency…

This lost sense of agency in our politics and civic life is real. We all know people who explain their non-participation in civic life or public decision making processes because they think that nothing will change, that the system is too corrupt, or otherwise have the general feeling that “participating won’t make a difference, so why bother?”  That lost sense of agency – and the lack of visible examples where small groups of average citizens do make a difference – is a big part of what NCDD and our field is working to shift every day as we engage and empower average people.

But it’s more than a lost feeling of agency. There has also been an actual erosion of what we know as democracy in our country.

I think that it is crucial for our field to reflect on and take seriously what Giroux is saying here about what he calls “casino capitalism” – our very economic system – as an active threat to democracy. He warns that this casino capitalism

…doesn’t just believe it can control the economy. It believes that it can govern all of social life. That’s different.

That means it has to have its tentacles into every aspect of everyday life. Everything from the way schools are run to the way prisons are outsourced to the way the financial services are run to the way in which people have access to health care, it’s an all-encompassing, it seems to me, political, cultural, educational apparatus.

And it basically has nothing to do with expanding the meaning and the substance of democracy itself.

[Casino capitalism] believes that social bonds not driven by market values are basically bonds that we should find despicable….we have an economic system that in fact has caused a crisis in democracy. What we haven’t addressed is the underlying consensus that informs that crisis.

In my opinion, Giroux is right: the drive to treat more and more sectors of society as markets that must create ever higher profits has encroached on so many venues of civic and political life that it has pushed the public out of spaces that are essential for real democratic governance. So we are left with a zombie democracy, complete with “people” – that is, corporations – that don’t have souls and can’t feel pain, but can and do hold more sway in our elections and government policy than flesh and blood citizens. And this creates a vicious cycle that feeds the real and perceived loss of civic agency.

Our Opportunity

One of the challenges of overcoming the “machinery of social and civic death” that Giroux lays out is the challenge of finding ways to “develop cultural apparatuses that can offer a new vocabulary for people, where questions of freedom and justice and the problems that we’re facing can be analyzed in ways that reach mass audiences in accessible language.”

In many ways, this challenge lands squarely in our lap as a individuals and as a professional field. The way I see it, a field like ours has unique potential to initiate momentum that can reverse this shift and, in a way, raise politics from the “undead” and keep our democracy from being completely bought out by casino capitalism. But this won’t happen by accident, we have to intentionally decide to shift that momentum.

The work of dialogue, deliberation, and public engagement is about connecting people to each other and their visions for their communities in real ways. Much of it is an outgrowth of the humanistic values and spirit of democracy, what Giroux calls “the human possibility for justice and equality.”

And in the coming year, it seems more important to me than ever that we reflect on how to make questions of justice, freedom, and equality more central in our work.

This may force us to struggle with concepts of neutrality and norms of professionalism that animate parts of our field, as talk of justice, freedom, and equality often naturally tend toward advocacy. But in my opinion, we should be struggling with ourselves about what it means for professionals in roles and work such as ours to also advocate for democracy itself, because if something doesn’t change, we may not have much of a genuine democracy left to work for. Only by continuing to ask ourselves tough questions can we find productive ways of imagining what it might look like for our field to play a role in staving off a zombie apocalypse for our democracy.

These questions, in Giroux’s mind, are posed by the actual state of affairs we are in.

We have to acknowledge the realities that bear down on us, but it seems to me that if we really want to live in a world and be alive with compassion and justice, then we need educated hope. We need a hope that recognizes the problems and doesn’t romanticize them, and also recognizes the need for vision, for social organizations, for strategies. We need institutions that provide the formative culture that give voice to those visions and those ideas.

Giroux adds that what is missing now ”…are those alternative public spheres, those cultural formations – what I call a formative culture – that can bring people together and give those ideas, embody them in both a sense of hope, of vision and the organizations and strategies that would be necessary… to reconstruct a sense of where politics can go.”

I believe that NCDD and the many practitioners, organizations, and indeed the movement that we represent can be thought of as the kind of formative culture that Giroux describes, and that we are capable of building the kind of institutions he calls for – those that can help people work through questions of justice, freedom, and democracy in our society in a way that is accessible, that will give loud voice to visions for a better future, and that can reconstruct a sense of where politics can go.

