Fighting Autocracy with Democracy
Reply
the long march through institutions–for civic renewal
(Baltimore, MD) I am here for a panel on “Systems Change and Culture of Health” at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Culture of Health conference. My great fellow panelists were Sonal Shah (Georgetown), Derwin Dubose (New Majority Community Labs), and Karen Matusoka (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services). The audience seemed to be composed mostly of health practitioners and policymakers who were already strongly committed to three goals:
- Doing a better job of understanding the needs, priorities, and circumstances of truly diverse people by engaging them in influencing health interventions and policies. For instance, instead of telling a specific group of new immigrants how to improve their health, pay attention to what they already know and want.
- Supporting solutions that require collective action by residents. Dubose brought up a situation in which individuals couldn’t exercise in a local park because it was too dangerous, but a group started tai chi exercises there every day at noon. Only a coordinated strategy would work, and coordination requires organization, trust, leadership, and skill. This point is related to the previous one, because community members would be the first to know about the danger of the park and the popularity of tai chi. Not only is a coordinated strategy essential, but only the participants are likely to be able to invent it.
- Recognizing and enhancing the civic capacity of whole communities to achieve better health. For instance, Robert Sampson’s major book Great American City shows that Chicago neighborhoods achieve better outcomes for their children if the adults are organized and active in civic life.
Several participants noted that these were shared principles in the room–but none of the ideas are really new. In fact, a roughly similar discussion could have occurred 50 years ago, during the 1960s movement to make health (and research) more “community-based.” That impulse still remains marginal, which can be discouraging.
I would note that some relevant practices and networks have grown and strengthened over the past half century. (See, e.g., Community-Campus Partnerships for Health and the networks it represents.) But I would also acknowledge the powerful hold of a technocratic model in which solutions are developed at the “bench” and implemented at the “bedside.” That model is deeply rooted in modern epistemology and reinforced by the prestige of technology. It serves both governmental and corporate bureaucracies. So it is not easy to shake, and may even be worse than it was in the 1960s.
Policy changes can help. If–as one example–the National Institutes of Health funds community-based research, we get community-based research. But even the best-intentioned policies don’t implement themselves. They require dedicated and persistent work, everywhere from the national or state agency to the street level.
Civic engagement by communities can help. Why do Chicago neighborhoods get better outcomes–regardless of race and class–if they are organized and active? I would propose that this is partly because they support and compel local institutions, such as schools, police districts, and hospitals, to engage with them better. Every Chicago neighborhood has the same police chief, school superintendent, and mayor, but some neighborhoods receive more responsive government at the local level. Note that residents are not organized in specific policy domains, such as health or public safety. They are organized in multi-purpose civic and religious associations and networks. Those are essential for driving change through institutions.
Finally, we need effective organizing within the professions, a strategy that my friends Harry Boyte and Albert Dzur have advocated–and practiced–effectively for years. Like any good organizing effort, this strategy begins with recognizing the assets and interests of the people in question. Physicians, health administrators, and academic researchers are people, too. Lecturing them that they should be less arrogant and more sensitive to diversity may fail for the same reasons that it usually fails to lecture people to eat more vegetables.
But health professionals have interests that can be tapped–for instance, interests in getting better results and escaping social isolation. Most of all, they can develop genuine skills for engaging the public better. That is hard, complex, challenging work. It requires evidence and analysis. When we tell professionals to be less professional–to diminish their sense of expertise and authority–I think it goes over like asking people to eat their broccoli. Even if they want to comply, all the incentives work against it. But when we reward them for exercising advanced professional skills in community engagement, we treat them as assets and give them ways to excel. Combined with policy changes and grassroots pressure from outside, this organizing effort within professions may begin to change systems at a large scale.
Hal Saunders – Tribute to Democracy Giant
Hal Saunders – Tribute to Democracy Giant
Hal Saunders – Tribute to Democracy Giant
Hal Saunders – Tribute to Democracy Giant
Registration Open for 4th Int’l PB Conference, May 20-22
This year is going to be a great year for conferences! Of course we want our NCDD members to join us at our 2016 National Conference for Dialogue & Deliberation, but we also want to encourage our members to consider registering for the 4th International Conference on Participatory Budgeting in North America this May 20th-22nd in Boston, MA.
