State of the Re:Union contributor Mike McGrath of the National Civic League shares the logic behind how such a simplistic and classicly iconic game, Pac-Man, is helping youths in L.A.’s inner city to learn in-depth understanding and engage in critical thinking regarding digital media and its role in their futures.

Source: anticool.com

I read an article in the New York Times recently that noted that some of the top execs at Silicon Valley firms were sending their kids to private schools where the students aren’t allowed to use computers.

Learning is about using your own brain, not some artificial intelligence, so it makes some sense. I sometimes think Google, Wikipedia and IMDB are atrophying my memory. But if tech execs are really sending their kids to computer-free schools it’s more than a little ironic. Will the luxury of not becoming computer literate until middle school become a new badge of affluence, like summering in the Hamptons?

I ask this because out in the everyday world, nonprofits, foundations and educators are trying to figure out how to get kids from low income communities to use more computers, more broadband, more devices—and to be more savvy and critical about the media they encounter in everyday life.

As one activist from the tribal areas of San Diego County pointed out in an interview I did a while ago, you can’t even apply for a job at Home Depot if you can’t use a computer. In fact, new information and technologies (ICTs) have tremendous potential for empowering kids and narrowing the gaps between haves and have-nots in our communities.

That’s the premise, at any rate, of the most recent issue of the National Civic Review, which is in its one-hundredth year of publishing. The issue attacks this question from a number of different angles, but among the most original is Katynka Martinez’s essay, “Pac-Man Meets the Minutemen: Video Games by Los Angeles Latino Youth.” The article relates lessons learned from a project in the Pico Union and Korea Town sections of Los Angeles to teach kids media literacy and creativity by having them design their own versions of the classic, first generation computer game, Pac-Man.

Why Pac-Man? That’s part of the fun of this article. The students, who attended a high school just west of downtown L.A., thought they were going to work on something comparable to Guitar Hero, say, or Counter Strike. “Instead they were told that they’d be creating a version of Pac-Man,” writes Martinez, . They grumbled upon hearing the news. The 1980s game is pretty simple, does not involve serious acts of violence, and does not feature scantily clad women. For that matter, it features no humans. The storyline—chomping on pellets and the occasional fruit while running away from ghosts—is quite different from the actions of professional athletes or skilled marksman. Pac-Man was an anomaly among space shooter games that were popular when it was released, and it continues to stand out when compared to contemporary games.”

The project began with students putting pencil to paper and creating maps of their neighborhoods and homes. Then they were asked to match this urban landscape with the Pac-Man maze. In one of the student games, Pac-Man became a boy who was helping a hot dog vendor in MacArthur Park who is being menaced by demonic hot dog chomping ducks. In another version, the hero is a boy running away from aggressive, alcoholic homeless men in his neighborhood. In a third version, an immigrant is being chased by anti-immigration “Minutemen” vigilantes.

The games allowed these students to reconstruct their own urban landscapes and grapple with issue and challenges people face in those neighborhoods in ways that defy the prevailing stereotypes from the media in all its forms, video games not excluded.

The goal is to help these students develop a critical distance from and understanding of digital media in general, and more specifically, games, which are being used these days for everything from on the job training at McDonald’s to Army recruitment.

“It is essential that today’s youth learn to deconstruct and read video games as they would a novel or a poem in school,” write Martinez. Educators and media activists should engage in productive conversations with youth to discover what attracts them to the game they play.”

While I’m on the subject of media, congratulations to Youth Radio, which recently won a Peabody Award. Another article in the review focuses on Youth Radio’s uses of mobile media.

The National Civic Review issue on technology and media was published with the support of ZeroDivide. Electronic versions of the articles are available free of charge at the Wiley Online Library.

Spin around in any direction and there is a 99 percent chance that what your eyes land on is somehow connected with the digital realm. There is very little in modern society that is not affected by digital media. Think about it, what is the role of digital media in your existence? What additional advice, experience or knowledge can be offered to those looking toward the future of digital media? We know that many readers have nuggets of wisdom just waiting to be heard, so what are you waiting for? Of course we want to know.

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 Haven for Community-based Problem Solving

Several years ago I was doing some research on civic innovation at the local government level. It wasn’t hard to find good examples, but many of them were old and out of date, or already familiar to the practitioners and researchers in the field of democratic governance and deliberative democracy. Part of my job was to find new examples, and one of the very best examples I found was River Haven.

