Institutes Using NIF Strengthen Civic Life
By Alice Diebel
Introduction
The new network of interaction is a strong example of the kinds of actions that can result from deliberation.
Article Text
One of the primary means people have had to develop their capacity to actively participate in their democracies is to work in associations of civic life. These are the very organizations Tocqueville cited as a significant and distinctive strength for democracy in the United States. However, all is not well with these associations. Theda Skocpol reported a disturbing decline in civic organizations since the 1950s, as professional disciplines developed in higher education and activist social movements turned their attention to lobbying in Washington, D.C. This trend and what it might imply for citizens got our attention.
Related Kettering research conducted with the Harwood Institute revealed that community-based, nonprofit organizations increasingly tend to focus on building their institutional strength and responding to mandates for accountability from funders. Therefore they have less energy, freedom, and creative potential to focus on working in, and building, civic life. Engaging citizens in solving problems is often seen as time consuming, fraught with uncertainty, and as inadequate to the task. Citizen engagement work is hard to measure and justify.
Kettering’s research has demonstrated that this decline in civic-minded associations and organizations has left citizens frustrated and disconnected from opportunities to take ownership over the problems they see around them. When people have limited opportunities to participate in meaningful ways, they resort to saying “no” to block an action or to partisan bickering. Democracy needs citizens to work through the problems that face them. Without citizen engagement, our communities and our nation lose the needed values check on public issues. And citizens need to feel a part of something larger than themselves. In an economic climate like the one we are in today, civic associations that can impact these problems are needed more than ever.
These problems of democracy are prevalent in economic development arenas. When citizens see the economy as something controlled and managed by the government or believe that corporations have all the control, they fail to see the impact of their own work to strengthen community prosperity. Communities that wait for the next big factory to come may wait a long time. What will it take for citizens to recapture their economies without these associations of civic life?
With the decline in opportunities to exercise their democratic tendencies, few organizations have stepped in to build civic capacity. One exception is the so-called Public Policy Institute (PPI), which Kettering has been studying for the past 25 years. PPIs started by offering National Issues Forums (NIF) and moderator preparation through a network of small organizations around the country. Most of these institutes were associated with higher education and the issues—framed in deliberation issue books—and tended to focus on significant, large, national dilemmas, such as Social Security reform.
The issue books used a framework of at least three approaches that were intended to deal with the concern by emphasizing the tensions among things held valuable in the approaches. This kind of deliberation helped citizens see themselves as actors in the problem and recognize that any direction taken would have its trade-offs. The PPIs began to see NIF as a means of building skills in deliberation that were needed for civic life.
As PPIs made use of NIF they recognized its value in reframing local issues as well. This kind of deliberation helped reveal the opportunities for citizens to act on their own behalf in some cases. This respectful talk was in sharp contrast to community public hearings where citizens could only voice their opposition to plans already made. What if this talk became more common? What if local issues were framed in a way to encourage deliberation? The PPIs were beginning to address these questions about the basic civic life of their communities. While PPIs still got their start using NIF, it seems that local issues and local acting were becoming of greater interest to the communities the PPIs serve.
Several of the PPIs are engaging citizens in such a way that the citizens can begin to affect their concerns through deliberation and action. While some PPIs have long looked for the connection between deliberation in a forum and action, these community-focused PPIs see their work as facilitating, convening, and building civic capacity. This focus engages the community in a different way than providing the opportunity to engage large national topics for the purpose of education. It is intended to help citizens see themselves as actors.
The Institute for Civic Discourse and Democracy (ICCD) at Kansas State University seems to be one of these community-based PPIs. This land-grant university serves the entire state through its county extension offices. As an agricultural state, the economy of Kansas has many small towns that serve farming communities. But local economies are harder and harder to sustain, as transportation to larger cities is more available, taking business away from the community. People are willing to travel to get lower prices on food and other goods.
Kansans were concerned about the cornerstone of small, local economies—the rural grocery. Between 2004 and 2007, approximately 1,300 small grocers had gone out of business in the state, so ICCD surveyed rural grocers and their customers to frame the issue for public deliberation.
