Category Archives: stories

Innovative Journalism Can Take Public Conversation to Scale

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We have barely begun to use major media and journalism – both old and new forms – to scale up the impact of powerful public conversations about public issues beyond the rooms and online forums where those conversations take place. Our societies urgently need innovations and development in the area of public conversation journalism in order to bring collective intelligence and community wisdom into our policy-making and into the everyday activities of ordinary citizens and organizations.

In this post I want to highlight the most remarkable public conversation journalism I’ve ever seen and explore some of the kinds of work public conversation journalists do and could do.

A few weeks ago 122 members of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation created, edited, and rated 95 ideas about what they’d like to see and do in their national conference in October 2014 (and you can see the results here). To my surprise and delight, an item I contributed ended up in third place:

Explore the best examples we can find where major media have partnered with dialogue and deliberation efforts to actually “scale up” public dialogue and deliberation to the regional, state, and national levels – or which contained lessons and best practices to help us do that in the future.

Thanks to these results I’ve decided it is finally time to share a major research project I’ve been working on over the last 15 years. I posted the last pieces of that work online last month. So now a major new resource is available – a thorough examination of what I believe is the most potent example of media-sponsored public conversation on public issues in North America and possibly the world. This initiative – all but unknown even to specialists in the field – was undertaken in 1991 by Maclean’s magazine, Canada’s leading newsweekly in collaboration with Canadian TV. The resources now available online include the entire 40 pages of Maclean’s coverage, the complete CTV documentary video, detailed interviews with four of the major players, and my own descriptions and analyses (see www.co-intelligence.org/Macleans1991Experiment.html).

What Maclean’s and Canadian TV did

These two major media innovators convened 12 Canadians whose extreme diversity reflected the diversity of their deeply divided country. They then charged these ordinary folks with articulating a shared vision for Canada. They were given two and a half days to do it. Maclean’s provided a team of leading-edge negotiators from the Harvard Negotiation Project – led by Roger Fisher, co-author of the classic negotiation handbook Getting to Yes – to help them.

The intense conversations that resulted were remarkable all by themselves. But the coverage provided by Maclean’s and Canadian TV was unprecedented and, I believe, has never been surpassed in the quarter of a century since. It generated widespread lively conversation around the country for months – and awards for Maclean’s.

Despite the fact that it happened more than two decades ago, I find this remarkable event teeming with potential lessons for all of us who want to “scale up” public dialogue and deliberation. We know that that can’t be achieved by centrally organizing millions of people into high quality conversations; there just aren’t the resources for doing that. We need some kind of catalyst that can trigger hundreds of self-organized, spontaneous conversations, including some with potential for real impact.

Maclean’s and Canadian TV provide important clues. They designed their coverage in ways that closed the gap between the small facilitated conversation and its mass audience. They didn’t provide the usual coverage to be witnessed by passive observers keeping up with the latest news. Their coverage was actively, intensely engaging. Like reality TV today, the Maclean’s/Canadian TV coverage drew millions of readers and viewers into intimate and often dramatic interactions among twelve radically different Canadians who included a few people much like themselves as well as others that they strongly disagreed with. Because of the brilliant design of both the interactions and the coverage, these journalists showed us how to vicariously engage an entire country in a higher form of conversation and a renewed sense of political possibility.

As I noted in my book Empowering Public Wisdom, a major unlearned lesson in this effort was that Maclean’s and Canadian TV didn’t repeat this process every year after that. If such a journalistic engagement of the entire country in high quality conversation were to be done on a regular basis, any country doing it would find itself thinking more clearly and creatively about its affairs than it had ever done before and creating a political force field which would profoundly influence politicians, news media, educators, businesses, and government decision-makers, as well as ordinary citizens.

Once it became part of the political culture, such collective thoughtfulness and due attention to diverse views and information would make all the difference in the world. That was, after all, the dream of democracy in the first place: an informed, conversant citizenry engaged together in crafting their collective lives and future.

The fact that we have today new ways to do that – conversational technologies as well as digital and telecommunications technologies – makes it even more important to understand what pioneers in the field did that we can now build on to succeed beyond their wildest dreams.

