Why do some communities seem better able to handle challenges or rebound from disasters, both manmade and natural, more quickly and effectively than others?

That’s a question the National Civic League took up years ago when the organization was undergoing a period of soul-searching about its mission. Its historic role as an advocacy organization for local government reform, nonpartisan, professional management and model city charters seemed less pressing than it had been in 1894, when it was founded and cities were famously corrupt and inefficient.

After a brainstorming session and retreat in 1987, NCL’s friends and board members were asked to come up with some new ideas during the annual National Conference on Governance. One idea the organization came up with was a concept known as “civic infrastructure.”

Civic infrastructure is the sum of local capacities that communities have to come together around common goals and implement them—things like “levels of citizen participation,” “intergroup relations” and “charitable giving and volunteering.” Communities with health civic infrastructures tend to be the one that handle challenges and crises most effectively.

Next week, we will be holding our biggest event of the year, the annual All-America City Awards (AAC), a program that asks the question: ‘What’s working in American communities?’ When AAC was started in 1949, it was mostly an award for government reform and professional city management, but over the years it has become more about the less formal mechanisms that make community democracy work—civic infrastructure.

Dakota County, Nebraska, is one of 26 finalist communities for the 2011 All-America City Awards.  (Counties, neighborhoods and metro regions are also eligible to for the award). In their application, Dakota County said their two most pressing challenges were a lack of affordable higher education opportunities (colleges and universities) and economic development.

These very common problems for rural towns on the high plains were exacerbated last year when the local meat packing plant closed its door, throwing about 1,450 workers into the ranks of the unemployed, many of whom were non-English speakers.

The county has responded by increasing its post secondary education programs a partnership between Northeast Community College, Wayne State College and South Sioux City to build a new College Center in South Sioux City. The community also built a new Industrial Park in the hopes of attracting new employers into the area. (You can read about these community projects and others by visiting the All-America City blog at www.allamericacityaward.com.

Last week we received an e-mail from the grants coordinator for the City of South Sioux City informing us that Dakota County, which is on the banks of the Missouri River, is facing a “500 year flooding event that is set to reach its peak on June 14-15, according to the Army Corps of Engineers.”

So the Dakota County delegation will not be attending the 2011 All-America City Awards, which will be held June 15-17 downriver in Kansas City, Missouri. They’ll be staying home to deal with a new crisis, which is exactly what they should be doing and wish them the best.

This has been a crazy year for weather—unimaginably destructive tornadoes in the South and Missouri, terrible flooding on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. But communities that have strong civic infrastructures will be able to weather these crises and come back stronger than ever. I’m confident Dakota County will be one of those. I’m equally confident that they’ll be back for another shot at the All-America City Awards.

---

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.

The first issue of the National Civic Review I edited was a special edition of the 100-year-old journal on “civic journalism.” It was called “Rethinking Journalism: Rethinking Civic Life.”

This is going back a few years, right about the time that the Internets were taking off, though in a very boring, text-heavy direction. (Care to join my listserv, anyone?) Meanwhile, a group of troubled news biz professionals were looking for new ways of covering their communities.

Civic journalists worried that ethics of media professionalism divided the reporter and editor from the ordinary citizen. “In fact,” wrote NYU professor Jay Rosen in the Civic Review, “The isolation of the press from our deepest needs as citizens is currently running the public trust, distorting the news product and corroding the soul of an important institution.”

Some were asking why editors and publishers should be able to set the public agenda instead of citizens themselves. Others lamented the increasing emphasis on celebrity, scandal and tempest-in-a-teapot controversies.

There were some impressive experiments back then in newspapers like the Wichita Eagle, the Charlotte Observer and the San Jose Mercury News. In some cities, local papers teamed up with one of the network television affiliates on ambitious civic journalism projects, combining small and large group community discussions with traditional newsgathering procedures.

