Activity to Explore the Impact of Skin Color

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Keiva Hummel

Everyday Democracy released this activity to show how participants’ may have different experiences based on their skin color. The goal is to prompt thinking about the different experiences because of skin color and provide an opportunity for dialogue. Part One is a true/false skin color survey and Part Two is a dialogue prompt about privilege.

From the intro…

This activity is meant to help us go deeper in our discussion about race. It may make some people uncomfortable and some may think this is contrived. Remember, one of the goals is to put the issues some people in our community are thinking about on the table. After the activity, we will discuss your reactions, thoughts on the issue, and how it impacts our community.

More about Everyday Democracy
Everyday Democracy (formerly called the Study Circles Resource Center) is a project of The Paul J. Aicher Foundation, a private operating foundation dedicated to strengthening deliberative democracy and improving the quality of public life in the United States. Since our founding in 1989, we’ve worked with hundreds of communities across the United States on issues such as: racial equity, poverty reduction and economic development, education reform, early childhood development and building strong neighborhoods. We work with national, regional and state organizations in order to leverage our resources and to expand the reach and impact of civic engagement processes and tools.

We have learned that some of the key components to ensuring racially-equitable systemic change include building relationships, establishing a diverse coalition, having trained peer facilitators during dialogues, building on assets, and linking actions to individual, community, and policy change. We provide online tools and in-person trainings on organizing, racial equity, facilitation, communications, and action planning. We act as a catalyst and coach for communities, knowing that the people of each community are best suited to carry out and sustain the work that will make a difference.

The communities we serve are the focal point of our work. Our ultimate aim is to help create communities that value everyone’s voice and work for everyone, and to help create a strong national democracy that upholds these principles.

Follow on Twitter @EvDem.

Resource Link: http://everyday-democracy.org/resources/activity-explore-impact-skin-color (Available for download)

Should the Public Rate & Review Engagement Projects?

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Roshan Bliss

We recently saw a post on NCDD organizational member the Davenport Institute‘s Gov 2.0 Watch blog featuring a piece penned by Matt Leighninger – a long-time NCDD supporting member. Matt’s article asks the question “What would happen if the public could rate and review public engagement projects like it can restaurants and stores?” We encourage you to check out the article below or find the original Davenport post here.

A Yelp for Public Engagement?

Over at Tech President, Matt Leighninger discusses why just having public engagement options available isn’t enough – we also need a way for people to give feedback about how these processes are working.

What if your residents could “Yelp” your latest engagement process? How would it rate?

Unfortunately, we have trouble separating productive from ineffective opportunities for civic engagement, in part because of the way we try to measure it. We focus almost entirely on assessing the impacts of discrete projects and tools, when we should also be giving citizens the chance to evaluate their civic environments. People now have the power to rate all kinds of products and services: if they had similar opportunities to rate their opportunities to participate in public life, democracy would improve.

You can read more here.

Lessons from Trayvon Martin

Posted on April 1, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

Last night I had the honor of hearing from Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton – perhaps better recognized as the parents of Trayvon Martin.

It’s been three years, one month, and two days since their son’s death.

They are powerful advocates, determined to make something good come from their tragedy. “I needed to do more than cry,” Fulton explained.

They spoke about gun violence, about how no parent should loose a child, and importantly – they spoke about race.

At first, Fulton said, she wanted to believe the media reports. She wanted to believe her son was targeted primarily because of his hoodie.

She wanted to believe it was the hoodie because she didn’t want to believe it was the color of his skin.

“I didn’t want to believe our country hadn’t come far enough,” she said. “I cannot take off the color of my skin.”

“We thought we had done everything in our power to raise our sons to be good, upstanding citizens,” Martin added.

And they had.

But it didn’t matter. As Fulton described:

“I didn’t want to believe my son was dead, deceased – murdered – because of the color of his skin. Something he couldn’t change. It didn’t matter what I taught Trayvon.”

“It’s not about me or how I carry myself,” she added, “it’s about someone else perception.”

That’s what it really means to be powerless.

And as if that wasn’t enough, I was really struck by something Tracy Martin said:

“People say the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. So if we appeared to be destructive, people would say, ‘that’s why Trayvon was killed.'”

I’d been surprised by Fulton and Martin’s calm, somber tone. People act and react in all sort of ways, but somehow I’d expected them to have more fire.

I thought of the advocates who emerged from Sandy Hook and Columbine. Grieving parents who’d been irrevocably radicalized by the terrible loss of their children. Advocates who’d willingly shout down Senators, who would fight anyone in their way, and do whatever it takes to prevent another parent from experiencing what they had experienced.

Fulton and Martin were passionate…but somehow subdued.

And suddenly it all made sense.