For as long as anyone could remember, homeless people have camped out in the dry bed of the Ventura River, but with El Niño sitting off the coast of California, the weather was a lot wetter than usual, and the risk of flooding was high. Local officials decided they would have to more strictly enforce local ordinances against people camping in the Ventura River.

“The law, in its majestic equality,” quipped Anatole France, “forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” The law is the law, but in this case, city officials decided to do more than just enforce the local ordinances.

They also convened a public planning process to deal with the larger issue of homelessness. All the usual “stakeholders” (public safety, business owners, service providers and, of course, the homeless people themselves) were invited, but so were “non-stakeholders,” that is, ordinary citizens who were simply interested in helping address a critical community issue.

The problem was this: many homeless people in Ventura and elsewhere don’t want to stay in shelters. The rules are too strict. They can only be there for certain hours and they keep their things and pets. What’s more, some of the homeless people who camped in the riverbed thought of themselves as part of a community—and they didn’t want to lose that connection.

After a series of what Ventura City Manager Rick Cole described to me as a series of “non-productive meetings with deadlines growing ever-closer,” a local artist with a studio near the river, one of the non-stakeholders, made a suggestion. Why not set up a camp for the homeless somewhere other than in the riverbed?

A philanthropic organization called the Turning Point Foundation stepped forward to be the fiscal agent, and the city made available some land near the harbor. Patterned loosely on similar efforts in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, the camp was called “River Haven,” a self-governing tent village with more than two-dozen residents. The rules were clear—no drugs or alcohol, for instance, and there would be an elected council of residents to enforce them.

I was wondering recently, what had become of River Haven? But I was almost afraid to find out. Some inspiring stories are just too good to be true. Recently, however, I phoned Clyde Reynolds, executive director of the Turning Point Foundation, to find out.

He told me River Haven is still going strong, albeit with some significant changes. Tents have been replaced by geodesic domes, and the screening of residents has become more careful. People have to be serious about wanting to transition out of the camp and into a more permanent kind of housing. Also, and this isn’t surprising, really, the camp isn’t entirely self-governing. Today there is more direct regulation by foundation management.

Self-governing or not, River Haven was one of the most vivid and interesting stories of civic engagement and collaborative problem solving I found. Homelessness is a perfect example of what deliberative democracy types call a “wicked problem,” that is, a persistent, complex challenge for which there is no easy solution. Citizens met together, including the homeless themselves. They deliberated on a complex issue and came up with a list of proposals, River Haven being one of them, and that is community problem-solving at its best.

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 few years ago, I had a little problem with the voting. I’d signed up for a mail-in ballot and as soon as I did, I knew it was a huge mistake. All my adult life, I’ve been going through the civic ritual of showing up at the neighborhood polling place, being greeted by the friendly neighborhood poll worker, going into the little booth and casting my vote. As Election Day neared and I had yet to receive my mail ballot, I began to worry. What if it doesn’t show up in time? Can I go to the polling place anyway? What should I do? So who did I call? 311. The friendly guy on the other end of the 311 line answered my question and eased my anxieties about the late mail-in ballot.

In the late 1990s, the Federal Communications Commission came out with ruling giving local government a new tool, the “311” designation for non-emergency calls. The original idea was to take the pressure off of 911 call-in centers, which often got non-emergency calls from confused citizens. Hampton, Virginia, became one of the first cities in the country to create a 24-hour, seven day a week, one stop customer call center using 311. The goal was to provide customer service as quickly and efficiently as possible, minimizing the number of times citizens would have to hold on the phone and or by told to call another city department.

The 311 systems vary in quality and extent from city to city, and these days cities are cutting back on hours and services because of the budget crisis. But Hampton’s call center’s knowledge base allowed customer advocates to answer more than 4000 different questions about local government and other nearby public agencies. The system is based on keywords, allowing customer services advocates to quickly input questions and get the answer. It also gave the capability to directly issue work orders to handle problems such as potholes or downed streetlights.