This year’s PB conference is especially exciting because it will coincide with the voting phase of the City of Boston’s award-winning youth participatory budgeting process, which adds an extra focus on young people’s participation in deliberative processes to the gathering. Regular registration is only $225 before the early-bird deadline on April 8th, but registration fees operate on a sliding scale that you can learn more about at www.pbconference.org.
Here is how PBP describes the conference:
The 4th International Conference on Participatory Budgeting in North America, organized by the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP), will take place in Boston, Massachusetts, USA during the voting phase of their award-winning, city-wide, youth PB process.
The conference is a space for participants and organizers of PB processes to share and reflect on their experiences so far, alongside interested activists, practitioners, scholars, elected officials, and civic designers.
The PB Conference will be organized around three themes this year:
- Youth power through PB: PB in schools, youth-only processes, and nearly every other PB process in North America uniquely gives real power to young people – as young as 11! What can we do to encourage even more youth leadership with PB?
- PB in practice: What is working well? What has been less successful? What improvements can be made in the way the process is implemented? How can we do better and be more effective with existing PB processes and how can we put more processes in place across North America and around the world.
- Measuring impact: How do we define a good PB process? What are the best ways to define success in this context? What are innovative, effective tools and methods we can use to assess the impact of processes that are currently underway as well as to shape new PB processes.
Conference participants will also have the chance to take advantage of a full-day introductory or advanced training on participatory budgeting before the conference May 20th from 9:30am-4pm. The regular registration rate for the trainings is $250, which is separate from conference registration.
The PB Conference promises to be a great gathering to learn more about one of the fastest-growing methodologies in our field, and we hope to see some of our NCDD members there! You can learn more and register for the conference at www.pbconference.org.
Engaging Ideas – 3/10
Hal Saunders – Tribute to Democracy Giant
Hal Saunders died on March 6, after a struggle with cancer.
I first met Hal in 1989, when he asked me to participate in a third task force, on civil society, in the off-the-record, high-level Dartmouth Conference. Dartmouth was a dialogue between the Soviet Union and the United States which began in 1960. Again and again it brought leaders of the two countries back from the brink of disaster by creating a space where they could get a reality check. Hal once told me Dartmouth "was where the Soviets gave the speeches they had in their desks and believed in, but couldn't say in public."
For a decade Hal co-chaired a Task Force on Regional Conflicts, some of the time with Yevgeny Primakov, former head of the KGB and then Prime Minister of the Soviet Union. The task force addressed hot spots in the Middle East and elsewhere. In 1990 Hal went on staff of the Kettering Foundation, which sponsored the Dartmouth Conference, as director of the foundation's international programs. No one could possibly have been better.
He had a remarkable history. In 1961, Hal Saunders joined the staff of the National Security Council and served as Mideast expert for both the Johnson and Nixon administrations -- during the Six-Day War of June 1967, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy." In 1978, President Carter appointed him Assistant Secretary in the State Department for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs. He helped set up the legendary Camp David meeting which brought Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt, together with Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of Israel and Jimmy Carter together for 12 days of secret talks. The Camp David talks laid the foundation for the historic Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty.
On November 4, 1979, in the early morning hours, he took a call from the American embassy in Iran and for two hours heard from frantic officials about the takeover of the embassy. For the next 444 days he worked to free the American hostages.
I worked with Hal as the Soviet Union underwent dramatic transformation. And I turned to him when we created the "Reinventing Citizenship" initiative with the Domestic Policy Council and Bill Galston, President Clinton's domestic policy advisor. Our aim was to develop strategies for overcoming the government-citizen gap. No one had more wisdom about how to get things accomplished in government bureaucracies. In 1994, at a Kettering international meeting in Puerto Rico, we discussed the effort and his own work.
Here is an excerpt from my travel log.
San Juan San Juan, Puerto Rico, January 31 10:06 am
Hal Saunders and I ate breakfast on the hotel terrace, surrounded by lush flowers, with the ocean sounding in the background. Small, graceful black birds lit all around us.