Not only had they been robbed of any agency in determining the fate of their son, not only had they realized that there was nothing they could have done – the context of race also determined how they had to respond.

It’s no coincidence that the advocates who emerged from Sandy Hook and Columbine were white. They were people of privilege who enjoyed the freedom to express themselves genuinely.

Not everyone has that luxury.

As one student of color put it during the question and answer discussion, “there is so much suffering and so many people who are privileged to be immune to that suffering.”

And that’s what makes systemic racism so insidious, so intractable.

It’s not enough that a young, black man was murdered in the street. Systems of justice and public opinion all conspire to ensure the continued oppression of black America.

And perhaps that is why white allies – or whatever term you prefer – are so important. Some of us do have the privilege to speak out, have the power to confront power. We should be careful not to steal the stage – not to use that power to keep ourselves the center of attention.

But we can speak up when others can’t. We can create space for those forced to the sidelines.

Sybrina Fulton said she didn’t want to believe our country hadn’t come far enough. She didn’t want to believe that we lived in a place where a person could be killed because of the color of his skin.

She didn’t want to believe that.

No one wants to believe that. It’s too much, too terrible, to believe.

But we have to learn to believe – and we have to work together to change it.

After all, as Fulton said:

“We have American citizens who are afraid to walk down the street. That’s a problem. I shouldn’t have to go through life afraid.”

Benkler on the Uber-ification of Services

Posted on April 1, 2015 by David Bollier

Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler gave attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos a dire warning about future instability if the “Uber-ification of all services” continues. In his intense six-minute talk, “Challenges of the Sharing Economy,” Benkler notes how open networks and collaborative production models have led to the “destabilization of the firm," and ultimately threaten to bring about “the potential reorganization of the entire services sector.”

In light of this epochal shift, he declares, the critical question is: “Will [this shift] allow embedding economic production in the same kind of social solidarity trust models that we saw with the emergence of Wikipedia? Or will the externalization of risk onto the people formerly known as employees create severe disruption?”

The big challenge today, he argued, is that the social and the political have diverged, as demonstrated by the Occupy movement. And this leads to worrisome social pressures that the political system is disinclined to address.

I realize that Benkler must have been under a strict time limit -- he was talking quite rapidly for this talk -- but it sure would be nice to hear his proposed solutions for re-integrating the social and the political in functional ways, and how he proposes moving that agenda forward. But at least the Davos crowd was alerted to this fundamental political challenge. Whether they will deign to recognize the issue and move beyond their adulation for the Uber, Airbnb and other lucrative forms of network monopoly is another matter.

Democracy In Practice: Democratic Student Government Program in Cochabamba, Bolivia

Posted on April 1, 2015 by Jeff Kennedy

Case: Democracy In Practice: Democratic Student Government Program in Cochabamba, Bolivia

Apr 1 '15

Author:

Jeff Kennedy

This case collectively examines the three pilot projects of Democracy In Practice’s student government program which ran February through November of 2014 in three schools in the Cochabamba area of Bolivia. This program involved replacing student elections with lotteries in which government members were randomly-selected to serve a given term...

from soft skills to agency

Posted on April 1, 2015 by Peter

I’m very pleased to see a blog post by Andy Calkins, Deputy Director of the Next Generation Learning Challenge, entitled “It’s Time to Trash the Terms ‘Non-Cogs’ and ‘Soft Skills.'”

Partly in response to the hegemony of standardized testing, some organizations and individuals have been pushing for “non-cognitive” or “soft” skills (e.g., collaboration, grit, participation) as important measures and goals of education. Theirs is a valid goal, but I agree with Calkins’ critique of the terminology. The kinds of skills that have been named “non-cognitive” actually require advanced cognition; the skills that have been labeled “soft” are, in every sense, quite hard.

But it’s not his critique of terminology that makes me recommend Calkins’ post. Rather, it’s the alternative master term that he recommends to replace “non-cog” and “soft.” Calkins chooses “agency,” which is indeed an apt word for the individual student outcomes that have been overlooked in the era of narrow assessments. Agency comprises an individual’s ability and motivation to interpret and change the world. But it is not an only individual matter. Agency has to be political (in the broadest sense), because individuals are truly effective as agents when they work together.

Thus we can say that citizens have agency; and people who exhibit agency in public contexts are citizens. Doris Sommers, who visited Tisch College earlier this week, would argue that citizenship is “cultural agency”: intentionally shaping the common world together. And Harry Boyte and Blase Scarnati write, “Agency can be understood as a form of empowerment that has conscious political dimensions, or as effective and intentional action that is conducted in diverse and open settings in order to shape the world around us.”

