It has been almost a year since I started writing blog items for the State of the Re:Union website. I’ve both enjoyed it and found it useful in my work. A lot of what I do at the National Civic League is to disseminate stories of positive community change, stories that typically don’t get the same coverage in the news media that stories about celebrities behaving badly do, or politicians or the weather.

But writing about these communities is only part of my job so I can’t always do justice to the many, many towns, cities, neighborhoods and regions we interact with through the All-America City Award and other programs. Blogging for SOTRU has forced me to focus on one such community every week and that has been good.

And I have to admit. I’m beginning to run out of stories. I’ve pretty much touched on all the finalists and winners from 2011 and some from earlier years. I was shaking my head over what to write about this week when I heard about Sam Lee and the story of Mililani Town, the only Hawaiian community to be named an All-America City.

Samuel Sang Hoy Lee returned to his native Hawaii in 1981 after a 26-year stint in the U.S Foreign Service having served in Sicily, Germany, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan. He was the chairman of the Mililani-Waipio-Melemanu Neighborhood Board when an environmental crisis erupted in his idyllic, tree-line, “perfectly planned” community.

Traces of ethylene dibromide (EDB) and dibromochloropropane (DBCP), pesticide runoff from the nearby pineapples fields, were found in the local water supply. One of the town’s five wells had to be closed because of contamination, the first of several to come.

“Most of the government agencies involved tried at first to downplay the health threat,” related Lee, in his 1985 presentation to the All-America City jury in Cincinnati. “Often supported by the scientific community and the university, their slogan to residents was, ‘Don’t panic!’” But one department head committed a pretty serious gaffe during a community meeting. “Personally, I’m not worried,” he said. “I drink Scotch.”

The community mounted a letter-writing campaign and held a series of nearly two dozen local meetings, eventually wearing down the resistances of the powers that be. “We approached the problem within the perspective of our times,” explained Lee. “We helped government agencies realize that the standards for pesticide use accepted a generation ago were simply not accepted today.”

Community pressure led to the mayor of Honolulu declaring the contamination to be a threat to health and safety, which triggered the release of a $3 million emergency remediation fund, but community pressure also pushed the developer of the subdivision paying for a new carbon filtration system, which freed up the public funding for other water projects. Community pressure also led the EPA to issue an emergency ruling suspending the use of EDB in pineapple fields.

In the course of this struggle, Lee noted, the neighbors gradually began to employ a “secret weapon,” which he described to the AAC jury as “ohana spirit.” Ohana means family in Hawaii, but not the immediate family, the extended family, the clan, the community. The water crisis had “infused the town with the ohana spirit—a sense of the whole community pulling together.”

As for Lee, after leading the successful community uprising, he ran for a seat in the Hawaii House of Representatives, was elected and served five terms before retiring from public office in 1996. He passed away last week at the age of 81.

I never met him, but reading a typewritten transcript of his presentation to the 1985 All-America City the vivid language and good humor, made me smile. In writing about civic engagement, it’s hard to avoid using and overusing verbal abstractions like “deliberation,” “democratic governance,” “public engagement,” and the like. Ohana spirit, though, that’s pretty good.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

In an article for a special issue of the National Civic Review on the civics of sustainability a couple of years ago, Joel Mills, director of the Center for Communities by  Design, noted a correlation between civic capacity and environmental sustainability.

He later blogged on our All-America City Award site about Dubuque, Iowa, a city I’ve mentioned in a previous post for its success in engaging residents in large scale strategic planning sessions. As Joel noted, Dubuque’s efforts in the sustainability field were getting noticed. The National Trust for Historic Preservation named Dubuque as one of “three partner cities for its new Green Lab initiative to develop best practices in sustainability and preservation.”

Also, “the Obama administration included the city on its tour of America to highlight urban success stories. IBM recently announced that Dubuque will serve as its first Smart City partnership in the United States, with the hope that it can develop a model for other communities regarding energy efficiency.”

Lakewood, Colorado, an All-Amereica City in 2011 is another good example. Lakewood has done a lot to engage residents in budgeting and planning efforts. So with a hat tip to Joel, let me point out that Lakewood, an All-America City in 2011, is also green pioneer.