I gave an update on Reinventing Citizenship. Hal had many thoughts about how to connect key people in the foreign policy "democracy promotion" networks. Ramon Daubon, a terrific guy, once the Latin Ford Foundation director will be here. He now is at the Agency for International Development, trying to change US approaches to democracy aid in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Beyond foreign policy, Hal's counsel on our initiative was wise and to the point as always: keep it relatively loose and uninstitutionalized for as long as possible and in as many ways as possible. Look for ways to create relationships and energy around the key concepts.
Hal's own work is fascinating. He has grants for the conflict resolution project Kettering has undertaken in Tajikistan, where civil war in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse has left a seventh of the population as refugees. Working with the Institute for Oriental Studies in Russia, they've been able to create a vibrant forum bringing together the warring parties in the country around the tasks of ending the war and resettlement; and also "constitution-building," understood as a political process not simply writing a constitution. Hal gives little "sermonettes" in the middle of meetings -- drawing undoubtedly on his mystique as someone who helped bring Sadat and Begin together in Camp David, and his other many achievements. One sermonette was on the need to see constitutional reform as connected to creating a political dynamic across different factions and ethnic rivalries.
I remarked, it must be an amazing and immense gratifying thing to see possibilities for settlement, ending of war, and society-building in a society that is so wracked with suffering and violence.
Hal said simply, "yes."
I last saw Hal and Carol, his wife, at a Kettering international gathering last July. He wasn't well. But he was, as always, passionately curious about democracy developments, including in South Africa - Hal had long worked with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa). Idasa, until its recent end, was one of the great democracy promoting organizations in the world. My wife, Marie Ström, directed their democracy education work for nearly twenty years, and I worked with it on many projects.
Hal combined calm, strategic, big picture thinking with a wonderfully generous, relational approach. He also had a passionate commitment to dialogue as a way to humanize and work through even the most intractable conflicts. This commitment came from his experiences.
Hal was a great theorist and practitioner of deliberation in our time. He created the Sustained Dialogue Institute which involves college students across America in working through conflicts.
I have tremendous admiration for Hal and his legacy, in the trenches of democracy across the world.
I first met Hal in 1989, when he asked me to participate in a third task force, on civil society, in the off-the-record, high-level Dartmouth Conference. Dartmouth was a dialogue between the Soviet Union and the United States which began in 1960. Again and again it brought leaders of the two countries back from the brink of disaster by creating a space where they could get a reality check. Hal once told me Dartmouth "was where the Soviets gave the speeches they had in their desks and believed in, but couldn't say in public."
For a decade Hal co-chaired a Task Force on Regional Conflicts, some of the time with Yevgeny Primakov, former head of the KGB and then Prime Minister of the Soviet Union. The task force addressed hot spots in the Middle East and elsewhere. In 1990 Hal went on staff of the Kettering Foundation, which sponsored the Dartmouth Conference, as director of the foundation's international programs. No one could possibly have been better.
He had a remarkable history. In 1961, Hal Saunders joined the staff of the National Security Council and served as Mideast expert for both the Johnson and Nixon administrations -- during the Six-Day War of June 1967, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy." In 1978, President Carter appointed him Assistant Secretary in the State Department for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs. He helped set up the legendary Camp David meeting which brought Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt, together with Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of Israel and Jimmy Carter together for 12 days of secret talks. The Camp David talks laid the foundation for the historic Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty.
On November 4, 1979, in the early morning hours, he took a call from the American embassy in Iran and for two hours heard from frantic officials about the takeover of the embassy. For the next 444 days he worked to free the American hostages.
I worked with Hal as the Soviet Union underwent dramatic transformation. And I turned to him when we created the "Reinventing Citizenship" initiative with the Domestic Policy Council and Bill Galston, President Clinton's domestic policy advisor. Our aim was to develop strategies for overcoming the government-citizen gap. No one had more wisdom about how to get things accomplished in government bureaucracies. In 1994, at a Kettering international meeting in Puerto Rico, we discussed the effort and his own work.
Here is an excerpt from my travel log.