Public conversation journalism

The field of journalism – its theory, practice, and business models – is in upheaval.

The primary source of this disruption – the Internet – is widely recognized: Journalists, who were once the gatekeepers of news and current information, have been bypassed by millions of bloggers, citizen journalists, and community and issue activists using the web and modern communications technology to share what’s going on and what they think about it. This explosion of participatory information-sharing has many blessings for democracy. But it also has limitations, as many valuable journalistic standards have been ignored on the way to greater freedom and participation. The field is now rife – or perhaps ripe – with angst and creative conversation and experimentation. Among the most creative efforts to engage with this issue is Journalism That Matters, catalyzed for over a decade by NCDDer Peggy Holman and a handful of colleagues.

To this rich transformational soup of modern journalism I want to add one more ingredient – an innovative manifestation of journalism’s time-honored contribution to informed citizen engagement in a vibrant democracy: I call it “public conversation journalism” – journalism that has a professional commitment to do things like these:

  • Report on public conversations on public issues – before, during, and after – as legitimate community news.
  • Sponsor major public conversations on public issues, like Maclean’s did.
  • Welcome op eds that promote or usefully comment on public conversations about public issues.
  • Profile public conversation participants from various angles including who they are (to entice audience identification with them and thus trigger a vicarious experience of their views, their passions, their transformations) as well as their personal human interest stories and their infectious enthusiasm.
  • Profile the issues being discussed (background and framing) to deepen and contextualize the public conversation.
  • Provide multi-media coverage (print, video, even journalistic drama like Multiple Viewpoint Drama and Playback Theater).
  • Feature conversations that include well chosen, inclusive diversity such as we find in the Maclean’s initiative, Citizens Juries, WIsdom Councils, and Deliberative Polling (which convene cross-sections or random selected members of a population) and/or in “whole system” stakeholder conversations such as Consensus Councils and Future Search Conferences.
  • Provide truly transpartisan coverage – that is, coverage that includes a broad range of perspectives that move the viewer or reader beyond the reductionist, obsolete, and deeply adversarial standard of “both sides”.
  • Cover the very real drama of citizens problem-solving together, that may include but goes way beyond “the debate”.
  • Help the public understand the character and dynamics of different kinds of conversation – productive and unproductive, creative and uncreative, informed and uninformed, vibrant and restrained, diverse citizens and “the usual suspects”, colaborative and adversarial, etc.
  • Cover – and even provide forums and structure for – the social media generated around quality dialogue and deliberation.
  • Cover the actual results of public conversations on public issues – the immediate and longer term impacts on participants, communities, decision-makers, etc. – and publicize when good public conversational work gets taken seriously or ignored.
  • Cover efforts to institutionalize public deliberations, to build a “culture of dialogue”, to promote citizen engagement, etc.

I hope journalists and professionals in the fields of citizen dialogue and deliberation and public engagement engage in thinking together about how to bring about this powerful new kind of collaboration among themselves and their colleagues. I hope to hear from you about earlier and current experiments in such collaboration, including any details we can all learn from and questions and challenges you now face. I have heard of some work in Australia along these lines, and a number of people have noted that South Africa’s Mt. Fleur scenario initiative – which, intriguingly, happened one year after the Maclean’s initiative – included remarkable publicity by major news media.

There is SO much to learn and try out here…

Five Strategies to Include Community in Collective Impact

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As of late, our field and NCDD specifically has been looking more closely at “collective impact” models of creating change in our communities, and we saw an article from Rich Harwood, an NCDD organizational member and president of the Harwood Institute, on that theme recently that was worth sharing.

Rich’s article looked at the way that, though collective impact strategies are becoming more popular, the involvement of local communities is often left out of our thinking on how we create collective impact: “My chief concern here is that we sometimes leave robust notions of community out of collective impact discussions and implementation efforts. At times, the very nature of community seems like an afterthought, even a nuisance.” 

He says that rather than imposing collective impact strategies on communities, we have to ensure that the community and its civic culture are part of the calculations for how to succeed. What is civic culture? Rich says,  

Civic culture is how a community works—how trust forms, why and how people engage with one another, what creates the right enabling environment for change to take root and accelerate. It directly contributes to the degree of readiness and appetite for change among leaders, groups, and everyday people.