It all began a few years ago when the Learning Source, one of the country’s biggest adult literacy programs, realized its utility costs were higher than that of a 50-unit apartment building. Worried about the rising costs, the Lakewood-based nonprofit organization began looking for information about energy efficiency.

A conversation with members of the Alameda Community Gateway Association led to more conversations and, eventually, the founding of a “Greening Lakewood Business Partnership,” a public-private collaboration with a twofold mission: 1) to bring energy efficiency to the more than 1,500 existing office and commercial buildings in Lakewood; 2) to provide job training for local residents, including military veterans, particularly those returning from the current overseas conflicts.

First in line for an energy makeover was the Learning Source, which reduced its utility costs from $3,500 a month to $200. The renovations included exterior building insulation, a multistage boiler system, an efficient condensing unit and upgrades to the air handler. An energy management system, solar lighting and photovoltaic and thermal solar panels on two sections of new roof also were added.

City government takes the lead in facilitating relationships with the utility company, the banking community and the Governor’s Energy Office. The Better Business Bureau is providing marketing for the partnership. Other partners include Red Rocks Community College, the Alameda Gateway Community Association, Veterans Green Jobs, the Jefferson County Workforce Center and the Better Business Bureau, each agency has played a unique role in developing the program.

As Lakewood Mayor Bob Murphy sees it, the partnership is both a win-win and a “great catalyst” for the community. “It creates jobs, particularly for veterans, provides the training and encourages sustainability,” he says. “Most importantly, it helps our small businesses. Money saved on energy bills can be reinvested in inventories and new hiring.”

Red Rocks Community Colleges developed an energy-auditing, retrofitting and financing curriculum for students. Under the direction of experienced proctors, the students gain field experience needed to pass industry auditing certification tests by conducting the free audits for businesses. The Veterans for Green Jobs mobilize the military veterans to enter the Red Rocks program. The Jefferson County Workforce Center coordinates funds providing paid internships for the students.

Another local Greening effort is the Sustainable Neighborhoods Program for homeowners and apartment dwellers and owners. The program creates partnerships between the city and various neighborhoods to complete projects, host workshops or design other creative ways to engage in sustainable practices.

The city gives annual Sustainability Awards to inspire community members and hosts an annual Earth Week festival that includes an expo of displays, hands-on demonstrations, live music and information on sustainable practices, lectures, tours and cleanup and educational activities.

Two things Dubuque and Lakewood have in common is that both communities have long histories in engaging groups and individuals in creative partnerships. Both cities recognize that they can’t go it alone, and the ability to work across boundaries is essential in tackling difficult challenges such as environmental sustainability.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

A funny thing happened a few years ago when I was sitting down to write the “Note from the Editor” for a special issue of the National Civic Review on “Diversity, Social Capital, and Immigrant Integration.” A colleague e-mailed me a January 26, 2009, article in Newsweek about Lewiston, Maine, a winner of the All-America City Award in 2007. The article is entitled, “The Refugees That Saved Lewiston.”

The author, Jesse Ellison, begins by describing how Lewiston, once a “bustling mill town,” had been shrinking since the 1970s. Jobs had vanished, the population was aging, and the downtown area was falling into disrepair. “That was before a family of Somali refugees discovered Lewiston in 2001 and began spreading the word to immigrant friends and relatives that housing was cheap and it looked like a good place to build new lives and raise children in peace.

“Since then the place has been transformed. Per capita income has soared, and crime rates have dropped.” There’s a great quote from Chip Morrison, president of the local chamber of commerce. “No one could have dreamed this,” he says. “Not even me, and I’m an optimist.”

From a cursory reading of the Newsweek article, you might even think that every fading New England mill town should go out and recruit some East African refugees, but of course, it’s not that easy. Lewiston won the All-America City Award in part because of its innovative New Mainers Partnership, a collaborative effort of the cities of Lewiston and Portland, Catholic Charities, and the State of Maine.

In the beginning Lewiston was ill-prepared to deal with this new population, not having had an existing refugee resettlement agency, or for that matter a considerable immigrant population when the Somalis began to trickle in. But somehow, they managed to turn a potential liability into an asset.