In We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (pp. 27-8), I write:

A master question for social theory during the twentieth century was structure versus agency: whether people’s voluntary choices made any difference in politics, or whether underlying “structures” determined everything. This question divided, for example, French existentialists (who preached the value of intentional political acts) from French structuralists (who thought that political events, including major elections and revolutions, were superficial perturbations on the permanent structures below). But the question for the twenty-first century should be different: not how much impact agency has, but how that impact can be expanded. The reason to expand it is not that agency is intrinsically good. Hitler was an effective political agent. Rather, deliberate and effective human action is one necessary condition of a worthwhile human life. If there is no agency, life can have no point.

In the context of education, “agency” moves us from a purely individualistic framework to a recognition of collaboration, social capital, networks, public discourse, and other outcomes for groups and communities.

This argument is important coming from the Next Generation Learning Challenge, which is influential, hard-nosed about measures and methods, and involved with enhancing students’ success as currently measured. (For full disclosure, the NGLC funded us for a randomized experimental test of iCivics’ Drafting Board module, which we found to be effective.) It would be easy and unremarkable for me–a civics and democracy guy–to endorse agency. For the NGLC to choose it as a master term is much more valuable.

The post from soft skills to agency appeared first on Peter Levine.

Bairo Limpo

Posted on April 1, 2015 by Diego Guidi

Case: Bairo Limpo

Apr 1 '15

Author:

Marc-Antoine Diego GUIDI

The following is a suggested structure. We recommend users follow these headings to make it easier to compare and analyze entries. Problems and Purpose High level of waste generation in poor communities, low if not no budget for WM systems, base of the pyramid influencing unsanitary habits like: dumping waste...

NW Initiative Creates Exemplary Civic Infrastructure

Posted on April 1, 2015 by Roshan Bliss

Recently, NCDD Board member John Backman wrote a guest piece on the CommunityMatters blog highlighting a great civic infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest called the Thriving Communities Initiative. TCI is an interesting case study of successful civic infrastructure, and John’s article pulls out some key lessons we can learn from it. You can read his piece below or find the original here.

Civic Infrastructure You Can See

Sometimes the raw materials of civic infrastructure are there but the connections are missing. Sometimes the connections are there but nobody sees them.

South Whidbey falls in the latter category. The residents of this Washington State community – about 20,000 people on the southern portion of Whidbey Island in Puget Sound – know one another well. Local organizations often work on similar issues. If any community would know its civic infrastructure, South Whidbey would.

And still the videos, highlighting unique and compelling community projects around the theme of food, surprised everyone.

One way to think of civic infrastructure is as “the underlying social structure – activities, meetings, community groups, etc. – that brings people together to address their challenges.” Despite all that activity, even the most robust civic infrastructures can go unnoticed… until a group arises to bring them to light.

“We all get so involved in our work that we sometimes don’t even acknowledge the wonderful overlaps,” said Jerry Millhon, executive director of the Whidbey Institute. “Video can showcase these connections and how powerful they could be.”

The videos were the first project of the institute’s Thriving Communities Initiative, whose mission is to connect and support grassroots leaders within and across communities in the Cascadian bioregion (which includes parts of Washington, Oregon, and northern California). Thriving Communities was born amid the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis, when a question emerged for Millhon and his Whidbey colleagues: how could communities thrive and be resilient in such difficult times?

The first seven videos, produced in 2012, depicted unique and compelling community projects happening in South Whidbey. Since the theme of that year revolved around food, so did the video stories.

“The stories answered the question ‘How is food connecting people in a way that allows the community to thrive?’” said Millhon. “We saw many stories around dignity and respect and a sense of belonging – stories of food banks and community gardens. Food is a connective material.”

The project ended up connecting people far beyond South Whidbey. Thriving Communities used the videos as a launch point for its first conference, which more than 100 people attended – including Jeff Vander Clute, the co-founder of Thrive Napa Valley, who has been participating in Thriving Communities since its inception.

“The gathering promoted the kind of conversation and connection that inspired people to go home and do great things in their communities,” Vander Clute said.

The annual conferences have continued to inspire great things. At one gathering, grassroots leaders learned about Supportland, a rewards program that encourages consumers to shop local and local businesses to share customers; three communities have started Supportland-type programs as a result. An innovative model for food banks, presented at a Thriving Communities conference, is now the norm in a number of Northwest locations.

As effective as they are, the videos and conferences are not the only ways in which Thriving Communities fosters connections and makes them visible. The initiative is building an online library with a range of resources, including profiles of organizations engaged in effective projects. A new website and social media presence enable even far-flung communities to connect with one another. Whidbey Institute leaders are seeking out ways for Thriving Communities to collaborate with other community organizations.