The trend was warmly greeted by civic groups and philanthropists, but within the news biz itself there were deep divisions. Some old-timers referred to it dismissively as “civic booster-ism” and worried that public spirited “puff pieces” would take the place of hard charging, shoe leather investigative reporting.

In the end, it wasn’t civic journalism, or any other new idea that transformed the news media. It was technology. We didn’t realize it at the time, but the business model on which any sort of professional journalism—civic, investigative  or otherwise-was predicated—was about to implode.

---

In the end, it wasn’t civic journalism, or any other new idea that transformed the news media. It was technology.

---

These days, you don’t need a journalism degree or years of experience covering Tuolumne County Water District No. 2 (as I had) to be a reporter or opinion writer. All you need is a laptop, a smart phone or access to a public library with computer stations, a flip camera or a fast internet connection. Mot of all it is the ability to adapt very rapidly to a changing technological landscape.

What economists refer to as the “entry barriers” to media work have been lowered. Not that the barriers have been removed. With new technology come new  class divisions between those who do and those who don’t have the basic computer skills, familiarity with new technology and a broadband Internet connection.

At the same time, an increasing number of groups and organizations have formed to bridge the “digital divide” between technological haves and have-nots. (In fact, the fall 2011 issue of the National Civic Review will focus on some of these efforts.

In doing research for the issue, I talked to a janitor in Philadelphia who is learning how to use Windows Movie Maker and Final Cut software to edit videos to document her experiences with media training courtesy of the Media Mobilizing Project. She recently produced an online video about an SEIU local’s efforts to organize security guards. She has also hosted an online talk show on labor issues.

The Renaissance Media Center in San Francisco recently came out with its New Media Toolkit, an-easy-to-navigate website “design for beginners and pros” and “created especially for the ethnic/community media and nonprofits.”

ZeroDivide (formerly known as the Community Technology Foundation of California) has funded a number of projects designed to empower underserved communities with the “power of information and communications technologies.” Gen ZD, for example, is a network of “youth technology users” in underserved communities across the western states. The Tribal Digital Village Broadband Adoption Program is working with Native American tribes in Southern California.

In retrospect, the civic journalism idea may have been something of an oxymoron. It was bucking the trends of contemporary media markets—the winnowing budget for public policy reporting and the increasing obsession with celebrity trivia and scandal-mongering.

But with citizen journalism, we are only beginning to see its potential. It’s a brave new world, and no one knows exactly where it is going. One part of me worries about the blurring distinction between professional and citizen journalism. I have the usual questions: who is going to pay for local investigative reporting? How will ordinary citizens sift through the unmediated mass of true and false information appearing hourly on their computer screens?

Another part of me says, why worry?

---

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.

The documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? opens with a mock funeral for the EV 1, GM’s early entry into the alternative fuels vehicle race. The ill-fated car was test-marketed in Southern California after the state passed a strict new emissions law. The EV 1 developed a small but devoted following before being discontinued by its maker.

At the heart of this film is a mystery; who or what strangled this experiment in its infancy—the state of battery technology, inadequate consumer demand, hostile oil companies, an ambivalent GM or the various state and federal government agencies that dropped the ball?

The film is agonizing to watch, more a tragedy than a mystery. You just can’t help wondering how much further along we would be in if a viable electric car had caught on in the 1990s. Fast forward a decade later to the Southern California community of Torrance. A group of citizens is crafting revisions to the city’s strategic plan and “environmental stewardship” is listed as one of the city’s nine priorities.

As part of its “alternative fuels program,” the city now has a biodiesel fueling station and a hydrogen fueling station, and soon there may be electric car charging sites spouting up all over town as part of its “one mile, one charger” policy, which has the goal of making Torrance a place where no electric car driver will be more than one mile away from a charging station.

What makes this so interesting is that Torrance happens to be home to the Exxon Refinery, the largest producer of gasoline in Southern California. Oil wells dot the local landscape and freeways surround the city and two of the largest Japanese car-makers, Honda and Toyota, have their national headquarters in Torrance.

