NCDDer Gives TEDx Talk on #BridgingOurDivides

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Did you know that NCDD member Mark Gerzon did his own TED Talk recently?

We were proud to see Mark – the Founder and President of NCDD member org, the Mediators Foundation – speak at TEDxVail this past January about the need for our country to deepen the work of #BridgingOurDivides between the partisan left and right blocs. In his talk, he challenges us to take inspiration from the integration of the left and right parts of our own physiology as we consider the importance of going beyond partisanship.

We think Mark’s selection for this prestigious opportunity speaks to the power of the sorts of ideas that drive the work of NCDD. We encourage you to join us in congratulating Mark on the accomplishment, and check out his 11 minute talk below.

The Youngstars Foundation’s 2015 Post-Election Youth Participation and Engagement Initiative

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Case: The Youngstars Foundation’s 2015 Post-Election Youth Participation and Engagement Initiative

May 1 '17
Author: 
Adebisi David Alade
The failures of Nigeria's civilian government gave rise to the Youngstars Foundation who committed to a campaign aimed at educating and mobilizing youths to improve participatory democracy and good governance through active post-election engagement of elected representatives.

was the Civil Rights Movement successful because of the Cold War?

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It’s widely argued that the federal government made concessions on civil rights between 1945 and 1970 because blatant racial oppression was embarrassing during the global struggle against communism. Doug McAdam illustrates this argument by noting the “stark contrast” between FDR and Truman on issues of racial justice. FDR was an extraordinarily powerful president who tended toward liberal personal attitudes on race and drew overwhelming support from Black voters in the North, yet he did virtually nothing for civil rights–not even endorsing anti-lynching bills that were pending in Congress. Truman held more ambiguous views and faced political peril, yet he took substantial steps to desegregate the military and civil service. McAdam, following other authors, attributes the difference to the onset of the Cold War.

This explanation has two slightly dispiriting implications (not for McAdam, but for other observers). One is that White American leaders didn’t respond to moral arguments, principles, or empathy; they simply wanted to win a geopolitical struggle. The other is that the Civil Rights Movement succeeded thanks to a fortunate circumstance, not due to its own courage and excellence.

What those inferences overlook is the skillful and principled ways that the Movement took advantage of openings to shift Whites’ hearts and minds.

First, Movement leaders intentionally provoked responses that would look ugly on national TV. After the setback experienced in Albany, GA, where local authorities behaved civilly but refused to budge, the Movement rushed to Birmingham, AL to confront Bull Connor during his lame-duck period because they knew he could be counted on to respond with brutality. The Cold War made the US vulnerable, and the movement took full advantage.

Second, the protesters wrapped themselves in the flag, the constitution, and other symbols of American patriotism. I am sure this was sincere–I read thinkers like King and Rustin as genuine patriots. But it was also smart.

As McAdam concludes: “the extraordinary string of civil rights victories achieved in the 1950s and 1960s (and beyond) has to be accounted as owing at least as much to the creativity and courage of movement forces as to favourable environmental circumstances.” Stephen Jones argues that successful social movements almost always need both “luck and pluck.”

The skill and success of the Civil Rights Movement then echoed in unexpected ways. In Communist states such as Czechoslovakia and Poland, television footage of brutal American racism was widely aired to discredit the US. These regimes also broadcast antinuclear protests from Western Europe. At least some viewers identified themselves with the protesters–and the communist state with the oppressors. They learned that nonviolent social movements could succeed against powerful governments like their own.

Aldon D. Morris writes, “in the early days of the Solidarity movement in Poland, Bayard Rustin, a major tactician of the civil rights movement, was summoned to Poland to give a series of colloquia and speeches on how nonviolent direct action worked in the civil rights movement.” Later, the Tiananmen protesters in China learned “that King’s methods of non-violence and civil disobedience had helped the blacks win civil rights in the United States. They were also impressed by King’s interactions with American presidents in that effort, which offered them a model to follow when they requested a meeting with China’s leaders.”