We like to think of ourselves as a “nation of immigrants,” or at least John F. Kennedy did when he chose that phrase for the title of a book published posthumously in 1964. It might be more accurate to say, however, that we are a nation of immigrants and “receiving communities” in which succeeding waves of the former have been met with decidedly mixed emotions by the latter.

Benjamin Franklin apparently complained about the growing population of Germans, who he thought had different values and even different complexions. This pattern of ambivalence has continued through subsequent migrations—the Irish, Asians, Italians, Eastern Europeans and Latin Americans.

The disorientation that many receiving communities began to experience in the early late 1990s and 2000s was a difference in magnitude, about one half a million a year, as opposed to about a mere 200,000 in 1960. Also, until the 1990s, there were effectively only six “gateway” states for recent immigrants—California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey and Illinois.

But now small towns and suburbs which had never experienced challenges and benefits associated with large-scale immigration were beginning to come to terms with the new realities—multiple languages spoken in their schools, interpreters needed at county hospitals and courts, religious practices that required accommodations in the workplace, to name a few.

“We are only as strong as our willingness to work together,” noted Statesville, North Carolina, Mayor Costi Kutteh when he revisited the city’s vision statement a few years ago. Residents and local government recommitted themselves to addressing a widening divide between the south side of the city and the “other side,” which was home to many of the community’s rapidly growing population of Spanish speakers. One strategy was the development of Mi Familia Institute to help the city’s Spanish speaking newcomers. Its program of financial planning and social services worked to strengthen family and community ties.

In the 2000s, the community impacts of immigration would become a bigger focus of the National Civic League’s work. Diversity and immigration programs are often featured in community presentations during the annual All-America City awards program. Recent examples would be Lewiston, Maine; Aurora, Colorado; Statesville, North Carolina and Fort Wayne, Indiana and Scott City, Kansas. Through our Community Success program we were part of a statewide immigrant integration program in Colorado.

When the economy took a nose dive in 2008, the immigration issue went from begin a “hot button” political issue to being a back burner issue, although it seems to have cropped up quite a bit in the Republican primary debates. For the most part, however, the poor economy meant the jobs magnet pulling immigrants in from across the world was less powerful.
But here at the league, we were never concerned with the debate over federal immigration policy. Our concern was always: how communities are responding to the challenges and opportunities of being one of these new gateways—from Lewiston, Maine, to Statesville, North Carolina.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

Entertainment. Most of us think of it in terms of television, smartphones, laptops and iPads. At least this is how many incorporate it into daily living. In fact, it would not take very long to look around and find toddlers, children and adolescents glued to electronic devices. However, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recent study findings warn that this habit can be detrimental to the development of young children having too much exposure to these devices. To help combat this, State of the Re:Union contributor John McKnight of Abundant Community offers some great and easy ideas on how we can “unplug” and get  back to the origins of entertainment. To read the original text in its entirety, click here.

It may be that most of us are not alarmed by “tube-nurtured” children because we think that what is happening is entertainment — innocent and pleasurable. Therefore, we don’t recognize the fact that the tube is replacing play and genuine entertainment created by children, families and communities. In fact, the word “entertainment” is derived from the Old French which meant “hold together.” Its essence is about relationships between people rather than people and “tubes.”

There is an interesting monograph first printed in 1928 titled “Baraboo 1850’s to 1860’s Pioneer Festivities.” It describes how people entertained themselves in the decade of the 1850’s in the small Wisconsin town of Baraboo. The monograph documents entertainments produced by the residents including (these are just a few in many depictions):

•    Fourth of July celebrations that went on all day and evening.
•    New Year’s day celebrated as a time of gift giving and calling on neighbors and friends.
•    Berrying parties and apple-bees where everyone joined together in forests and orchards.
•    Afternoon tea parties.
•    Public dances of every kind, with local musicians providing the music.
•    Village gatherings to watch the dancing of Native Americans who still lived in the area.
•    Pound parties where everyone attending brought a pound of food to be shared with a poor family.
•    Festivals throughout the community held frequently to raise money for good causes.
•    Park festivities where public gatherings of every kind took place in the village.