Not to mention the fact that a generation of baby boomers grew up listening to catchy odes to the internal combustion engine penned by Brian Wilson, who formed the Beach Boys in a garage in Hawthorne, a mere fifteen minutes away (depending on the time of day) on the Santa Monica Freeway.

And now these Boomers are starting to retire, and Torrance—along with other cities—has figured out a potential mobility problem, a generation of aging boomers no longer able or well-advised to drive spending their money on expensive cab rides. The city’s Transit Ambassador Program is designed to encourage seniors to use the local transit system. The goal is to both save money for seniors and to reduce carbon emissions in the region by substantially increasing ridership on local buses. Since 2007, the program has increased risdership by bout nine percent.

More recently, Torrance joined Stanford University and Google Inc. in Honda’s Electric Vehicle Demonstration Project. Nine city departments will help evaluate issues related to the introduction of the Honda Fit EV. It will provide feedback to Honda on the development of charging stations, analysis of CO2 reduction, energy consumption and effect on community-wide energy costs.

The transportation ambassador electric car demonstration programs are two of the three community projects that Torrance will be touting at the All-America City Award program in Kansas City next month. Torrance, Philadelphia, Kenai, Alaska and Lakeview, Oregon—these are just a few of the communities that will be presenting environmentally friendly or green energy projects to the jury of civic experts who will choose the winners.

And just as a footnote: on May 23, the day after Earth Day, a sequel to Who Killed the Electric Car? is scheduled to premier at the Tribeca Film Festival. Revenge of the Electric Car is a much more hopeful title. The ultimate revenge may by the fact that GM, EV 1’s maker (killer?) is now on the road to recovery thanks in part to its new Chevy Volt, acclaimed as “car of the year” by Motor Trend magazine.

---

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.

There aren’t that many big changes in American life that I would consider a 100 percent net positive development. Usually, there are pluses and minuses, something gained and something lost. For instance, I love being able to stream videos and buy books and music online, but hate the idea that book stores and records stores (yes, even video stores) are going away. The dearth of public places where people gather and browse is a big loss.

But if I did have to come up with a wholly positive, 100 percent good change, it would be the growing number and size of farmers markets throughout the land. Whenever I visit a new place (if in the spring, summer or fall), I invariably make it by the local farmers market.

Admittedly, I’m not always buying kale. I may get a cup of coffee and an adobado burrito (if I’m at the Santa Fe Farmers Market) or a buffalo brat (back home in Denver), but occasionally some actual produce does find its way into my bag.

Farmers markets combine public spaces with increased consumer choice and better nutrition. They help support local producers and make it more possible and popular to have “farm-to- table” eating experiences, whether in a chic restaurant or at home. And more and more farmers markets are doing something else—promoting better nutrition and greater access to affordable, fresh produce in lower income, inner city communities.

I first noticed this trend in 2008 when New Haven, Connecticut, won an All-America City Award and one of its projects was an ambitious city effort to bring farmers markets into produce-deprived low income neighborhoods. Now Ann Arbor, Michigan, a 2011 All-America City finalist has joined the trend.

At age 91, the farmers market in the Kerrytown section of Ann Arbor its one of the largest producer-only farmers markets in Michigan, an agglomeration of more than 100 market vendors including farmers, growers, bakers and artisans. The market operates year round on Saturdays and also on Wednesdays from May through December.

And since 2004, the Project FRESH program has made farmer’s market produce available to low-income, “nutritionally at-risk consumers,” specifically the 5600 participants in Washtenaw County’s Women, Infants & Children Program. Program participants receive a booklet of ten $2 coupons to be used at their local farmers markets between June 1 and Oct. 31. Only fresh fruit and vegetables may be purchased (no prepackaged foods or baked goods).

Getting the project started was not without its difficulties, however. When it was first launched only five market vendors were willing to participate, preferring to sell on a cash or check only basis, but these days about 80 percent of vendors participate, with an approximate redemption amount of $5,088.