San Juan San Juan, Puerto Rico, January 31 10:06 am
Hal Saunders and I ate breakfast on the hotel terrace, surrounded by lush flowers, with the ocean sounding in the background. Small, graceful black birds lit all around us.
I gave an update on Reinventing Citizenship. Hal had many thoughts about how to connect key people in the foreign policy "democracy promotion" networks. Ramon Daubon, a terrific guy, once the Latin Ford Foundation director will be here. He now is at the Agency for International Development, trying to change US approaches to democracy aid in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Beyond foreign policy, Hal's counsel on our initiative was wise and to the point as always: keep it relatively loose and uninstitutionalized for as long as possible and in as many ways as possible. Look for ways to create relationships and energy around the key concepts.
Hal's own work is fascinating. He has grants for the conflict resolution project Kettering has undertaken in Tajikistan, where civil war in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse has left a seventh of the population as refugees. Working with the Institute for Oriental Studies in Russia, they've been able to create a vibrant forum bringing together the warring parties in the country around the tasks of ending the war and resettlement; and also "constitution-building," understood as a political process not simply writing a constitution. Hal gives little "sermonettes" in the middle of meetings -- drawing undoubtedly on his mystique as someone who helped bring Sadat and Begin together in Camp David, and his other many achievements. One sermonette was on the need to see constitutional reform as connected to creating a political dynamic across different factions and ethnic rivalries.
I remarked, it must be an amazing and immense gratifying thing to see possibilities for settlement, ending of war, and society-building in a society that is so wracked with suffering and violence.
Hal said simply, "yes."
I last saw Hal and Carol, his wife, at a Kettering international gathering last July. He wasn't well. But he was, as always, passionately curious about democracy developments, including in South Africa - Hal had long worked with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa). Idasa, until its recent end, was one of the great democracy promoting organizations in the world. My wife, Marie Ström, directed their democracy education work for nearly twenty years, and I worked with it on many projects.
Hal combined calm, strategic, big picture thinking with a wonderfully generous, relational approach. He also had a passionate commitment to dialogue as a way to humanize and work through even the most intractable conflicts. This commitment came from his experiences.
Hal was a great theorist and practitioner of deliberation in our time. He created the Sustained Dialogue Institute which involves college students across America in working through conflicts.
I have tremendous admiration for Hal and his legacy, in the trenches of democracy across the world.
Fond Memories of Hal Saunders
I’m so sad to share this news with the network, but our long-time member Harold Saunders passed away yesterday at the age of 85. Hal had an incredibly distinguished career – I can’t even begin to do it justice. He developed and practiced the process of Sustained Dialogue, a “public peace process” to transform racial and ethnic conflicts.
He authored four books on peace building and dialogue. He worked with Kissinger, President Carter, and so many others. He became the Director of International Affairs at the Kettering Foundation. And he was just an all-around incredible human being.
Many of us were privileged to know him, as he always attended the NCDD conferences and interacted with all of us with an open heart and an amazing attitude of humble curiosity and camaraderie. He participated in a panel of field leaders at our 2004 national conference in Denver, and spoke again at our 2008 conference in Austin. Please join me in mourning the loss of our friend and colleague. Contributions in his memory can be sent to the Sustained Dialogue Institute. You can read more about Hal’s incredible work in the Kettering Foundation’s write-up below or read the original here.
Dr. Harold H. Saunders, 1930-2016
Harold H. Saunders, assistant secretary of state in the Carter administration and the recently retired director of international affairs at the Kettering Foundation, who spent more than 20 years in high foreign policy positions in the United States government, died on March 6, 2016, at his home in McLean, Va. He was 85.
The cause of death was prostate cancer.
“Hal Saunders served with distinction under six U.S. presidents and was a significant figure in America’s international affairs for more than 50 years. We were fortunate to have had his good counsel for much of that time,” David Mathews, Kettering Foundation president, said. “In addition, we will remember his interest in young people. He reached out to college students and built a network devoted to sustained dialogue, one of the primary themes of his work in recent years.”
“He tackled some of the greatest challenges of our times – protracted conflict, destructive relationships, weak governance, dysfunctional democracy and the need for a new world view,” Dr. Mathews continued.