This is a history of entertainment, festivity and play that was produced by everyday people in so many ways that most days had at least one entertainment. People knew how to create activities that would be fun, inspiring, social and informative. In that sense they were capable of creating a community’s enjoyment.

In a “tube-focused” community, many people have lost the capacity to produce an enjoyable life. Instead they are consumers of commercial “entertainment.” And because so many of them have never engaged in creating and participating in entertainment, there’s no need for us to develop our talents. We pay to watch people with talent on a tube. And everyone knows that “tubing” has nothing to do with a festive life. Instead it is a sad retreat from the joy of using our abilities to celebrate each other by coming together in a thousand exciting, happy, supportive, friend-making, talent-displaying ways.

So, supposing your 2012 New Year’s resolutions included personal leadership in creating an enjoyable neighborhood. We can begin by recognizing that we still know how to celebrate weddings, birthdays, graduations and holidays with our relatives. The people of Baraboo in the 1850’s have created a community celebration menu for us to build upon. We can join together with our neighbors to have gardening, tea, quilting and book parties. We can open our houses of worship to all kinds of neighborhood celebrations. We can create opportunities to dance together, sing together, make music together and raise money together. We can join in enjoying the talents of our children and debates of public issues.

In all these ways, we can become a real community where we know everyone by name and experience their unique talents. Best of all, we can become real neighbors celebrating life together rather than living isolated lives in houses where electric tubes create a counterfeit life for us and our families.

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John McKnight is an expert on communities. An Ohio native who currently lives near Chicago, he has spent decades organizing communities and researching them, primarily in the Windy City itself. In the course of his career, he mobilized neighborhoods during the civil rights movement, wrote several books about community development, created a center for urban affairs at Northwestern University, and even taught the current President a thing or two about advocacy. (Yes, it’s true: way back when, a young and eager Barack Obama interned at McKnight’s training program for community organizers in southeast Chicago). If that’s not enough, he recently co-authored a book called “The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods.”

State of the Re:Union will be featuring pieces from John McKnight and Peter Block of Abundant Community every other Monday.

Thirty years ago, the main vehicle for citizen participation—other than voting—was the public hearing. Public hearings are well and good, but they often serve as little more than a steam-valve for irate citizens to vent. In fact, the very term “public hearing” is considered by many civic experts to be something of a misnomer.

Dan Kemmis, a former Missoula mayor and speaker of the Montana House of Representatives, said it best in this book, Community and the Politics of Place: “Out of everything that happens at a public hearing, the emoting, the attempts to persuade the decision-maker, the presentation of facts, the one element that is almost totally lacking is anything that might be characterized as public hearing.”

More and more communities are discovering new and betters ways of talking about (and hearing about) public issues. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for instance, an all-volunteer organization known as Portsmouth Listens conducts regular “study circles” on important local issues.

The study circles process works this way: The small group, consensus-based discussions of 8-12 people take place over a four-week period, meeting once a week. Then they produced a written report on their findings, which was published in the local paper, the Portsmouth Herald.

Portsmouth Listens began as a one-time effort to mobilize parents and students to deal with issues of bullying and violence in schools. Local attorney Jim Noucas and a group of citizens contacted the Study Circles Resource Center (now known as Everyday Democracy) to help put together a dialogue on the subject. More than 12 years later, the city is still using study circles for local dialogues, most recently, an extensive dialogue and report on the city’s budget challenges.

It was Portsmouth city manager John Bohenko’s idea to use the study circles process to review the city’s master plan, the document that guides policy on such issues as development, open space protection, affordable housing, transportation and infrastructure needs.

The master plan involved over 400 citizens over a period of two years. The process led to the development of a visioning statement and set of recommendations adopted by city government.

Portsmouth Listens has also held candidate forums using a dialogue-based roundtable to allow meaningful interaction between voters and candidates.

Portsmouth has a nine-member council with an average of 18 candidates running every two years. So the roundtables were divided into five groups of two or three and the voters into groups of 12-15. Each voter group was given 15 minutes to engage in a roundtable with the candidate groups. Each candidate was given three written questions and their answers are printed in the Herald. The questions were formulated by city officials, former council members and school board members.