The market has also joined forces with the state and federal low income food assistance programs (FAPs), better known as food stamp programs. Eligible participants receive food assistance benefits electronically on a state-issued “Bridge “Card, which the Ann Arbor Farmers Market began accepting as a form of payment in 2009.

This was a little tricky because earlier the market only accepted cash and checks, so as food stamp program changed from paper vouchers to electronic swiping cards a new process had to be developed. Participants were asked to swipe their Bridge card in the market office and request a dollar amount to use at the market. The amount is then deducted from their card in exchange for market tokens to use at participating market vendor stalls. To avoid a stigma being associated with using tokens, the market also began issuing tokens for any shoppers who wish to pay with a credit card.

FAP recipients can use the Bridge Card to purchase fruits, vegetables, baked goods and pre-packaged foods at the farmers market. In 2009, there were approximately 20 market vendors participating with a redemption rate of $4,750. By 2010, there were 56 market vendors participating with an approximate redemption rate of $16,200.

This, as I said before, has to be one of the 100 percent wholly positive developments and it seems to be something of a trend. Farmers markets in Portland, Oregon and Detroit have similar programs. Ann Arbor market manager Molly Notarianni calls it a “win-win-win” solution, adding an extra “win” to the usual “win-win.” It’s good for the farmers, who have more potential customers. It’s good for the government, which can get more nutritious food to nutritionally “underserved” communities. And it’s good for the food assistance recipients, who get to eat healthier for less.

Win-win-win.

---

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.

As I watched the spontaneous celebration outside the White House Sunday night, I was struck by how much how attitudes about patriotism and the military have changed since I was young. The unembarrassed, flag-waving patriotism of the people in DC and New York was contagious. It wasn’t a “red versus blue” crowd. It was a “red, white and blue” crowd.

During the Vietnam years, support for the military reached a low point. Then there was the anti-anti-war reaction of the 1980s, when Hollywood revenge fantasies like “First Blood” turned vets into superheroes and anti-war activists into villainous stereotypes.

American culture was a roller coaster ride during those years. Patriotism was on the rise, but it was a peculiar kind of partisan patriotism that pitted one side of the political/cultural spectrum against another. Are we now experiencing the birth of a new kind of “post partisan” patriotism? Hard to say, but if you want to see one version of what a “new patriotism” might look like, you should check out this article in Time magazine about Fayetteville, North Carolina, “America’s most pro-military town.”

The story goes back to the bad old days of the Vietnam War era, when the local army base, Fort Bragg, was a major stopping off point for soldiers bound for Southeast Asian. Being an Army town during those years was a mixed bag. Most of the draftees who went through the town were not happy about being there. Nor were the townies always thrilled. Strip clubs, cheap bars and tattoo parlors proliferated downtown, earning a new nickname that stuck for years, “Fayette-nam.”

Flash forward to the year 2001 when Fayetteville, like much of the industrial south was languishing economically. Per capita income was stagnant. Few jobs were being created and young people who grew up there had to look elsewhere if they wanted to find promising career paths.

A community improvement effort known as Greater Fayetteville Futures came up with an idea. Why not turn the community’s Army town identity, once considered something of a liability, into a major cultural and economic asset? Members of the community actually voted online to adopt their new slogan, “History, Heroes and a Hometown Feeling.” Fayette-nam rebranded itself as “the most patriotic town in America.”

This was in part a canny form of pure economic development. In 2005, Fayetteville opened its North Carolina Military Business Center, working with local businesses and individual to garner defense industry contracts. Instead of attracting strip clubs and cinder block taverns, the city would bring in high tech companies and defense industry entrepreneurs.

But it’s not all about marketing. Residents were encouraged to fly flags and say “thank you” to service men and women they pass on the street. Local organizations were formed to help military families find housing and jobs. There was a local baby boom-let a few years ago when 22,000 members of the 82 Airborne returned from Iraq, so the town threw a mass military baby shower for all the hundreds of expectant mothers.

