civic engagement | CitiesSpeak

The City of Big Ideas

Posted on April 10, 2014 by Tim Mudd

This is the second in a series of blog posts highlighting “big ideas” reshaping America’s cities. Join the conversation on social media using the hashtag #CityIdeas.

While Congress continues to be trapped in budget battles and partisan gridlock, tomorrow’s “Big Ideas for Cities” event is an opportunity for local leaders to showcase the city innovations and programs that address our nation’s biggest challenges.

Chicago is a fitting host. The City of Big Shoulders continues to tackle tough challenges, from addressing barriers to small business development and entrepreneurship, to working to ensure all children and youth are on a pathway to postsecondary education and training.

Here are just a few initiatives we’ve documented that are moving the city toward a more engaged, equitable and sustainable future:

Participatory Budgeting

Starting in 2010, Chicago Alderman Joe Moore began using a participatory budgeting strategy to determine how to prioritize and spend $1.3 million in local infrastructure funds.

“The participatory budgeting process is conducted primarily through a range of community meetings—educational meetings in each of the Ward’s eight geographic sections, followed by the creation of committees with team leaders for specific topic areas such as parks, arts and streets,” said Alderman Moore.

In addition to increasing citizen involvement in decision-making, participatory budgeting in the 49th Ward has spurred citizens to be more active problem-solvers. Today, for example, a dog park and a community garden, two projects that were initiated and approved through the process, are now operated by teams of neighborhood volunteers.

Dropout Reengagement Centers

Chicago has joined the ranks of cities that are using highly accessible physical locations to connect out-of-school youth and their families with services that enable youth to obtain a diploma or GED.

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) developed “Student Outreach and Reengagement” (SOAR) centers, and contracts with a community-based organization to operate each of its three centers.

The centers use several strategies to locate dropouts. Reengagement specialists – four at each center – receive a list of students who have withdrawn from Chicago Public Schools, or show signs of chronic truancy. The specialists also work with counselors at nearby schools to identify dropouts or truants, and receive ongoing referrals as well.

All returning students undergo an intake assessment designed to identify barriers to school success, which frequently results in referrals to supportive services. A reengagement facilitator reviews the student’s transcript to determine graduation needs and develops a graduation plan.

Improving Parks and Playgrounds

Last year, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a comprehensive strategy to rebuild, repair or refurbish 300 playgrounds in communities across Chicago, the city’s first major park rehabilitation effort in 20 years. Called “Chicago Plays,” the goal of the project is for every Chicagoan to live within a 10-minute walk to a safe and vibrant park.

“The 300 playgrounds we are rebuilding in every neighborhood will be a catalyst for a better quality of life and higher standard of living for every Chicagoan,” said Mayor Emanuel.

Chicago is expanding access to playground facilities by mapping their location and assessing the current state of the city’s parks and playgrounds. By identifying neighborhoods that are “play deserts” either because parks and playgrounds near them are unsafe, inaccessible or nonexistent, Chicago is making strides to ensure that all children in the city have opportunities for play and physical activity.

Bright Spots in Community Engagement: Detroit – The Wild, Wired West

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Emily Pickren

This post was written by Matt Leighninger, Executive Director, Deliberative Democracy Consortium.

This is the second post in a blog series highlighting communities that were profiled in the new Knight Foundation and NLC joint report, Bright Spots in Community Engagement. The report showcases 14 U.S. communities that are building greater civic participation and engagement from the bottom up.

When you talk to civic entrepreneurs in Detroit, you hear a common refrain:

“This city is like the Wild West – you can do anything here!”

Part of Detroit’s ‘Wild West’ feeling comes from the physical surroundings. Even though it is an older Rust Belt city, the wide avenues in the downtown and the new wide-open spaces in Detroit’s neighborhoods – which have emerged in part through demolition of blighted housing – make it seem emptier than is actually the case. (In fact, Detroit has greater population density than Denver or Phoenix.)

Some people mention the coyotes that have moved into neighborhoods near downtown; Delphia Simmons of Kiva Detroit complains about the pheasants that now occupy the vacant lot next to her house and wake her up early in the morning with their calls.