Portsmouth Listens co-chair Jim Noucas says study circles have changed how the local government does business. The city is much more likely to consult the public on issues before evaluating the solutions, and the public is much more likely to support solutions that have been developed through deliberation. “It’s not just showing up and giving your opinion,” he says. “You have to be able to work with others, and people walk away with their opinions changed.”

The group is now working to organize a “New Hampshire Listens” to foster dialogue and deliberation on statewide issues and to get more communities in the state to conduct their own local study circles.

You can link here to read a longer article on Portsmouth Listens on the Everyday Democracy website.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

I’ve been working on revisions for a new version of the Civic Index, a tool created by the National Civic League to help communities assess their civic strengths and weaknesses. In the process, I’ve been looking back at some of the best examples I know of communities doing innovative things with civic engagement.

In general there are two approaches to local public engagement. One is to convene temporary deliberative processes to do strategic planning, issue-oriented dialogues, conflict resolution or problem solving initiatives. Another is to embed public participation processes in local government with permanent neighborhood councils or other structures.

In Sarasota County, Florida, local officials and philanthropic leaders found a third way. Concerned about the negative and unfocused nature of discussions over a controversial bridge project, they decided to form a nonprofit to handle the county’s public participation and dialogue strategies, SCOPE, Sarasota County Plans for Civic Excellence.

“Government tends to do certain things well,” noted Tim Dutton, SCOPE’s executive director, when I interviewed him in 2009. “Encouraging people to engage in rich dialogues has tended not to be one of those things. SCOPE can help out a little bit here because we’re not the government. We are being asked by government to convene around issues now, because we can create an invitation that has a different reaction than what happens when government makes the invitation.”

SCOPE has convened dialogues on such issues as traffic and congestion, aging, affordable housing, school dropout rates, mental health, family violence and community change. Last year, the group convened a summit on environmental action. Sometimes the organization produces short documentaries on topic areas as part of its “Stories Project.”

Interestingly, SCOPE studies and summits have led to the creation of nearly a dozen nonprofit spinoff groups to work in different issue areas, including a community housing trust to buy housing that can be preserved as affordable. A conversation/study on school attendance got the local school district to change the way its handles its dropout policies, and a group of mental health organizations launched a $9 million initiative focusing on children.

Additionally, the organization undertakes what it calls community report cards, looking at a number of indicators that reflect different facets of community life. In 2008, the report card led to the convening of a summit for Environmental Action.

SCOPE was one of the organizers of the Grassroots Leadership Initiative, an effort to identify and develop leaders from under-served communities. One graduate of the program joined the country housing authority board. Another became a PTO president. One became a program associate at a local foundation.

SCOPE has helped change the way citizens and activists think about community solutions, said Dutton. In the early years, recommendations from the conversations tended to produce documents that began with the words, “The County should do….” “We now talk in terms of what we have to do to grow active citizens,” he explained. “How can I have the capacity to make a difference in my own neighborhood? At best we are looking at government being an active partner.”

Today SCOPE receives funding from three area foundations, Sarasota County and (to a smaller extent) four municipalities, the United Way and various groups and individuals. It was one of the three projects the county listed when it was named a finalist in the 2008 All-America City Awards.

At the NCL, we think it is important for communities to convene citizens in large-scale efforts to do problem solving or planning, so people can be engaged in local issues year-round, not just on Election Day. Sometimes we help them do it themselves through our Community Success programs. Often we work with local government officials to kick start a project.

But these days city funds are tight and more and more communities may need to find new ways to finance and organize ambitious civic engagement projects. SCOPE could be an interesting model for other communities.

Counties, towns and cities throughout the United States are finding that more traditional ways of governing and garnering public participation are no longer as effective as they once were. We as an American public are growing more concerned — and, consequentially, more aware — about things going on in our communities. Therefore, there no longer resides an easy willingness to accept that which does not work anymore. That being the case, what are some of the ways your community is changing to make local government work for the good of the people. Use the box below to brag on your civic and civil growth.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.