North of downtown Denver, a block from the Greyhound Station and not far from the federal courthouse, is a small commercial/residential district known as Sakura Square. There’s a Buddhist temple, a pan-Asian grocery, a high-rise apartment complex, an office building, a sushi restaurant and a small Japanese garden.

Every now and then I go out there in search of some Asian food product I can’t find at the local supermarket. I don’t have to go downtown. In fact, there are more Asian groceries per square mile on Federal Boulevard in West Denver. Nor does it have the “best Japanese garden” in Denver. If it’s Japanese Gardens you want, Denver Botanic Gardens is the place to be.

Mostly, I go there because of the history.

Colorado is a study in historical contrasts, especially when it comes to race relations. The Ku Klux Klan was a major power in state and local politics during the 1920s, briefly assuming control of the state assembly. But Colorado is also the home of Governor Ralph Lawrence Carr, the only prominent politician in the country to speak out against the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

A little background for non-history buffs: In the hysteria following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order creating exclusion zones and special curfews for Japanese-Americans on the West Coast. Thousands of Nisei (second generation Japanese immigrants) were rounded up and interned at desolate, windblown camps in the interior West. One of those camps was near the town of Granada in eastern Colorado, not far from the Kansas state line.

Meanwhile, back in Oregon, an attorney named Minoru Yasui refused to comply with the curfews and internment order, arguing that the discriminatory policies violated his constitutional rights. He was arrested, imprisoned and fined $5000. Later he went to one of the camps.

Yasui’s argument was that the Japanese-Americans were being singled not because of disloyalty but strictly because of race. Governor Carr made the same point when he spoke out the internment policy in 1942. “I was brought up in a small town where I knew the shame and dishonor of race hatred,” he said. “I grew to despise it…”

After the war, many of the internees stayed in Colorado, partly because their property had been confiscated back home and there wasn’t much to go home for, but also because of Carr’s support, which explains the small Japanese-American community at Sakura Square.

Min Yasui moved to Denver after being released from a camp in another state.  He practiced law and served as executive director of the city’s Community Relations Commission. His criminal conviction was officially overturned in 1986, shortly before his death.

For his part, Carr served out his term as governor and ran for Senate in 1942, narrowly losing to Senator Edwin C. Johnson. It is widely believed that the unpopularity of his stance on the internees cost him the election.

The governor’s reputation has grown over time, vindicated by changing attitudes about race and civil liberties. Not long ago, a section of Highway 285 near Kenosha Pass was named after him. But the most moving tribute, it seems to me, is the bust of Carr erected by the Japanese-American community in the garden at Sakura Square. If you are ever in Denver, check it out, it’s the one that stands a few yards away from the bust commemorating the courage of Min Yasui.

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 couple of months ago, I read an article in the Observer, by a student newspaper for Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s College, pondering the question of how South Bend, Indiana, could appear on Newsweek’s recent list of “dying cities” and also have been an All-America City Award finalist in 2009. (Read the Observer article here.)

Well, one possible answer is that these “best of….worst of” media lists are often misleading. South Bend was apparently flagged by Newsweek because of its loss of population and manufacturing jobs, but the city has a lot of strengths, not the least of which is its relationship to Notre Dame and other nearby colleges and universities.

Another point, which comes up again and again, is that the All-America City Award is not a beauty contest. We ask applicants to list their strengths and weaknesses and to describe three successful of projects to address their most pressing challenges. In these tough economic times, there are very few cities that aren’t facing some kind of crisis or another. What makes them “All-America Cities” is the ability to address those problems with innovative solutions.

We Can! Program

South Bend happened to have some terrific civic projects in 2009. The city’s neighborhood revitalization partnership with the local universities and hospitals was impressive, as was its government innovation task force. Thanks to local anti-childhood obesity efforts, South Bend was selected one of the three cities to pilot the national We Can! campaign in 2007.