Each community has its own civic culture, and to make progress, it’s important that everyone understands and develops it.

As part of making sure that civic culture is factored into the ways we approach change, Rich describes what he says are five characteristics of a community’s civic culture that effective collective impact efforts have to address.

The first characteristic is community ownership:

…the success of collective impact depends on genuine ownership by the larger community, and that starts with placing value on both expert knowledge and public knowledge, which can come only from authentically engaging the community.

The starting point is to determine shared aspirations for a community and to know the challenges people face in moving toward those aspirations.

The second is selecting strategies that “fit” the community:

…organizationally aligned strategies will produce measurable progress when teams base them on data, evidence-based decision-making, best practices, and other inputs. But it is important to not confuse a commitment to rigorous analysis with developing strategies that actually fit a local context.

Collective impact efforts should actively use public knowledge to drive the definition of a common agenda and to understand what strategies are relevant to the community.

Third, it’s important that collective impact strategies create a sustainable enabling environment:

…it is critical to create the right enabling environment in a community. This means focusing on the underlying conditions in a community that allow change to occur—and for the community itself to change how it works together.

…These include different layers of leadership in a community, norms for interaction, the presence of multiple groups that span boundaries and bring people together, conscious community conversation, and networks for learning and innovation.

The fourth characteristic is a focus on impact and belief:

…the intense focus on impact alone is not enough to create that desired goal. Another necessary ingredient is belief… Belief, after all, is that intangible factor that prompts and prods people to step forward and engage… Belief arises when people feel they are part of something bigger than themselves. How we structure collective impact efforts can either enlarge or diminish people’s belief.

And finally, Rich writes that collective impact efforts that genuinely involves community have a story:

…traditional aspects of communications strategies are not adequate for addressing the challenge that narratives play in a community. This is the story the community tells about itself. And it is this story that helps shape people’s mindsets, attitudes, behaviors, and actions.

We took a lot from Rich’s insights and think that as we strive to innovate and change the way we engage with our communities for the better, keeping these five dynamics in mind will help us to do that better.

The full version of Rich’s article was published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review and we encourage you to read the full article, which you can find at www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/putting_community_in_collective_impact.

The Importance of Completed Conversations

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This reflective piece was submitted by NCDD member Katy Byrne, MFT Psychotherapist, columnist, radio host, and public speaker, via our Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have news you want to share with the NCDD network? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

“We live in a time when there are so many sophisticated means for communication: email, telephone, fax, yet it is very difficult for individuals, groups, and nations to communicate with each other. We feel we can’t use words to speak, and so we use bombs to communicate.” – Thich Nhat Hanh, Calming The Fearful Mind.

Hairballs aren’t easy.

Why do we leave, abandon, disappear, walk away or never talk to someone again?

Those silly fights or sudden break ups, what’s that about? Twenty, thirty, forty years and vamoose… gone. What‘s up with that? Sometimes it’s a wife, a sister, a friend who just blows up and loses it. “Hey, what happened?” we ask ourselveswhile reading multiple emails with words in black and white.

Some of the past loves of our lives were important .Some died and we lost the opportunity for final closure. A few had unhappy endings. But don’t many of us have a couple past relations that were torn apart like a ripped sleeve?

As we age, don’t we want to be at peace with old friends or family? Don’t we want to feel complete with loved ones when we die? But it takes courage to reach out before it’s too late. It’s not easy to listen to unpleasant feedback or to risk speaking up.

I usually fear folks who yell or blame me. So, I excuse myself, “nuff of that…I’ve been around the bend and I don’t want to go there again.” Is it a way of letting myself off the hook? Or, is it time to let go? If I don’t step up to difficult conversations, who will?

Sometimes I still felt this edgy, lonely feeling inside about some people I cared for
who disappeared or maybe it was me who left them. So, what to do?

Hey, I wrote a book about the courage to speak up, but I have a helluva time doing it myself sometimes. I was writing about the importance of communication and self-responsibility, so I knew that I might have a part in these separations.