Though we clearly have a long way to go, I think that we still have reason to keep a firm grasp on this “educated hope” – hope that recognizes challenges and takes them seriously, but that feeds the growth of visions and strategies to create the changes we need.

As we transition into 2014, I invite you to reflect with me on how we can make this work more about developing strategies for confronting and overcoming the real threats to democracy posed by zombie politics and casino capitalism. I also invite you to share in the hope that we can actually do it.

Giroux leaves us with a vision for what is needed for that change: “The real changes are going to come in creating movements that are longstanding, that are organized, that basically take questions of governance and policy seriously and begin to spread out and become international. That is going to have to happen.”

Here’s to making it happen. Happy New Year.

Birmingham Joins Mental Health Conversation with NIFI

Posted on by
Reply

In addition today’s exciting news about the Text, Talk, Act project, we are pleased to share more good news about the Creating Community Solutions effort. This post comes from our partners at the National Issues Forums Institute, sharing the recent announcement that they will be helping the city of Birmingham, AL engage its public in mental health issues. Read more below, or find the original post here. 

NIF-logoOn November 1, 2013, Birmingham City Mayor William Bell hosted a press conference where he announced the launch of a public forum series on the topic of mental health and mental illness. Others who spoke at the press conference included Bill Muse, president of the National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI); Stephanie McCladdie, regional administrator for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSHA); and other Birmingham area mental health officials.

The following is excerpted from Alabama’s 13 WVTM-TV website posting about the press conference:

“Birmingham is one of ten cities around the country to answer President Obama’s call for a national conversation about mental health with a broad based dialogue to discuss how mental health issues affect our communities and to discuss topics related to the mental health of our young people,” according to a news release from the city. “These discussions will lead to action plans designed to improve mental health programs and services for our families, schools and communities. The discussions, entitled Mental Health: What Are The Options?, will take place in the form of ten forums in Birmingham. Data collected from the forums will be provided to SAMSHA and aid in the further formation of programming in the Birmingham area.”

This Birmingham, Alabama citywide forums project is part of a large, nationwide conversation project about mental health and mental illness called Creating Community Solutions that was launched with a White House press conference in June, 2013.

More information about the nationwide project, how to join in the national conversation, and free resources and materials to use in local communities for conversations about mental health and mental illness, can be found at the project website at www.creatingcommunitysolutions.org.

The original NIFI post plus other links can be found here: www.nifi.org/news/news_detail.aspx?itemID=25207&catID=23664.

Join us for “Text, Talk, Act” on Mental Health

Posted on by
Reply

On December 5th, we encourage all NCDD members to participate in the first-ever, nationwide text-enabled dialogue on mental health. All you need is 1 hour, 4 people, and at least 1 phone.

TXTTLKACT_Infographic

This is a project of Creating Community Solutions – a collaborative effort led by the National Institute for Civil Discourse, the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, AmericaSpeaks, Everyday Democracy, National Issues Forums Institute, and the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (with many, many partner organizations signed on — including some of you!). We’re excited to be experimenting with the use of text messaging technology to help groups of young people and adults, all over the country, get together in small groups for one-hour discussions on mental health.

Sign up today at bit.ly/texttalkact, and think about whether you can get your university, your classroom, your community group, your neighbors, or others involved in Text Talk Act!

And please share this infographic widely to help us promote the event! The infographic was created by Andy Fluke — NCDD’s Creative Director.

Small groups of 4-5 people will gather together for the event. Each group will need a cell phone and will receive polling & discussion questions and process suggestions via text message.

Results from the live polling questions will be tabulated almost instantly, so that people will be able to see how participants across the country responded. The discussion questions will provide a safe space for candid dialogue on mental health, one of the most critical and misunderstood public issues we face. The process will also provide an opportunity for participants to discuss actions they can take to strengthen mental health on their campuses and in their communities.

Reflections on Technology from Davenport

Posted on by
Reply

This post comes via the Gov 2.0 Watch blog, which is a project the Davenport Institute (an NCDD organizational member). You can read the post below or find the original here. We think a lot about using technology to enhance democracy here at NCDD, and we wanted to share this post that reminds that technology can be used for good and for ill. It’s a tool, not a panacea.