The system has helped alleviate one of the biggest challenges in local government performance, the ignorance of many citizens about who does what, and thereby, who to call. In many regions, government services are dispersed between villages, townships, cities, counties and a myriad of special districts. Simply calling city hall, in other words, may result in nothing more than a referral to another agency or department. Now the customers/citizens have an easy task. When in doubt, simply call 311.

Calling 311: Somerville Mayor-Senator-Governor

Somerville, Massachusetts, a 2009 All-America, has a 24-hour 311 call center service allowing citizens to ask questions and make requests for service. Easy to answer questions are handled immediately. Others are answered in a timely manner through e-mail or a follow-up call, ensuring that citizens are not shunted from one department to another. Requests for service are entered into a database, given a tracking number so citizens can find out how things are proceeding.

In Somerville, the 311 system is a two-way street. The calls and work orders became an important source of data for the city’s data-driven performance management program, a system known as SomerStat, which was started by the city’s energetic mayor, Joseph Curtatone. The origins of SomerStat go back to 1994 and efforts by the New York City Police Department to link crime fighting efforts to timely, accurate data generated by police calls, computers and databases under the city’s CompStat program. Geographic information system software was used to pinpoint problem areas in the city and regular performance management meetings were held to ensure that resources were being deployed in the most efficient manner. The resulting drop in crime rates was dramatic, and other cities noticed. Baltimore created its CitiStats program using data to drive performance management in all city departments.

Somerville has added a new twist to the “stat” concept, combining it with good old fashion face to face meetings. Somerville began its ResiStat meetings in 2007 to complete the feedback loop between citizens and government. The comments and suggestions of residents are reported back to the SomerStat semiweekly data-driven performance evaluation meetings and compiled in an annual Resident Report that is published along with the official city budget.

Calling 311: NCL's All-American City Awards

As part of Somerville’s ResiStat” program, the mayor, the local alderman and other city officials meet with citizens in each of the city’s nine wards, which correspond roughly to neighborhoods, and five special interest groups (parents, young people and speakers of the city’s three main foreign languages—Spanish, Portuguese and Creole.) The goal of these public meetings is to present information generated through SomerStat, the city’s data-driven performance management system, and get feedback from citizens.

The 311 systems are great for answering questions quickly and easing the frustration of citizens who get tired of hearing, “sorry that’s not my department.” But at Somerville and other cities are proving, 311 can also help complete the information feedback loop between citizens and government, which is an important element of any thriving democracy.

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.

Lately I’ve been browsing the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading website, which has a feature called “Bright Spots,” a collection of local success stories about reading programs.

One of those bright spots is Morningside Elementary School in Brownsville, Texas. About 99 percent of the kids are Hispanic. About 99 percent are on the free or reduced-price lunch program (FARM). About 80 percent are Spanish speakers.

Students reading in Morningside Elementary's library

This is a demographic that typically haunts the less- than-excellent categories of statewide standardized performance tests. Not at Morningside. Quoting from the website:

“During exam time at Morningside Elementary, big posters appear with a simple message: 90%. ‘I expect everyone to get at least 90 percent on the test,’ says Principal Dolores Cisneros Emerson. Ambitious? Yes, but consider that 100 percent of Morningside third graders — virtually all from low-income families —were reading at grade level on the state assessment test last year, and 55 percent were commended for having no more than three questions wrong. Emerson expects excellence from Morningside students, no matter where they come from. Benchmarking, regrouping, individualized instruction, tutorials, and relentless optimism get results.”

“It’s true,” said Morningside Principal Delores Cisneros Emerson, when I asked her about the bright spot description. “We’re awesome. Let me tell you. We’re the best.”

The school uses the aforementioned benchmarking to determine individual strengths and weaknesses. Kids who are performing poorly are placed in smaller sized classes and meet with an “interventionist” to work on skills.

The school has regular tutorials, three days a week in the fall and spring, to help kids who are not doing well and kids who could be doing better with a little push. Ten times a year the school has tutorials on Saturdays to make sure the kids get enough time with the teachers.

“There are a lot of facets that contribute to students’ success on the campus,” said the principal. “One of them is the teachers really caring about the kids and doing everything possible to make sure they get what they need and treating each child as an individual. Second, the interventions with the kids who aren’t doing well and benchmarking the kids really often and seeing what skill they are lacking and working on that skill for those kids.”