I wanted to risk knowing whatever I could about relationship rifts. It was for my own healing but also for the world – since splitting off from others and anger seems to be the problem of the planet. So I started a campaign.

With one old friend all it took was a phone call and we’re fine now. Later, I was a “wuss” with a relative and sent a hand-written letter using my skills to dwell on intention and wishes. I never heard back.

Another person didn’t want to talk about our break-up because she’s into meditation and love. I thought “what’s love got to do with it?” No, really I thought bridging gaps was love.

Anyway, to an old colleague, I said I didn‘t like doing this on email. Could we talk by phone? She insisted on computerized hairballs! So, I tried it, reluctantly.

Umpteen emails later we had different views of our split. She insisted it was nothing personal… just a new stage of life. I felt better that at least we “talked” about it.

Another acquaintance claimed he was just busy. I said, “Do you think there might be some other teensy, eensy thing, since I don’t hear from you anymore?” Bless his heart, he did finally send a loooooong  email saying he was surprised to find that even though it was twelve years later, sure ‘nuff… he did have unexpressed feelings but needed more time to sort through them. It kinda left the hairball up in the air, but at least I practiced bravery.

One old pal surprised me. He came over for coffee after my call and we told the whole truth- judgments, different perceptions and all. We talked it through and ended laughing with deep belly laughs– hairballs gone!

This old world is so full of blame and separation; can’t we do our part to mend it? What matters most?

John Donohue says: “Your way of life has so little to do with what you feel and love in the world but because of the many demands on you and responsibilities you have, you feel helpless to gather yourself; you are dragged in so many directions away from true belonging.”

I believe completion is better, can it always occur? Maybe not. But, do we have the courage to try?

Featured D&D Story: Strategic Planning for Sustainability in Dauphin Island

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Today we’d like to feature a great example of dialogue and deliberation in action, Strategic Planning for Sustainability in Dauphin Island. This mini case study was submitted by Dr. R. Warren Flint of Five E’s Unlimited via NCDD’s Dialogue Storytelling Tool (add YOUR dialogue story today!).

ShareYourStory-sidebarimageTitle of Project:
Strategic Planning for Sustainability in Dauphin Island

Description
I was contracted to design and facilitate a long-term strategy and implementation plan (more here) to create a more resilient community able to balance economic development with environmental protection and conservation. I facilitated planning meetings that included the public, the Town Planning Comm., the U.S. EPA’s Mobile Bay NEP, the NOAA Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Program, and state/county agencies toward designing a strategic planning process to achieve sustainable community goals, adhering to NEPA guidelines and the protection of threatened species. I assisted the community in identifying how strategic planning process could better inform the Island’s Comprehensive Plan and enhance future community resiliency.

The results of this strategic planning process emphasized major issues such as water conservation, community behavior changes related to climate change strategies, including energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions, eco-tourism programs, rising sea level, protection of pristine coastal environments, diverse land-use strategies, and the general assessment of best uses for existing community assets (capital) to achieve long-term community resiliency.

The project planning activities developed both short- and long-term strategies for these issues and more. This project was recognized as a finalist in the International Association of Public Participation’s (IAP2) 2009 Project of the Year Award. The international recognition by IAP2 on pages 8 and 67 in the above linked report acknowledged the diversity of environmental, social, and economic issues addressed, as well as the project’s promotion of the IAP2 Core Values in public participation.

Which dialogue and deliberation approaches did you use or borrow heavily from?
Open Space / Unconference, Study Circles, World Cafe, Appreciative Inquiry, Public Conversations Project dialogue, Technology of Participation approaches, Future Search, Charrettes and Deliberative Polling

DauphinIsland

What was your role in the project?
Project director; Primary facilitator; Process design specialist

What issues did the project primarily address?

  • Economic issues
  • Education
  • Environment
  • Planning and development
  • Science and technology

Lessons Learned

  • Important to employ multiple ways of engagement for the different publics in community.
  • Make sure an implementation group is in place before project of planning is completed.
  • Keep reminding stakeholders of the role of sustainability in all discussions for actions.
  • Public engagement includes the promise that the public’s contribution will influence the decision.
  • Public participation seeks input from participants in designing how they participate.
  • Public participation must provide participants with the information they need to participate in a meaningful way.