As is common in economic development, the issue can be viewed through a variety of lenses. They framed the issue themselves, identifying three approaches to the economic concern: 1) competing with big-box stores, 2) preserving a community, and 3) improving health by making nutritious foods locally available. As a result of the deliberation, cooperative relationships among grocers were formed to meet the community and economic development needs of these communities.
Some anecdotal changes that have occurred as a result of connecting the storeowners and the citizens include simple things that citizens could do themselves. Yet these actions would not have occurred without the space to deliberate—catalyzed by the ICCD. For example, the stores changed their hours and added product lines that citizens needed and wanted. And, the grocers have been able to expand their product lines by working with regional distributors who sell healthy food in smaller quantities—a service the large distributors would not provide.
ICCD learned several lessons from their facilitation and convening work with these rural communities. Not only did the community create a way to deal with the concern out of its own resources, ICCD learned to approach the issue differently. They see themselves less as content experts—the traditional role in the university— and more as process convenors. By working from the grassroots up they were able to make personal connections, create neutral space for deliberation, and catalyze community action. The new network of interaction is a strong example of the kind of actions that can result from deliberation.
The University of Michigan (U of M) is another example of a PPI that operates like a civic-life association. They did not start that way. Faced with a struggling economy in Michigan, the governor went on a listening tour to identify the citizens’ budget priorities. She heard citizens say clearly that its priorities were for public education at the K-12 level and health care for vulnerable populations. Higher education was a low priority to citizens. Yet there was recognition on the part of the governor that higher education was important for the state to grow economically. The governor’s office sought help from the PPI at the U of M to better understand the public’s thinking about higher education.
What started as a traditional policy-focused series of forums turned into something much more. U of M was unprepared for the interest of forum participants in the topic and the urgency to act that often develops from such discussions. They did not anticipate that the “move to action” was even needed. They believed there was an intrinsic value in deliberative forums as informing, educating, and sharing a public voice with policymakers.
Learning as they went along, they began to consider their work, not as organizing an event, but as convening a community around an issue. What they discovered was that the community had many resources to bring to the issue—without which, government actions alone were likely to fail. They reflected on their efforts in five communities and generated insights about how PPIs might engage communities differently, depending on the networks and relationships they found.
U of M learned different ways of entering communities as they moved across the state to hold forums. In their early work in Ann Arbor, they simply collected the results of the forums and compiled it as information for the Governor’s office. When they moved on to the cities of Grand Rapids and Jackson, they tapped into networks that were willing and ready to deliberate, such as a mediation center. The work in these two communities helped build stronger relationships and facilitated action around education. When they moved on to Detroit, they lacked relationships to build on, so the university had to create “transactions” that would build those relationships first, through trust. This work had to occur before any deliberation would be successful at building the network for action.
Finally, Sault Ste. Marie—a community more than eight hours away from Ann Arbor —required another approach altogether. Again, they lacked existing relationships. Building on what they learned from Jackson and Detroit, they contacted established groups to build a network of strong, sustainable relationships. The network became responsible for the public participation rather than the PPI as event organizer. Furthermore, this relationship with the community placed the community as the expert with the university responding with the information, data, and experiences the community requested. They believed they left structures and capacities in place that would overcome the distance and time required for action.
Beyond building the capacity in the communities, these PPIs are bringing deliberation to the university. Kansas State works across disciplinary lines in the academy and builds capacity across the university. The provost funded a start-up institute there, which enabled the institute to focus less on satisfying internal institutional mandates and instead focus on the community it serves. The University of Michigan makes extensive use of graduate students from a variety of disciplines. This builds the capacity of future generations.
Other PPIs operate in this capacity-building frame of mind as well. Kettering is embarking on a new line of inquiry to discover the roles that PPIs play in communities, how they enter political environments, and how they relate to the citizenry. We want to understand more about how these institutes are able to accomplish what they do in an environment that is full of institutional and external mandates that typically discourage the kind of innovations in civic life they are experimenting with. Without strong community networks and the desire to experiment, we believe it is much harder for a community to develop and prosper. And, it helps democracy work better by rebuilding an associational, civic life.