Yesterday, the National Civic League released the names of the 26 finalists for the 2011 All-America City Award, and I was very happy to see South Bend on that list again. Once again, South Bend is touting its Northeast Neighborhood Alliance, but it has a couple of new programs, including one that nicely illustrates what I mean by communities having challenges and addressing them.

Back in the 1920s, there was a local swimming pool known as the Engman Public Natatorium. It was located in a racially mixed neighborhood yet was a “whites only” pool. In 1937, African-Americans gained admission for one day a week. The next day the pool would be drained before whites would use the pool again.

The pool closed in 1978, but last year the site was rechristened as the “Indiana University South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center,” thus transforming a shameful chapter in the city’s history into a “cultural center focusing on the civil rights movement in the northern United States,” a movement that—among other things—successfully desegregated the Engman Natatorium pool in the 1950s.

Infill Housing for the Neighborhood Revitalization Program

In the coming weeks I will be writing most posts about the 26 All-America City finalists and their community projects, everything from tsunami preparedness (Seaside, Oregon) to “green city” initiatives (Philadelphia and Cincinnati) to an effort to improvement mental health care (Forth Worth, Texas), to name a few.

The ten winners of the 2011 All-America City Awards will be announced June 17 after a three day event in Kansas City, Missouri. It won’t be a list of the ten “most livable” cities or the ten best places to raise children.

Just be a list of ten places where people are working hard to make their communities better.

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 recently found myself embroiled in a “not-in-my-backyard” dispute, pitting my neighborhood against a well-connected group of investors who hoped to operate a late night dance club 55 feet from my bedroom window.

I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say, that we neighbors felt pretty lucky to have an active neighborhood organization to argue our case. Without them, we would have felt completely bulldozed by the coterie of professionals—a lawyer, a sound engineer, a paid petition organizer and assorted local power brokers—who showed up at the licensing hearing.

A Ribbon Cutting for a Neighborhood Improvement Project in El Paso

The point is: wouldn’t it be great if every neighborhood in the U.S. had an association or an organization to look after its interests and serve as a sounding board for community concerns? Often it is the more affluent areas of cities that are best organized and the less affluent ones that tend to get ignored.

Some cities have gone out of their way to help neighborhoods that aren’t well organized. In El Paso, Texas, a 2010 All-America City, if a neighborhood doesn’t have an association, the city’s Neighborhood Services Department will help them start one.

The program dates back to 2003, when the El Paso City Council passed the city’s first Neighborhood Recognition ordinance to address two concerns, local apathy and the imbalance of power between organized neighborhoods and unorganized neighborhoods.

• A new and improved Neighborhood Recognition ordinance was adopted to further define neighborhood boundaries. The city identified those neighborhoods that weren’t represented and started looking for ways to bring them to the table.
• An annual Neighborhood Leadership Academy was convened to provide citizens with the direction and savvy they need to navigate city processes and to become neighborhood resources and ambassadors. The academy seeks out nontraditional leaders to ensure that all members of the community are represented.
• El Paso’s Neighborhood Improvement Program gives residents opportunities to submit their own neighborhood-driven small-scale capital projects. During the first two rounds of the program, $850,000 has been expended and 21 projects completed.

A Meeting of Neighborhood Groups in El Paso

Since the program began, the number of neighborhood associations has nearly doubled and citizens feel they have more say in the decision-making process. A coalition of the city’s 67 associations meets monthly to discuss citywide issues and how the effect the various neighborhoods.

“I think we’re getting there,” says coalition president Mark Benitez, when asked how the neighborhood empowerment program was working. “We’ve empowered quite a few people to address different issues. I think it has had a big effect on the areas that have been underserved over the years.”

“This benefits the city too,” added Benitez, who heads the Cielo Vista Neighborhood Association. “It gives the city government a chance to voice their issues and goals to the neighborhoods.”