A movement for universal human rights embarrassed a government ostensibly committed to those values. Foreign dictatorships then tried to exploit this embarrassment, only to inspire similar movements against themselves. This is a story of some luck and lots of pluck.

Sources: Doug McAdam, “The US Civil Rights Movement: Power from Below and Above, 1945-70,” Merle Goldman, “The 1989 Demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and Beyond: Echoes of Gandhi,” and Stephen Jones, “Georgia’s ‘Rose Revolution’ of 2003: A Forceful Peace,” all in Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash (eds.), Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Aldon Morris, “A Retrospective on the Civil Rights Movement: Political and Intellectual Landmarks,” Annual Review of Sociology vol. 25, no 1 (Nov. 2003), pp. 517-539.

Using Data Mapping to Help Reclaim Urban Commons

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Big Tech understands the power of data to advance its interests.  It’s time for commoners to do the same, especially in urban settings.

A pioneer in this style of high-tech activism is the Brooklyn-based group 596 Acres, whose name comes from apparent number of acres of vacant public land in Brooklyn in 2011 as determined by the NYC Department of City Planning.  Since its founding that year, 596 Acres has ingeniously used various databases to identify vacant lots throughout the City that could be re-purposed into public gardens, farms parks, and community meeting spaces.

Paula Z. Segal, an attorney who works with the Urban Justice Center in New York City, explained in a blog post that shortly after its founding in 2011, “the 596 Acres team started hunting down all available data about city-owned land. Once we got the data, we worked to translate it into usable information. For each publicly owned ‘vacant’ lot we found, we asked two questions: 1) ‘Is this lot in use already?’ and 2) ‘Can you reach this lot from the street?’”

The group used a combination of automated script, Google Maps, the interactive community maps at OASISNYC.net, and gardener surveys done by a NYC nonprofit, to identify the unused lots accessible from the street.  It discovered that there were approximately 660 acres of vacant public land in New York City, distributed across 1,800 sites.  But putting this land to better, public uses required commoners to organize and pressure elected officials and city bureaucrats to transfer ownership and allow the creation of new green spaces.

There is a backstory to 596 Acres’ activism: In the 1990s, many New Yorkers converged on trashed-out parcels of city land, converting them into hundreds of community gardens. This amazing surge of commoning helped to humanize the cityscape while, as a byproduct, raising property values for adjacent buildings in the neighborhood. People could undertake this work only because the vacant lots were open and accessible. (In the era of Mayors Guiliani and Bloomberg, by contrast, any vacant lots are fenced, effectively thwarting the reclaiming of vacant lots and abandoned buildings for commoners.) Guiliani sought to sell off the land that commoners had reclaimed, provoking a fierce backlash that resulted in the creation of scores of community land trusts to manage the gardens.

Now that vacant lots are fenced, 596 Acres post signs on the fences informing neighbors that the land is actually publicly owned (i.e., government, not commoners, has title to the land). The signs invite people to organize to try to convert the unused lots into gardens or parks. To help move this process along, 596 Acres has created online maps giving detailed information about each vacant lot – who is the registered owner, the land's legal status, city departments and politicians who should be contacted, etc.

Living Lots NYC now serves as “a clearinghouse of information that New Yorkers can use to find, unlock and protect our shared resources.”  The site features a searchable database and map of 899 “acres of opportunity” on 1,337 sites, and 1,186 acres of community projects on 584 sites.  The map also includes colored dots showing where people have access and where people are organizing to liberate land.  A primary goal of the site is to “broadcast what is know-able [about vacant city land parcels] and to help people find one another on a property-by-property basis.” 

Paula Segal explains that:

Wherever possible, the goal is a permanent transfer of public land to the NYC Parks Department, or private land to a community land trust. But sometimes creating a temporary space for a few years until other planned development moves forward—arranged via an interim use agreement—is the only achievable outcome.