Morningside Elementary student reading in the school's library in Brownville, TX

The third key to success, says the principal, is parents. “I have a very strong parental base,” she says. “They may not be here every day sewing or cutting or making copies, but they support the school. They send their kids to school. Last year I had an ADA (average daily attendance) of 97 percent. They are trying to survive themselves, but the best way they can support me is to make sure they get their kids to school.”

Research tends to bear this out. One of the critical barriers to performance by low income kids is poor attendance.  Attendance is one of the three critical areas the campaign is asking schools and communities to focus on as a way of upping reading performance. The others are school readiness and the summer reading gap, the fact that low income kids lose ground during the summer months if they are not reading regularly.

Another key to success: “I know where the kids come from,” she said. “I know what their future is if they don’t become educated.”

She grew up in Brownsville, a city of about 175,000, across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, Mexico and attended local public schools, a local university and a local graduate school. She learned her management skills from another dedicated educator, Ernestina Treviño, who recently retired as principal of A.S. Putegnat Elementary, another school with mostly Hipsanic low income kids that has shown excellent results in the performance tests.

The National Civic League's All-American City Awards

“She would always try to think what she could do more for those kids to succeed,” she said. When she got her own school, she was determined to duplicate her mentor’s performance. When she came to the school, it had not made the AYP (average yearly progress) benchmark under the “No School Left Behind” law. Her first year, it made the AYP but just missed being classified as exemplary. “The second year, we became exemplary and we have been exemplary ever since.”

We used to run an awards program for outstanding educators, and I interviewed a number of the honorees. How to describe? “Dedicated,” doesn’t quite get it, “energetic,” yes, “confident,” that would be an understatement. I’m talking teachers and principals who work in low income, high crime parts of our cities and seem to have no problem mobilizing kids, parents, teachers, community and business people—any and everybody—to buck the expectations and statistics. It’s like what the NASA guy says in the movie, Apollo 13. For these people, failure really isn’t an option.

Does this remind you of a school you know? Tell us about it. We love to learn about communities and schools coming together to help their children achieve success.

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.

Tapping the Potential of Non-Traditional Leaders

I haven’t always been a big fan of conventional youth leadership programs. They seem to be places where young go-getters go to network with important people and learn new ideas about becoming better go-getters. What’s the point?

How about a program for kids who aren’t actively seeking leadership positions or looking for ways to maximize the potential they have already exhibited and been recognized for time and time again?

Do I sound bitter? Was I passed over for leadership accolades when I was a youth? Looking back on it, I can’t recall any inspirational mentors who recognized my innate potential, lurking somewhere beneath an off-putting veneer of smart-alecky cluelessness. On the other hand, I can’t say that I was much interested in being recognized either.

So naturally, I’m drawn to the idea of communities trying to develop the less obvious potential leaders who may have been passed over by the usual leadership development entities, and that’s what Salisbury, Maryland, had in mind when it developed its Youth Leadership Academy to focus on engaging non-traditional youthful leaders, those with untapped leadership potential and limited opportunities.

A little background: Salisbury was named one of the “100 Best Communities for Young People” by the group America’s Promise in 2006 and awarded $20,000. The local chapter of the organization met to figure out how to use the money and the planning group unanimously agreed to create an academy focused on developing the community’s “non-traditional leaders,” that is, the kids with untapped leadership potential and limited opportunities.

The Salisbury program is available to any young person between 8th grade and junior year in high school at no cost. It reaches out to local secondary schools and youth organizations. But word of mouth is the most effective recruitment method, the organizers of the academy have found.

The academy works like this: students come together for three days in the summer at Salisbury University to learn new skills and ideas about leadership. From those participants, a Youth Action Team (YAT) is created to plan the next summer’s academy. Any interested graduate of the Academy is accepted for YAT.

YLA graduates have made an impression. Two students won positions in the Student Government Association their freshmen year. Another became senior class president. Other students have served on boards of organizations and attended a Search Institute Conference. One graduate was the Student Representative to the Maryland State Board of Education.

That graduate was also a 2010 Olympic torchbearer for Coca-Cola. Another graduate was accepted into the CIVICUS program at University of Maryland-College Park. Several graduates received scholarships to attend colleges such as Davidson, Morgan State University, Princeton, and Shaw University. Others received the President’s Service Award.