I know of other cities that have embraced the value of neighborhood power—Rochester, New York’s Neighbors Building Neighborhoods program, Portland, Oregon’s Office of Neighborhood Involvement and Fort Wayne, Indiana’s Community Oriented Government—to name a few. (If you are interested, read more about them in this report on local government and civic engagement I wrote a couple of years ago).

I have no idea how my particular neighborhood beef will turn out. I’m just glad the local neighborhood organization had my back. Otherwise, I would have been pretty frustrated by the process. To me, these two-way communication systems that El Paso and other communities have pioneered are the essence of democracy. I’m always interested in learning about any other examples of neighborhood-based local government programs. If you know of any good ones, e-mail me at aac@ncl.org.

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.

One of the biggest problems we face as a country is our inability to face problems, or rather, our inability to have face-to-face conversations about our problems, educate ourselves, weigh the options and come to a consensus about how to move forward.

Instead, we divide ourselves into warring camps, hand out talking points and get into the fight before we even understand the true nature of the problem or how we might do things differently. Name the issue—health care reform, climate change, the economic crisis—too much energy is being spent on gearing up for the big fight before we even have a real conversation.

I’m always heartened to find out about local groups like Hands Across North Quabbin that are trying to get people look at problems and challenges in a different way.

Hands is an ambitious effort to shift the “civic culture” in an economically depressed, politically polarized region of north central Massachusetts. Founder Mark Shoul compares the organization to the agricultural extension programs that were developed years ago to help rural dwellers learn new and better ways of growing crops and caring for farm animals, only in this case, the goal is to grow a healthier “civic culture.”

“We create projects where people come together to work

on issues of common concern so that trust gets built,” says Shoul, a longtime resident of the region who had headed up a local community development corporation before founding Hands.

North Quabbin is a region of fading mill towns—Athol and Orange—and “postcard” New England villages. Years ago, one of the region’s largest employers shut down leading to high levels of unemployment, political infighting about who was to “blame,” and growing class division between the older, blue collar residents and an influx of more affluent newcomers attracted to

Action Forum to prioritize community issues that need to be worked on

the unspoiled scenery and quaint New England architecture.

Concerned about the way things were going, Shoul gathered together some of the smartest and most respected people he knew to think and talk about ways of building trust and moving the community forward.

An opportunity arose when the town of Athol got into a brawl about what to do about the local high school, which had lost its accreditation by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. The superintendent came up with the plan to turn things around, but the plan was unacceptable to many in the community.

In the meantime, the local school committee (school board) had earned a statewide reputation for being divided and dysfunctional. “The problem wasn’t really the school committee,” says Shoul. “The school committee was a reflection of a divided community.”

Youth from five No. Quabbin churches stain picnic tables for community pavilion in Athol

Shoul’s organization stepped in to try to break the impasse, challenging opponents of the superintendent’s plan to come up with their own ideas. The first step was to organize a massive volunteer effort to fix up the high school building. The next was to organize a long-range strategic planning process for the Athol-Royalston Regional School District.

The upshot was this: the high school got its accreditation back, and the community developed a new sense of direction for the district. This was the first of several new initiatives inspired by Hands, including the development of a North Quabbin Green Economy Network and the construction of a new pavilion for community meetings.

I met Shoul last year at a national “civic innovators forum” in Washington, D.C. His organization was one of several civic start-ups I found out about during the forum. I asked Shoul to write an article about Hands for our quarterly, the National Civic Review. His article, co-authored with Hands board chair, Philip Rabinowitz, will appear in the summer issue of the review.

Shoul thinks it takes three conditions to change the “civic culture” of a community: First, a high level of dissatisfaction; second, a new vision of a better future; and third, action-oriented first steps on how to achieve that vision.
Admittedly, collaborative problem solving is a tough thing to do at the national level. There are too many entrenched interests groups, professional campaign organizers, PACs and lobbyists and too few forums for real discussions, and, frankly, most Americans simply aren’t engaged at that level of government.