Where to learn more about the project: www.eeeee.net

Archive of March’s Confab on Everyday Democracy

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EvDem LogoLast month, as part of NCDD’s Confab Call series, we spent time with the staff of one of NCDD’s founding members, Everyday Democracy, exploring what Everyday Democracy has learned over the years, through their close work with community partners, about how to create dialogue and change.

We’re happy to share a recording of the the webinar, now available on the Everyday Democracy website, presented by Malik Russell, Everyday Democracy’s Communications Director, Carolyne Abdullah, their Director of Community Assistance, and Rebecca Reyes, Communications Manager.

More about Everyday Democracy…

Everyday Democracy helps communities build their own capacity for inclusive dialogue and positive change. Everyday Democracy’s ultimate aim is to create a national civic infrastructure that supports and values everyone’s voice and participation.

Because structural racism and other structural inequities affect communities everywhere, Everyday Democracy helps community groups use an “equity lens” in every phase of dialogue and change – coalition building, messaging, recruitment, issue framing, facilitation, and linking the results of their dialogues to action and change. They provide advice, training and flexible how-to resources on a wide range of issues – including poverty, racial equity, education, building strong neighborhoods, community-police relations, violence, early childhood, and community planning.

Look over the resources in the EvDem/Study Circles tag in the NCDD Resource Center to get a sense of the breadth and depth of work these folks do!

Update from Participatory Budgeting Campaign in CA

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We are always happy to hear good news from our partners with the Participatory Budgeting Project, an NCDD organizational member, and we wanted to share an update on their campaign in California from the PBP blog. We encourage you to read about how PB is growing below, or find the original post by clicking here.

PBP-logoLast October 2013, PBP began a year-long partnership with one of California’s foremost foundations to promote participatory budgeting (PB) across the state. Through our work with The California Endowment (TCE), PBP is supporting local advocacy for PB in the foundation’s Building Healthy Communities (BHC) program sites around the state. BHC is a 10-year initiative focused on empowering residents in 14 low-income California communities to eradicate health inequalities through community organizing and policy change. In each of these communities, PB presents a unique opportunity to channel public resources toward services and infrastructure that promote health and foster community economic development.

PB in Schools: Proposition 30 and the Local Control Funding Formula

Since PBP began working with Building Healthy Communities, a major shift in education funding in CA has presented an unexpected but promising opportunity for PB throughout the state. Through a new statewide tax passed by voters in 2012, millions of new education dollars are now flowing to California’s school districts, along with greater control over funds at the local level and new requirements to engage local stakeholders in the budget process.

C4J Workshop_California

In response to interest from advocates around the state, we held a webinar on this new Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) and international models of PB in schools and school districts for over 60 participants, with representatives from the California Teachers Association, Californians for Justice, and EdTrust West. PBP is now working with BHC groups and other community allies in Oakland, Sacramento, and Los Angeles to explore options for moving PB forward in schools.

In the picture to the right, youth leaders and staff from Californians for Justice rank project ideas at a PB demo workshop in Oakland. Participants discussed projects to support student health and learning in Oakland and San Jose school districts.

PB in Cities: Long Beach, San Diego, Richmond

In addition to developing new PB models, we’re also supporting BHC groups in Long Beach, Richmond, and San Diego in launching new citywide and district-based processes. In November, PBP staff and Chicago Alderman Joe Moore went to Long Beach for a speaking tour, including a City Council briefing, several strategic meetings and a community form (pictured on the left). Since then, three candidates running for Long Beach City Council have endorsed PB, and a current council member, James Johnson, held a PB workshop with his constituents in February.

Right across the bridge from Vallejo, the City of Richmond is considering a youth PB process in conjunction with the city’s Youth Council. PBP will be leading a workshop at the Richmond Youth Summit on April 19. In San Diego, BHC groups active with the Community Budget Alliance, coordinated by the Center for Policy Initiatives, have also been meeting with their council members and Planning Department staff over the last few months to build support for PB. They’re looking at both district funds and CDBG funds as possible pots of money for PB.

