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Strategy for Civic Engagement
Last updated
1/28/04
by Peter Block
Critical Distinctions
Much of our effort to improve community
is organized around conversations of problem solving, deficiencies,
holding others accountable, and creating change through leadership,
legislation, and program driven improvement.
We bet on the future by identifying
problems, assessing their cause, and developing action plans which lead
to tangible investments and programs. This is a desire to control the
future through specifically identified destinations and blueprints to
reach that future. This has the side effect of encouraging citizens to
turn their future over to specialized experts, full time implementers,
and formal leaders.
An alternative is to organize around
conversations of possibility, gifts, holding ourselves accountable, and
inviting change through citizenship, engagement, and being pulled
forward by an alternative future as it emerges.
This alternative approach is a bet on a
future where we recognize and reframe problems as symptoms, avoid
assessing causes, postpone tangible investments and programs, and invest
in the intangible assets, which we call civic engagement and social
capital. This is a strategy to create a future through a shift in
context and language, a shift in how we engage each other when we come
together, and a shift in how we think about the physical
architecture within which we live.
To be more specific:
1. We commonly cite as problems
Inadequate Education, Weak Local Economy and Low Income Population, Low
Public Safety, Worsening Environment, Inadequate Health Care,
Underutilized or Deteriorating Housing Stock, Parochial vs. Regional
Planning.
Yet if we continue to treat these
conditions as problems, there will be no breakthroughs. There can be no
real shift if we act on them in the existing context using the existing
language. At best we will achieve marginal improvements or slow the
deterioration.
The first shift in context and language
is to recognize and name these conditions as symptoms of the breakdown
in community. This shift then leads us to explore what breakthrough in
community would be required to replace a breakdown in community. And
this exploration means that community is not only seen and related to as
a place or an outcome, but is now also seen and related to as an
experience.
2. We can see the evidence of the
limitations of trying to problem solve symptoms by looking at the
actions we have invested in that have made an inadequate difference.
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In Education, higher teacher
salaries, smaller class size, and arguments over superior pedagogy
have not produced markedly better outcomes for students.
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In Health Care, privatization, cost
control, and quality initiatives leave us a nation paying a 40%
premium for health care and ranking tenth in quality among benchmark
nations.
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Our investments in public housing,
empowerment zones and urban renewal have created as many community
problems as they have solved.
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More policing and better technology have
limited impact on street safety in vulnerable neighborhoods.
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We are now reversing policies to improve
the environment, or more often exporting harm to the environment to
low income locations.
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We continue to be concerned primarily
about our own back yard while regional thinking and planning continue
to be a struggle.
The actions we have invested in might
best be called false positives. They are positive in that they reflect
our care and concern, they are false in that they indicate results that
do not materialize. They made a prediction they could not fulfill.
Without shifting the context in which our
actions occur, we cannot expect better leadership, more funding, new
policy and legislation, and tighter program management to make a
significant difference.
The Means of Civic Engagement
There is evidence that what makes a
significant difference in reducing the symptoms and achieving authentic,
positive returns on our tangible investments is the extent to which
citizens take personal and communal responsibility for the well being of
the whole. We might name this the condition where we live within a
community of accountability. Putnam, Rae, McKnight, Alexander, and
others teach us that this condition is almost always associated with
high civic engagement and social capital.
Civic engagement as used here is
much broader and more demanding than the usual lens of getting out the
vote, creating pride-building special events, and marketing the benefits
of involvement.
Civic Engagement is the individual and
communal choice of how we choose to be together. It is to collectively
create the power to cause a breakthrough in the social capital of
community.