In each instance, residents must navigate a unique bureaucratic maze: applying for approval from their Community Board, winning endorsement from local elected officials, and negotiating with whichever agency holds title to the land. Along the way, 596 Acres provides legal advice, technical assistance, and a network for sharing best practices from successful campaigns.

Some of the benefits of building power this way have been unexpected.  In January 2015, when NYC’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) published a list of 181 “hard to develop” properties that they would sell for $1 to developers willing to build affordable housing, we were able to quickly analyze the list and find out that it included 20 community garden lots. Six of those were gardens that had been formed with our support.

Within three weeks of the list’s publication, over 150 New Yorkers, including four City Council members, were rallying on the steps of City Hall. By the end of that year, the administration had transformed 36 formerly “interim use” spaces to permanently preserved NYC Parks Department gardens, including fifteen of the gardens on the January list. Using our network, community gardeners had preempted a major threat, ensuring that the largest wave of garden preservation in NYC history would happen without a legal battle.

596 Acres has now moved beyond vacant lots, focusing on how inaccessible and neglected NYC parks, buildings and post offices could be put to better use.

In collaboration with the Urban Justice Center and Common Cause/NY, 596 Acres also operates a website called NYCommons that helps people learn more about New York City’s public spaces.  Some 3,243 properties are listed, with colored dots indicating whether the property is a library, post office, waterfront facility, public housing, garden, vacant lot, whether “development is pending” and if organizing [against “development”] is underway.

“Some are opportunities to organize new spaces for integrated community services,” writes Segal. “Others we hope to preserve in the face of a real estate market hungry for places it can transform into luxury development.”  Many of of the neglected land parcels, parks, community centers, public baths, rest rooms and buildings are in low-income communities of color -- victims of the city’s fiscal crisis and class-driven policy choices in the 1970s.

I’m impressed with how database-driven maps can be used to galvanize and assist citizen campaigns to reclaim the city.  It suggests that commoners should convene more “inter-mapping” confabs to trade insights and develop database activism.

Using Data Mapping to Help Reclaim Urban Commons

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Big Tech understands the power of data to advance its interests.  It’s time for commoners to do the same, especially in urban settings.

A pioneer in this style of high-tech activism is the Brooklyn-based group 596 Acres, whose name comes from apparent number of acres of vacant public land in Brooklyn in 2011 as determined by the NYC Department of City Planning.  Since its founding that year, 596 Acres has ingeniously used various databases to identify vacant lots throughout the City that could be re-purposed into public gardens, farms parks, and community meeting spaces.

Paula Z. Segal, an attorney who works with the Urban Justice Center in New York City, explained in a blog post that shortly after its founding in 2011, “the 596 Acres team started hunting down all available data about city-owned land. Once we got the data, we worked to translate it into usable information. For each publicly owned ‘vacant’ lot we found, we asked two questions: 1) ‘Is this lot in use already?’ and 2) ‘Can you reach this lot from the street?’”

The group used a combination of automated script, Google Maps, the interactive community maps at OASISNYC.net, and gardener surveys done by a NYC nonprofit, to identify the unused lots accessible from the street.  It discovered that there were approximately 660 acres of vacant public land in New York City, distributed across 1,800 sites.  But putting this land to better, public uses required commoners to organize and pressure elected officials and city bureaucrats to transfer ownership and allow the creation of new green spaces.

There is a backstory to 596 Acres’ activism: In the 1990s, many New Yorkers converged on trashed-out parcels of city land, converting them into hundreds of community gardens. This amazing surge of commoning helped to humanize the cityscape while, as a byproduct, raising property values for adjacent buildings in the neighborhood. People could undertake this work only because the vacant lots were open and accessible. (In the era of Mayors Guiliani and Bloomberg, by contrast, any vacant lots are fenced, effectively thwarting the reclaiming of vacant lots and abandoned buildings for commoners.) Guiliani sought to sell off the land that commoners had reclaimed, provoking a fierce backlash that resulted in the creation of scores of community land trusts to manage the gardens.

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