Stay tuned for upcoming PB events in Long Beach, Richmond, and San Diego!

PB Conference

We’re now planning the first PB conference to take place in California, in the Bay Area in September 2014. Our 3rd annual international PB conference will bring together practitioners and advocates from across the state, country, and world. See more info.

Join us in expanding PB in California!

If you live, work or attend school in any of California’s 14 BHC sites and want to see PB in your community, contact Ginny Browne, Project Coordinator, at ginny@participatorybudgeting.org.

Featured D&D Story: Respectful Conversations Project

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Today we’d like to feature a great example of dialogue and deliberation in action, the Respectful Conversations Project. This mini case study was submitted by Jerad Morey, Communications and Program Manager of the Minnesota Council of Churches via NCDD’s new Dialogue Storytelling Tool (add YOUR dialogue story today!).

Title of Project:
RespectfulConvProjectRespectful Conversations Project

Description
When the state of Minnesota was facing a ballot question defining marriage, people were divided. Churches found themselves in sharp internal disagreements that mirrored those in the broader community. Fearful of the end result of a year’s worth of polarizing media campaigns on Minnesota’s civic discourse, churches decided to build peace as a way to love the communities they were in and strengthen Minnesota’s civic culture.

The Minnesota Council of Churches, with support from the Bush Foundation and in partnership with The Public Conversations Project, Twin Cities Public Television and The Theater of Public Policy, designed a conversation model not to change minds, but soften hearts. Respectful Conversations on the Marriage Amendment were conducted across the state in rural, exurban, suburban and urban communities. One thousand five hundred fifty Minnesotans participated in 54 conversations. 62% of participants reported experiencing more empathy for those with whom they disagreed. That figure grew much higher in those conversations were the array of viewpoints was most diverse.

People were excited to participate in these conversations and they have proven to be generative. In level 2 evaluations, participants reported improved listening skills, facilitation skills, reduced tension in home conversations, improved parenting skills and paradigm shifts. Many congregations have gone on to create peace in their communities around other divisive issues and sectors such as higher education, government and public health have studied the model for future implementation.

Which dialogue and deliberation approaches did you use or borrow heavily from?
Public Conversations Project dialogue

What was your role in the project?
Program co-designer and communicator

What issues did the project primarily address?
Gender / sexuality

Lessons Learned
Budgeting more for evaluations that captured people’s stories of the experience in multiple media would have been a great idea — we were surprised by all of the good will and gratitude generated by the project, and the thirst for follow-up activities. Had we captured it better to better report on it then we would have had a great storytelling tool that Minnesotans could be proud of.

Where to learn more about the project:
http://www.mnchurches.org/respectfulcommunities/respectfulconversations.html

Questions Elected Officials Ask About Public Engagement

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We wanted to encourage you to read the great insights that NCDD organizational member Max Hardy of Twyfords Consulting recently shared on the Twyfords’ blog. Max wrote some of his reflections on concerns that elected officials have shared with him recently about public engagement, and we encourage you to read them below or find the original piece by clicking here.

twyfordsI was enjoying a conversation and coffee with a friend the other day. After sharing a few stories with her about my work with executives and elected representatives, she asked, ‘Have you recorded any of this anywhere?’ I confessed I hadn’t.

Of particular interest to my friend were the questions that elected representatives have asked me in relation to collaborating with their communities. Perhaps you’ll find them of interest as well.

  1. ‘How do I know that an active minority will not monopolize the process?’
  2. ‘Collaborating takes time and I don’t have much of it. How can I find the time to do this properly?’
  3. ‘Every time I invite the community to consider an important matter they seem to be after blood. How can we have a reasonable and meaningful conversation about such matters (without getting bashed up)?’
  4. ‘Every time I ask what people want I end up with an unrealistic wish-list. Then when I don’t deliver on all of it people feel not listened to, and let down. How can I work with communities without setting up myself up for failure?’
  5. ‘People voted me in because they thought I could be a strong leader for them. How can I look like a credible leader when I keep asking for their help?’