The results have been impressive—more than 5000 jobs and $586 million invested and a housing market that is booming—this according to the city’s application for All-America Award. Per capita income growth is the second highest in the country. Tourism is also on the rise with a convention bureau that touts the military-friendly posture to vets planning Army reunions and other events and local attractions like the Airborne and Special Operations Museum and the soon to open Veteran’s Park downtown.

Not that everything is all roses in Fayetteville. It never is. There was a controversy earlier this year when the mayor asked a local Quaker group to participate in a celebration of Vietnam era vets and some of the veteran groups objected.

But the military people interviewed in the Time article and other news reports seem to like the sense of welcome in town. And the local group Fayetteville Cares plans to hold its second “Boots and Booties” event for military moms June 25 at the city’s events center. Apparently a large number of Fort Bragg soldiers returned from a deployment late last year, setting off another baby boom-let in Fayetteville.

Also in June (15-17), the All-America City Awards in Kansas City, Missouri, and Fayetteville will be there as a finalist.

---

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 remember the moment as if it were yesterday. It was 1989 and I was at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, a friend having wrangled tickets to game three of the “Bay Bridge” series. The Oakland A’s great Bob Welch was about to take the mound. I say “great” because he was a Cy Young Award winner who had managed to win 27 games in one season.

But he also had the reputation of being something of a “nervous” pitcher, subject to the odd mood-induced erratic outing. So my first reaction upon feeling the concrete heave beneath my feet was: uh oh, earthquake, that can’t be good for Bob Welch’s nerves. Funny how myopic we can be at times.

---

Here I was worried about a pitcher’s mood after the worst Bay Area earthquake in decades.

---

Of course, the game was called, and when it was played 11 days later, Oakland fans rode the ferry from Jack London Square to San Francisco, because the unthinkable had happened—a chunk had fallen out of the Bay Bridge, making that section of U.S. Highway 80 impassable.

I remember during those following weeks and months a laudable increase in earthquake preparedness activity. People were organizing phone trees, block groups, neighborhood preparedness plans, storing food and water in their laundry rooms and garages. But a year passed, then two, and people began to slack again.

Planning and preparing for a major, terrible, horrible disaster that may be far in the future really isn’t in our DNA, but every now and again, nature has to give us a little nudge to goad us into thinking about the unthinkable.

For Seaside, Oregon, the reminder came in 2004, when an earthquake/tsunami devastated Southeast Asia. Seaside is near an area of the Pacific where one tectonic plate is sliding under another one, a geological twin to those coastal areas of Indonesia and Thailand.

With its low-lying level topography, Seaside would be one of the most vulnerable communities in Coastal Oregon in the event of a tsunami. Four of the city’s five schools are located in the inundation zone of a possible tsunami, so these days the schools conduct twice yearly evacuation drills.

In 2005, the city hired graduate student Darcy Conner to design and implement an outreach program to educate locals about the danger posed by tsunamis. The grad student set up a voluntary citizens group to help implement the program once her contract with the city expired, and the city hired a part-time coordinator.

TAG, the Tsunami Advisory Group consists of Ham Radio operators, a local geologist, a nurse, a firefighter and an engineer. During the past three years TAG has, among other things:

• Conducted three “emergency expos”
• Created a PowerPoint presentation to educate residents
• Amassed 100 barrels of survival gear and rations placed in households outside the flood zone
• Developed evacuation maps and emergency kits to be distributed throughout the community

The city’s part-time tsunami preparedness coordinator has been hired by the state to spread the word around the state, and the Seaside program has become a model for communities up and down the coast of Oregon. Seaside’s precautions were further vindicated in March with the tsunami in Japan.

Tsunami preparedness is one of three community projects listed in Seaside’s bid to be an All-America City in 2011. It may seem like a prosaic matter, developing emergency plans and educational materials for a potential disaster, but it requires civic leaders and ordinary citizens to do a lot of clear thinking about events that are both rare and unthinkable.

---

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.