"What Citizens Can Do . . . and Can't"

By Deborah Witte

Margie Loyacano was eager to attend her first school board meeting in New Lebanon, Ohio. She wanted to talk to board members about testing in the schools. The dialogue-such as it was-didn't last long. "They didn't want to hear what I had to say," she said. "They only wanted me to hear what they had to say."

Disappointed but not discouraged, she and other parents kept coming back. But nothing seemed to improve. As Loyacano saw it, the board became increasingly less responsive and more ineffective with each passing year. School levies failed repeatedly. School programs, such as art and music, were cut.

The parents were fed up. But they refused to give up. They decided they would have to step up and try to make the changes they wanted themselves. Although "we didn't always know what it was we should be doing," Loyacano said, they did succeed in making some small changes in the schools. The bigger change, however, was in the community. Citizens were coming together around their shared concerns, building a community, and creating a public.

Eventually the citizens of New Lebanon voted in new school board members. The new board invites the public in and works more willingly with citizens. Parents are participating in school activities and showing up for other community events. Other members of the community are attending programs as well. Even the school building is more open as seniors in the community now use the hallways as a walking track.

While this tale of citizen action could be seen as simply a classic case of "throw the bums out," Loyacano observed, this story is not simply a case of bad behavior on the part of school board members. As another participant in our series of interviews for the "Readers' Forum" said, after listening to Loyacano's story, board members need to be supported by citizens when they take risks and tread into new territory. Board members need to know that citizens want to work with them.

"It may be," as Paloma Dallas points out in her article on citizen boards, "Citizens Boards: When Local Isn't Enough," "that citizen boards, in their efforts to be effective, have . . . excluded citizens, albeit unwittingly."

Grass Tops, Not Grass Roots

One community organizer from Helena, Arkansas, who works at the grassroots level trying to persuade citizens to speak up, struggles with the idea that deliberation empowers people. While she firmly believes in the process and has experienced people actually taking action to help themselves, she said she has also experienced everyday citizens finding themselves weeded out of the decision-making process, especially when the decisions are made around money.

She recalled a "heart-wrenching" experience in her community when civic engagement played a key role in the development of a plan to move the community into a more productive growth mode. Grassroots citizens were involved in the planning, but once the goals for the project were established, the citizens were denied the right to vote on them. This type of power grab makes it difficult for citizens to believe in any process.

The experience in Helena, the community organizer said, caused some citizens to vow never again to participate in a community meeting. Moreover, these citizens learned that staff members from the development agency later commented that the planning process did not include the kind of citizens they desired; they were looking for the community's "grass tops," not the grass roots. One lesson she learned is that institutions can have a different idea of what it means to be a grassroots citizen. People will leave the poor out of decisions and still claim they've involved the grass roots in their efforts. The way some decisions are made in her community, she said, makes her think that at times "democracy is a farce."

Too often, this community organizer said, she and her colleagues find they have to apologize to citizens who have agreed to participate in community forums because their voices were discounted. It's hard to rally people to engage in the community's affairs, she said, because experience tells citizens that the outcome isn't likely to be what they wanted-when interest groups that know the ropes circumvent the wishes of the majority. "When you're working to empower people," she said, "they ought to get a little credit."

Sidetracking Citizens

Sad to say, other participants in our "Readers' Forum" interviews related all too easily to these stories. Yvonne Sims from Grand Rapids, Michigan, wondered whether people in power even want poor and less well educated citizens to vote since so many impediments are put in their way. Before the last election in Grand Rapids, Sims explained, precincts were changed with little publicity. This caused considerable confusion on Election Day. But even when voters found their correct precincts, she said, poll workers often couldn't find people's names on the rolls. It left you with a bad feeling, she said. "But we'll hang in and vote no matter what."

Sims also told about an effort to rename a street in Grand Rapids for Martin Luther King Jr. The effort gained ground in community forums, attended by newspaper and television reporters who publicized the outcomes. Finally the recommendation to name the street Martin Luther King Jr. Drive was taken to the city commission. But the commission wasn't buying it. They found a "nice" way around what the people really wanted by giving the street the unofficial, and secondary, designation, Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Drive. The powerful listen nicely in Grand Rapids, Sims said, but the people see through them.

Sims shares the same dilemma as the community activist from the South. How can you help citizens learn that politicians don't have to agree with you, that they may not come to the same conclusion as you do about what should be done? The community steering committee on which Sims serves struggles with this question. Were the politicians really listening? If so, how could they sidetrack and trivialize what so many citizens clearly wanted? Members of her steering committee, Sims said, wonder how they can encourage people to continue to participate in deliberative dialogue when their decisions can so easily be circumvented.

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• What Citizens Can Do . . . and Can't