The initiative continues to focus its efforts on a specific theme each year. From food in 2012, the team shifted to “living local economy” in 2013 and to health in 2014. This year’s videos tell the story of how different aspects of health create a thriving community.

As for the future of Thriving Communities, Millhon envisions many years, and many themes, to come.

“There is a hunger and energy around this work from communities, and it isn’t going away,” he said. “So much is going on within 100 miles of the institute. Even so, we don’t want to get too far out over our skis; for this to work, it must preserve a regional focus and the grassroots feeling it brings.”

You can find the original version of this CommunityMatters blog piece at www.communitymatters.org/blog/civic-infrastructure-you-can-see.

Intersector Toolkit: Tools for Cross-Sector Collaboration

Posted on April 1, 2015 by NCDD Community

This 31-page Toolkit (2014) is the cornerstone of The Intersector Project’s work. It provides practical knowledge for practitioners in every sector to implement their own intersector initiatives. At The Intersector Project, we think of a toolkit as a resource that provides actionable guidance on how to solve a problem. Toolkits can be broad or narrow in focus, providing general guidance or sector-, industry-, or issue- specific guidance.

In a cross-sector context, toolkits assist practitioners in navigating the differences in languages, cultures, and work practices that exist across sectors, differences that can prove challenging to align when pursuing shared goals in a consensus-oriented environment. Our Toolkit is designed to be process-specific, rather than issue- or sector-specific because we believe there are common elements to all successful cross-sector collaborations and because we want to ensure that our Toolkit is accessible to practitioners working on a broad range of problems in varying types of collaborations.

Our Toolkit is composed of 17 tools organized into four stages of Diagnosis, Design, Implementation, and Assessment. It has been crafted as a flexible handbook that guides practitioners’ thinking on when and how to implement a specific tool, regardless of the practitioners’ sector affiliations. Each tool describes an action that practitioners can take together to help forge successful collaborations. These tools are not static. We encourage practitioners to select the tools that are most appropriate for their project stage and partnership structure, and to use them repeatedly at different stages when needed.

To date, this resource is informed by our library of case studies and correlating leadership interviews, literature reviews that address the theories and practices that characterize cross-sector collaboration, and in-depth analysis of similar guiding resources in the fields of collective impact, public-private partnerships, and other collaborative frameworks.

We consider this Toolkit a living document, which we are continually improving based on practitioner feedback. If you have suggestions on how to further enhance this resource, please share them with us at research[at]intersector[dot]com.

More about The Intersector Project
The Intersector Project is a New York-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that seeks to empower practitioners in the government, business, and non-profit sectors to collaborate to solve problems that cannot be solved by one sector alone. We provide free, publicly available resources for practitioners from every sector to implement collaborative solutions to complex problems. We take forward several years of research in collaborative governance done at the Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School and expand on that research to create practical, accessible resources for practitioners. Follow on Twitter @theintersector.

Resource Link: http://intersector.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/The-Intersector-Project-Toolkit.pdf

This resource was submitted by Neil Britto, the Executive Director at The Intersector Project via the Add-a-Resource form.

Judgement

Posted on March 31, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

The phenomena of judging people is fascinating.

In face-to-face conversation, for example, I find it common to say things like, “this is a judgement-free zone.”

And I think that’s important.

After all, I’m in no position to judge anybody for anything. I have my own faults, my own quirks, my own self; any of which could easily be put under scrutiny and fall short of someone else’s perfection.

So I don’t judge.

Except when I do.

Let’s be honest: if I’m out on the street, surrounded by strangers, I judge the hell out of everybody. That girl who pushed the “walk light” button and crossed the street without waiting – I judged her. That guy wearing – what is he wearing? – I judged the hell out of him. The person who wrote an article about her gentrifying love for my home town – you better believe I judged her.

I judge people all the time. Faceless, nameless people. Anybody I actually know – real people – get a pass. After all, we’ve all been there, right? Who am I to judge?

I imagine there must be something healthy about judging. Something satisfying to the soul.

A friend told me today that she “hates everyone.”

I say the same sometimes.

Except, of course, I don’t really hate everyone. It’s just a general sense of antagonism towards the world.

It’s the kind of thing you say when the world is just too much.

And we all know the world can be too much some times.

And I suppose that’s how it is with judging. You can be open minded. You can be accepting of all types of people doing all sorts of things. You can refuse to sit in judgement of the real people you meet.

But you still need that outlet. That general feeling of superiority over something. Even if it comes from silently judging a stranger for something you know you’ve done before. There’s something cathartic about it, I suppose.

The real task, then, is to find the appropriate time to judge, the appropriate way to judge. When it’s solely an internal experience completely divorced from the reality of another person.

Is that possible, I wonder? Is it then okay to judge?

Either way, it’s all good, I suppose. After all – I don’t judge.

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