This kind of civic engagement occurs as a
shift in three dimensions of community life:
A. It begins
with a shift in language, which correlates with a shift in
context. The language and subsequent conversations that occur in the
public debate and when citizens are assembled have the power to shift
the experience of our future. This shift is towards:
1. Possibility rather than problem solving
2. Gifts rather than deficiencies
3. Ownership rather than blame
4. Commitment rather than barter
5. Invitation rather than mandate
B. This shift
in context and language is most powerful when it occurs alongside a
shift in associational life. Associations take the lead in
creating the future by shifting the conversation and bringing citizens
together in more powerful and intimate ways. Also community is built
through the extent to which associations associate with each other. The
existence of an Association of Associations is a major determinant of
high social capital. Business, Health Care, Education and Government are
players in community life, but they are system constrained, often
controlled by agencies from the outside, and show up as employees who
operate mostly through mandate. It is the self-created, self governed
and volunteer nature of associational life that gives it the power to
transform a community.
C. The third
element that creates civic engagement is found in the physical and
social architecture of the community. Physical architecture concerns
the public spaces where people congregate, and the design of the
interior space of buildings, even the structure of the rooms where we
assemble to learn, heal, worship, eat, and entertain. Social
architecture is about the way we occupy the physical space. We need to
enter these spaces with the expectation of decreasing the isolation,
passivity and entitlement of those assembled and increasing their
connectedness, activism and accountability.
Together these represent a blueprint for
the present moment rather than some future we never quite get to. They
can be thought of as a design for emergence. When these conditions are
put in place, civic engagement will emerge naturally in the every-day
activity of citizens.
The
Strategy
Focus on Associational Life.
Bring together the leadership of associational life as conveners of a
long series of conversations. Be inclusive of government, business,
education, and health care, but stay focused on associations. This means
naming them, listing them, convening them. Include those informal
associations on the margin, for our sense of community is engaged most
in that place where those on the margin are brought into the center.
Who Is in the Room?
We need a constant reminder that we are developing an emergent strategy
and not a destination strategy. This means the most critical decisions
are who needs to be in the room and what is the right conversation for
them to have. We look for diverse rooms -- diverse both in those at the
center and those who live on the margin of the community; diverse
especially in the dimensions of economic and class. These spectrums of
power are the diversity the problem-solving culture does not want to
confront.
Design the Invitation.
A shift in context and language occurs in the
invitation we offer to each event. The invitation declares that this
event will require something unique, namely, the willingness to postpone
problem solving and negotiation, the willingness to invest in personal
connection, the active participation in conversations of possibility,
gifts, ownership, dissent, and commitment. We state in the inviting
process that we want you in the room; you come by choice, and here is
the context within which you enter and which you agree to abide by.
Choose the Language.
There is a social architecture that becomes a template
for gatherings. It treats reflection and dialogue as an action step, and
relationship and insight as outcomes. This acknowledges that learning
and doing are essential and really one in the same thing. They become
the new context for our conversations, displacing the old context of
knowing and deciding, which have become obstacles to the kind of change
we seek.
Slowly organize around emergent
initiatives. At some point we need to focus on
symptoms of safety, economy, education, health care, housing and
development, and the environment. But these become community and
citizens’ initiatives, not professional objectives. These initiatives
proceed within the context of invitation, emergent tactics, the language
of engagement, insight, reflection, and relationship as steps that
constitute action. The professionals, or the systems, are part of these
initiatives, even becoming conveners, but they hold one seat at
the table, not the seat at the table.
Summary
These
ideas can be challenging because they treat what we thought was
interesting but less critical, such as an invitation, the process of a
meeting, the choice of language, the shape of a room, as central and
decisive. The ideas also can be seen as a way to redistribute power from
formal leaders to citizens. It is not about a shift in power but rather
a way to produce power. Power in these terms is the capacity to make a
difference in our lives and the life of our community. Our communities
will become reconciled and work for all, when more and more people act
as owners and stakeholders, which is what comes from this kind of power.
None of this is an argument against our
existing efforts to rebuild and grow our communities. It is more an
intention to shift the context within which these efforts occur. The
context of engagement and possibility is really intended to reengage the
large number of citizens that now sit as bystanders to the struggle for
healthy communities and a living democracy. It is intended to deepen the
experience and demands of democracy beyond the current belief that
democracy is defined by the power to vote and recall our leaders.
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