After serving as a U.S. Air Force lieutenant and in the Central Intelligence Agency, Saunders joined the National Security Council staff in 1961 and served through the Johnson and Nixon administrations as the council’s Mideast expert, a period that saw the Six-Day War of June 1967, the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the Kissinger shuttles. He was appointed deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs in 1974, director of intelligence and research in 1975, and was appointed by President Carter to be assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs in 1978.
During his tenure as assistant secretary, Saunders was a principal architect of the Camp David Accords and the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. In the early morning hours of November 4, 1979, a call was patched through to his home from Tehran, and over the next two hours he listened to the overrun of the American Embassy. For the next 444 days, Saunders worked tirelessly to free the American hostages, culminating in their release on January 20, 1981.
For his contributions to American diplomacy, Saunders received the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Service, the government’s highest award for civilian career officials, and the State Department’s Distinguished Honor Award. After leaving government service in 1981, he was associated with the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution for 10 years before joining the Kettering Foundation as director of international Affairs. In 1981, he also became U.S. co-chair of the Task Force on Regional Conflicts for the Dartmouth Conference, the longest continuous dialogue between American and Soviet citizens.
Harold H. Saunders was born in Philadelphia on December 27, 1930, and attended Germantown Academy there. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University in 1952 with a bachelor’s degree in English and American Civilization and received a doctorate in American Studies from Yale University in 1956. He was president of his class at Princeton, later served on the Board of Trustees at Princeton and received the Class of 1952’s “Excellence in Career” award.
Over the past 35 years, Dr. Saunders developed and practiced the process of Sustained Dialogue, which he described as a “five-stage public peace process” to transform racial and ethnic conflicts. He was the author of four books, co-author of another and co-editor of still another, all dealing with issues of international peace.
In 1999 he wrote A Public Peace Process: Sustained Dialogue to Transform Racial and Ethnic Conflict. That experience led to his founding the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue (now the Sustained Dialogue Institute), which he served as chairman and president until his retirement on December 31, 2015. He is also the author of The Other Walls: The Arab-Israeli Peace Process in a Global Perspective (1985), Politics Is about Relationship: A Blueprint for the Citizens’ Century (2005), and Sustained Dialogue in Conflicts: Transformation and Change (2011).
Through IISD/SDI he moderated dialogues among citizens outside government, from the civil war in Tajikistan to deep tensions among Arabs, Europeans, and Americans and all factions in Iraq. More recently, he had been collaborating with established organizations in the U.S., South Africa, Israel and the Americas to embed sustained dialogue in their programs.
Dr. Saunders was the recipient of many awards. From Germantown Academy, he received its first Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002. He was given Search for Common Ground’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004 and the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Annenberg Award for Excellence in Diplomacy in 2010.
He had served on the board for the Hollings Center, the executive committee of the Institute for East-West Security Studies and on the boards of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, Internews, and Partners for Democratic Change and had been a member of the International Negotiation Network at the Carter Presidential Center. He served on the governing council of the International Society of Political Psychology, which presented him the 1999 Nevitt Sanford Award for “distinguished professional contributions to political psychology.”
He taught international relationships and conflict resolution at George Mason University and at Johns Hopkins University’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Academy of Diplomacy and a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
He was awarded honorary degrees of doctor of letters by New England College, doctor of international relations by Dickinson College, doctor of humane letters by the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and doctor of arts, letters, and Humanities by Susquehanna University. He was an elder in the Presbyterian Church and had participated in a Roman Catholic-Reformed Churches dialogue.
Dr. Saunders’ first wife, the former Barbara McGarrigle, died in 1973. He is survived by his wife of 25 years, Carol Jones Cruse Saunders, a son, Mark and daughter-in-law, Robin Stafford, daughter Catherine, a step-daughter, Caryn Hoadley, and her husband, Brad Wetstone, three grandchildren and two step-grandsons.
Burial is private. A memorial service will be held at a future date.
In his memory, contributions may be made to his Sustained Dialogue Institute.
You can read the original version of this Kettering Foundation remembrance at www.kettering.org/blogs/harold-saunders-1930-2016.