But learning about local efforts such as Hands Across North Quabbin process helps us think about political issues and policy debates in a different way and, hopefully, to imagine a healthier civic culture in state capitols and Washington, D.C.

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 be appearing every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

Years ago, I heard Senator Bill Bradley give his famous “three-legged stool” speech. “Think of the American society as a three-legged stool,” said the former Senator and basketball legend. “One leg is the private sector, the second leg is the public sector, government and politics, and the third leg is the nonprofit sector.”

It’s another way of saying that communities are stronger and more resilient when business, government and nonprofit groups work together—the three-legged stool—to address challenges as they arise.

It’s a useful metaphor, but one I hadn’t heard in a while. That’s why I got such a kick out of last year’s All-America City Awards where I met leaders of one of California’s newest cities, Rancho Cordova. They had taken Bradley’s three-legged stool concept and turned it into a concrete (glass and steel) reality.

A few years ago, when Rancho Cordovans were converting a vacant office building into a City Hall, they decided to house all three legs—city government, the local chamber of commerce and an umbrella group for nonprofits—in the same capacious office complex. A large, open foyer makes a welcoming entrance for the public, and a spiral staircase leads from the first floor to the second level, so if there is a problem or idea that requires a public-private-nonprofit partnership, it is a short walk from one sector to another.

I asked Shelly Blanchard, who heads the Cordova Community Council, how the three-legged stool idea is working out in practice. “It’s actually been more successful than we had anticipated,” she told me. “We are all in the same building, so it’s very common for people to run into each other over coffee or in the ladies room—and solve problems.”

Like other military towns in the post Cold War era, Rancho Cordova (circa 1990s) had a growing list of problems. After the local defense contractor downsized and Mather Air Force Base closed, a community known for its aviators and rocket scientists lost both its economic base and its main source of identity.

Being an unincorporated area of Sacramento County didn’t help. With no local government of its own, the community was hard pressed to deal with an array of challenges—aging housing stock, rundown apartment buildings, abandoned cars, illegal garbage dumps and a rising crime rate.

In the meantime, Rancho Cordova had become a gateway community for successive waves of immigrants and refugees—southeast Asians in the late 70s, Russian Christians, other Eastern Europeans when the Soviet Union imploded, and most recently, Latinos looking for construction work and inexpensive housing.

After a lengthy tussle with the county (and a serendipitous federal court ruling that made incorporation easier), the community voted to make Rancho Cordova California’s 287th city. Now they had a government. All they needed was a City Hall.

The idea of housing the three sectors together was originally proposed by City Manager Ted Gaebler, a co-author with David Osborne of the seminal book, Reinventing Government. But as Vice Mayor David Sander recently explained it to me, it was also a natural outgrowth of the fact that during the unincorporated years the community council and the chamber had served as a kind of substitute government. It also fits the local leadership style, he said, which is “not silo-oriented, but matrix and team-driven.”

It seems to be a classic “win-win” solution. Since City Hall opened up, the Rancho Cordova Chamber of Commerce has become a much stronger organization. The chamber had been on the brink of dissolution, but now membership is growing and the budget has gone from red to black. The community council organizes regular community celebrations and gives advice and planning assistance to community groups and nonprofits.

The new municipal building is considered a model of innovation and sustainable design, complete with LEED “green” certification. It has a “community board room” where nonprofits and civic groups can enjoy the use of flat screen projection and wireless internet to make meetings more interesting and productive.

The only downside to the arrangement, notes Sander, is that the people who tend to be distrustful of government anyway wonder whether the arrangement isn’t a little too cozy. They worry that decisions are being made privately behind closed doors.

On the other hand, the doors aren’t exactly closed. City Hall has become something of a social hub. Residents use it for baby showers, weddings, graduation parties, Eagle Scout ceremonies and memorial services. Rental rates are kept low to be affordable for families.

“It’s really more of a civic center than a city hall,” says Shelly Blanchard.” It’s the heartbeat of our community.”