DavenportInst-logo

Technology and Democracy

While technology offers many interesting possibilities for strengthening democracy, it is important not to get so caught up in the promise that we forget technology is a tool rather than a solution. Comparing and contrasting surveillance practices in China and the U.S., Kentaro Toyama argues in The Atlantic that technology only reinforces “underlying political forces” already present in a society, which may or may not be democratic:

What both Chinese censorship and American surveillance show is that there is nothing inherently democratizing about digital networks, at least not in the political sense. Far-reaching communication tools only make it easier to impose constraints on the freedom of expression or the right to privacy. Never before have Chinese censors had it so easy in identifying subversive voices, and never before has the NSA been able to eavesdrop on the private communications of so many people.

Toyama raises interesting questions about the relationship between communications technology, democracy, and political freedoms:

Many of us take advantage of online government services, and electronic voting machines can streamline elections. So, the digital can support democracy. But, the reason why the Internet seems “democratizing” in America is exactly because America is a democracy. We have free speech online because we have free speech offline, not the other way around…What does this mean for anyone working to spread or strengthen democracy? It means that focusing on new technological tools is far less important than focusing on the underlying politics.

You can read the full article here.

Two years ago, Toyama wrote about technology’s role in widespread social changes, with reference to uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen that sparked what came to be known as the Arab Spring. You can read this earlier article here.

Contributor: Benjamin Peterson, Pepperdine School of Public Policy, MPP Candidate ’15

Opinion, Choices, and Health Care Reform

Posted on by
Reply

The insightful post below from our friends at Public Agenda is a great piece that puts the government shutdown into the context of public dialogue and deliberation, highlighting the need for much more of it around health care issues. You can read the full post below or find the original post on PA’s blog by clicking here.

PublicAgenda-logo

We Must Help, Not Hinder, the Public on Understanding Health Care Reform

The argument to delay implementation of the Affordable Care Act, which led to this week’s government shutdown, is partly rooted in the assertion that the public does not support the law. Yet public opinion of the health care law is not as simplistic as some members of Congress (of both parties), and even the media, have painted it. Before we continue basing decisions that have real consequences on opinion regarding the Affordable Care Act, it’s worth taking a deeper look at how the public is really thinking about this issue.

Many of the recent polls, when taken together, suggest that the public is confused and unclear about many aspects of the Affordable Care Act. In the most recent health tracking poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 51 percent of respondents said they don’t have enough information to understand how the law will impact them and their families. When asked to provide, in their own words, the one question they would most like to have answered to help them understand this impact, many focused on very basic information:

“Will the medical insurance be free or will I have to pay?”

“Can you just put it in plain laymen language so we can understand what you’re doing for us?”

“How is my care going to change?”

Furthermore, while most recent polls suggest the public does not support the Affordable Care Act as a whole, when the law is broken down into its respective elements, they support what’s in it. For example Continue reading →

Report Back on Mental Health in Kansas City

Posted on by
Reply

As you may know, NCDD is involved in the Creating Community Solutions mental health project, and we hope you will take a moment to read a recent update that our partners at AmericaSpeaks shared on their blog.

creating solutions

On Saturday, September 21, the Creating Community Solutions effort of the National Dialogue on Mental Health hosted a successful all-day town meeting in Kansas City, Missouri. The meeting was part of the collaborative effort lead by the National Institute for Civil Discourse. It was organized and managed by a veteran of dialogue and deliberation, Jen Wilding, with the support of a small but dedicated team and a large and diverse planning committee.

The Mayors of both Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas opened and closed the event and spent the entire day participating. U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius also helped open the event that generated lots of good news coverage:

Kansas City Start Article
Fox 4 News Video

Like the events before it in Sacramento and Albuquerque, the organizers successfully recruited a large and diverse audience of 360 participants with pretty good representation of the community along lines of age and race. And like previous meetings, higher educated people were over represented, but this is hard to overcome given the number of health professionals involved.

Click here for a full report on the meeting including data about the participants and the outcomes of all the table discussions.

It was a great pleasure to work with the team in Kansas City to help them produce an AmericaSpeaks 21st Century Town Meeting and support the on-going National Dialogue on Mental Health.