I could go on but you get the drift I’m sure. It isn’t easy being a politician and I must say that the more time I spend with them, the more I appreciate just how hard their job is. What is clearer to me now is a set of assumptions that underpin many of their questions. This is what some of them are:

  1. People who have an agenda, or interests, different to the government’s, are a threat, and need to be neutralized or managed in some way.
  2. People expect me to be involved in everything and be everywhere to know that I am committed to the process.
  3. People generally behave badly if given an opportunity to influence an important decision.
  4. People are not capable of appreciating complexity, understanding other perspectives, deliberating or making wise judgments.
  5. Strong people need to be seen as having all the answers, and good at persuading others they are right.

What is interesting is that when we are guided by these pessimistic assumptions we are not helping any form of collaboration; invariably they provide the fuel for very unhappy processes that merely reinforce those assumptions.

It is not difficult to write a different set of assumptions that flip those 180 degrees. Just imagine how collaboration could be fuelled in a different way. What if we believed that collaboration with a community of interest with a diverse set of interests would deliver a more sustainable solution? What if we believed that the strongest leaders are those who encourage and support a process that taps into collective wisdom? What if we believed that people can be trusted to really step up when they are invited into genuine dilemmas? What if we believed that people could appreciate other perspectives if given the opportunity?

Like many others, Twyfords have been experimenting with democracy around complex issues for years. We are continually encouraged by what we see when we expect the best of people, which is why we have reason to be very optimistic about new ways to tackle our most challenging issues.

You can find the original version of the above post at www.twyfords.com.au/news-and-media/our-blog/questions-that-leaders-have-asked-me-over-the-past-18-months.

Thoughts on “Place” from Pete Peterson

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We wanted to share a thoughtful note that Pete Peterson sent to our transpartisan listserv the other day. Pete is not only the executive director of the Davenport Institute and an NCDD organizational member, but he’s also running for Secretary of State in CA, and he has some great insights to share on “place” from a newly released book…

DavenportInst-logoAll,

I thought you might be interested in knowing about a new book project on the subject of “Place” and its relationship to civic engagement…

Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America was just released on Thursday at an event at Pepperdine (reviewed here in today’s Sacramento Bee). I have an essay in the book about how we should be incorporating an understanding of place into public policy formation and education.

Of particular note to this group is how the essays in this volume address the issues of ideology from a communitarian perspective. My experience has been that many friends from the left-side of the aisle see conservatives as viewing the world from a “rugged individualist” perspective, and that they are the more “community-minded.” You hear this many times from our President, who, when met with opposition to some of his policy prescriptions describes his opponents as those who say “you’re on your own.”

There is certainly a growing libertarian movement in America (that has both left and right components), but there is also a long history of conservative communitarians. A tradition that begins with Edmund Burke and runs through De Tocqueville to Russel Kirk, Wilmoore Kendall, Donald Davidson and (especially) Robert Nisbet, through to today’s Rod Dreher, Ross Douthat, and others.

I’ve thought for some time that one way to find some “common ground” between ideologies is in this communitarian arena. I see many strands of this way of thinking in the recent Slow Democracy by Susan Clark and Terry Teachout. And while I may draw the line differently in how centralized policies either inhibit or promote the creation of something called “community” than folks like Susan and Terry, I think we’re all trying to get to (nearly) the same… place.

Best,

P.

Does Identity Trump Facts? (reflections from Greg Ranstrom)

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We are happy to share the reflective piece below from NCDD organizational member Greg Ranstrom of CivilSay, which came via our great Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have news you want to share with the NCDD network? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

Here’s a great example from the public health sphere about how hard it can be to arrive at shared facts: an NPR segment on vaccines and public opinion. The reporting suggests that the right information is not enough – people must reconcile self image with new information.

My own experience suggests this is right – if not a bit maddening. I am a fairly rational guy and I expect others to shift perspectives if the facts don’t add up. Trouble is – if I am really about smart action in the world – I have to figure out to keep people whole as they shift their sense of the world. Otherwise, they’ll stick to the old facts to preserve their sense of themselves.

I think the answer lies in deep respect for where people are coming from (regardless of the facts they hold to be true) and deep empathy for how they might land gracefully in a new reality.

What do you think?

We encourage you to share your reflections in the comments section below!