Hundreds of young people have participated since YLA was founded in 2006 and the program has never turned anyone away. One graduate explained that YLA “has brought the youth voice to the table—youth are included in planning groups as an expectation not an exception now.”

Salisbury was an All-America City in 2010 and YLA was one of the programs they touted when they appeared before the civic jury. Salisbury’s was one of several innovative youth-led programs described at the 2010 All-America City Awards. In Chandler, Arizona, a group of young people developed a comprehensive community program to discourage underage drinking and substance abuse. High school students in Middleton, Wisconsin, a finalist in 2009, participated in a planning “charrette” to design a new splash park.

Communities all over the country, in fact, have recognized the importance of engaging young people in leadership development and local problem-solving/decision-making efforts, and it’s beginning to show in terms of the larger numbers of young people who are included in the community delegations at the annual All-America City competition/celebration.

It’s an old cliché to say that young people represent the future of the country. These days the new cliché is that “young people aren’t the future, they’re the present.”

What new youth movements are on the horizon in your community? Are there any youth programs in your town that you think are deserving of accolades? We are always looking to assist in touting amazing stories such as these, so please drop us a line and let us know.

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.

Back in 2009, IBM announced it was opening a technology center in Dubuque, Iowa, a move that would bring 1,300 jobs to the region. Not long afterwards, I read an editorial by a TV commentator in Madison, Wisconsin: “IBM could have located here, and chose Dubuque. That’s just not right.”

Source: Dirk Hansen

What seemed remarkable to the author the opinion piece was the notion that a small, Iowa city would be selected instead of a more recognized technology “triangle” or “corridor,” but it wasn’t much of a surprise to me. Dubuque was an all-America city winner in 2007 and I knew that it was an unusually innovative community. What it lacked in glitz and cachet, it more than compensated for with pluck, organization and civic spirit.

To be selected a finalist for All-America City Awards each community must submit an application that tells its story and describes three community-improvement projects and Dubuque had quite a dramatic story. In 1985, it had one of the highest levels of unemployment in the country, upward of 23 percent. The city’s largest employer, John Deere, recently had shut its doors, and residents were leaving in droves. Old-timers remember when a joker put up a billboard outside town that said: “Will the last person to leave Dubuque please turn out the lights?”

A few years later, the city undertook an ambitious public planning process called Vision 2000, in which citizens from across the region met to lay out a road map for economic recovery: The vision that emerged was a “diverse and balanced economic base that provides job security for all segments of the community … secured through the support, retention, recruitment of retail, manufacturing, hi-tech, services, year-round tourism, recycling businesses and industries.”

Source: Gregory Davis

Focusing on bringing in new industry – insurance, technology, publishing, health care, education and tourism – Dubuque rose to No. 1 among Iowa’s metro centers for job growth. A revitalized waterfront with hiking trails, restaurants, a museum and an aquarium reconnected the city with one of its great resources, the Mississippi River.

Vision 2000 was the first of four strategic planning processes that took place in Dubuque over about a dozen years, the latest being Envision 2010 in 2005, when thousands of residents convened to dream up 10 “big” ideas for the future.

One of those ideas was for downtown Dubuque to be a “cool” place to live, where people surf the Internet and chat in cafes with original art hanging on exposed brick walls, a place that would draw young professionals away from Chicago and the Twin Cities because of its combination of livability, affordability and opportunity.

“It all started in the 1980s when people decided we had reached the bottom and collectively wanted to make it a better community,” said Mayor Roy Buol. “The new Dubuque, that’s what I call it. People really bought into the idea. There was a common desire to better the community and make it place where everybody has opportunities, a place people want to come, and when they do come, to stay.”

Last year, when we were doing a special issue of the National Civic Review on environmental sustainability, Dubuque’s name came up again—as a case study in community-wide successful environmental sustainability planning. Again I wasn’t surprised.

Few, if any, winners of the All-America City Award have exemplified the spirit of regional cooperation, civic engagement and community innovation more effectively than Dubuque. It’s a story that we love to tell and tell again.

To learn more about the National Civic League, click here, or to nominate your city for an All-American City award, visit here.

Is there a similar story of rebirth and rejuvenation for your town that you would like to share? Please do let us know, we would love to hear about it.

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.