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 be appearing every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

State of the Re:Union has recently teamed up with the National Civic League (NCL) to produce and share website content. The partnership was a no-brainer for us. The NCL puts a major spotlight on communities that are coming together, bridging divides and doing innovative things to meet challenges head on. We share such a such a similar ethos and both place prominence on solution. Without further adieu, please welcome Mike McGrath of the NCL:

As the writer/editor/new media person for the National Civic League, I’m always coming across noteworthy examples of community-based innovation or problem-solving, but only occasionally do these stories get the kind of coverage they deserve from the national media. (Perhaps this is the place where I should rail against the 24-7 coverage of Charlie Sheen. But really, why bother?)

To be fair, doing community journalism right isn’t as easy as it sounds. It takes a certain kind of finesse and savvy to avoid being bland, “simpy” or overly promotional. So when my boss, Gloria Rubio-Cortés told me about State of the Re:Union’s unique blend of Americana, local culture and issue-oriented reporting, I felt like somebody was finally starting to get this right.

You may or may not have heard of the National Civic League (NCL), but you have probably seen the signature red, white and blue All-America City Award shield on, say, a city limits sign or a water tower somewhere. To win the award, communities have to tell their stories to a “jury” of civic experts, describing their most pressing challenges and listing three successful projects to address them. More than 600 cities (and neighborhoods, towns, villages, counties and regions) have won the award since it started in 1949, and it is the chief source of our nearly bottomless supply of stories of positive community change.

NCL was founded during the Progressive Era as a national clearinghouse of municipal reform ideas. In those days, local government was dominated by omnipotent utility barons and crooked party bosses. Over time, local government went from being the most corrupt and dysfunctional level of government to being the most trusted, thanks in part to reforms advocated by NCL.

You might say these reforms were so successful that NCL was becoming a victim of its own success, but instead of declaring “mission accomplished” and closing up shop, the organization shifted its focus from the mechanics of government to the less formal avenues of local democracy.

In the mid-1990s, when I left the journalism business to work for NCL, it was in the forefront of what some experts have called a “civic renewal” movement, a quiet revolution that was occurring at the local level. All over the country, ordinary citizens were coming together in large and small-scale efforts to address longstanding issues such as housing, jobs, growth, race relations, crime, education—you name it.

Through our Community Services (now Community Success) program, NCL Senior Vice President Derek Okubo, has helped dozens of cities organize communitywide strategic planning or “visioning” efforts, engaging hundreds of citizens in meetings to identify key challenges and concrete ways to address them.

When Gloria Rubio-Cortés took over as president a few years ago, she began to move the organization in a new direction, focusing less on “process” and more directly on social justice issues. We have recently started a new initiative to explore successful examples of communities who are addressing the budget crisis by linking public engagement strategies with a “triple-bottom-line” of equity, efficiency and environmental sustainability. We will be announcing a new issue-oriented community initiative in the coming weeks.

When Gloria heard about SOTRU, she contacted Al Letson and Ian DeSousa to explore the possibilities. The commonalities were pretty obvious as soon as we started talking and exchanging URLs. For instance, in their pilot season, they did a great segment on the “surprisingly metropolitan and progressive” city of Des Moines, Iowa. We noticed the same qualities in Des Moines when we gave it an All-America City Award in 2010.

Greensburg, Kansas, was profiled in SOTRU’s season opener last year, a great piece on how this small rural town was recovering from a horrific tornado by rebuilding green. We published a case study on Greensburg in the National Civic Review special issue on the “Civics of Sustainability” last year. (Here’s a free link to the issue.)

It’s always gratifying when we see others recognizing the same communities we have honored with an award or an article, but even more exciting is the opportunity to contribute community stories SOTRU listeners and readers may not have heard or read about, and to learn about examples they may know about. And that is what I hope to be doing in the upcoming weeks.

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 be appearing every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.