The support of several foundations, including the Knight Foundation, combined with the wide-open environment for civic entrepreneurs, has fostered a number of bright spots in Detroit’s engagement scene:

Kiva Detroit, which provides microloans to local small businesses.
Hatch Detroit, which provides funding, business services and community exposure to new retail startups.
Code for America; Detroit is one of the cities involved in this national initiative to connect technology experts with public service through a system of embedded fellowships.
Detroit Works, a community engagement process to create a shared, achievable vision for Detroit’s future.
Detroit Soup, a monthly dinner at which participants raise money and select creative projects to receive micro-financing.
Model D, an online magazine highlighting the successes of engagement efforts.
Urban Innovation Exchange, an initiative to showcase and advance Detroit’s growing civic and social innovation movement.
Data Driven Detroit, which provides high quality information and analysis to drive engagement and informed decision-making.
The Detroit City Futbol League/Club, an 800-person, 28-neighborhood league that goes beyond soccer to bring together neighbors and highlight Detroit’s unique and historic communities.

Most of these bright spots rely on the same successful principles. Similar to the community engagement work being done in Philadelphia, all of them build supportive networks of people, and use social media in concert with face-to-face meetings to make and sustain those connections. They are all information- and idea-rich, allowing innovation to spread rapidly and gather support through the network. And they have a ‘cool factor’ – there is a psychological reward for people in these networks when they do things that seem innovative and public-minded.

The public institutions of Detroit do not seem to have much of a presence in these networks. Nick Gorga of Hatch Detroit, a nonprofit committed to promoting retail entrepreneurs and improving retail business in the city, reported that though he and his partners had spoken with hundreds of people as they set up their organization, they hadn’t talked with a single person in local government.

Sean Mann, founder of the Detroit City Futbol League, noted that most of the successes he and his collaborators have experienced have come in spite of, rather than with the support of, city government institutions.

Bridging Civic Divides

One result of this division between civic entrepreneurs and civic institutions is a lack of coordination among people working to solve public problems. The new civic networks have been effective at tapping assets outside government, but they are not connected with the public resources, including money and manpower, available for problem-solving and community-building.

A largely unspoken dimension of this division is racial: the civic entrepreneurs working in Detroit seem to be disproportionately white, well-educated, and middle- to upper-income, whereas the workforce in City Hall and the Detroit Public Schools is dominated by the African-America middle class.

The real Wild West may have been a good environment for innovation, but it was also a highly divided society. There may be ways that technology-assisted, socially savvy network-building can help to bridge the key divisions in Detroit, making it a city that is more innovative, equitable and engaged. Public-private partnerships between civic entrepreneurs, foundations, city government and other public institutions could provide a more systematic, coordinated approach to community engagement that is as inclusive as it is innovative.

Engaging Youth in Local Government

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Tim Mudd

When Alderperson Scott Resnick of Madison, Wisconsin ran for local elected office in 2011 at the age of 24, he knocked on nearly every door in his district – which encompasses parts of the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus and surrounding neighborhoods. As he was greeted by residents, some would mistakenly ask, “Are you running for student council?” To their initial surprise, Resnick replied that he was seeking their vote for a seat on the Madison Common Council.

Engaged in local governance from a young age, Alderperson Resnick joined his home town’s Youth Action Council while in high school, continued his passion for public service in various clubs throughout college at UW-Madison, and upon graduation, served as President of the State-Langdon Neighborhood Association. In 2004 during his junior year in high school, Resnick also served as a youth representative on NLC’s Council on Youth, Education, and Families.

“From my earliest days involved with local government back in Wausau, I learned to love how communities are made strong by effective and creative leadership,” said Resnick.

At NLC’s Congress of Cities in Boston last month, Alderperson Resnick shared his experience in local government with nearly 100 youth delegates. Joining him on the panel were Boston City Councilor Matt O’Malley, age 33, and Coral Springs City Commissioner Dan Daley, age 22. The young elected leaders told the youth to not let their age restrict them from engaging in public service – that their voice adds value to the design of local policies, practices, and public spaces.

Youth as Participants

Over the years, municipal leaders have increasingly championed this same message in cities across the country. More and more city leaders see youth as a resource for community problem-solving rather than simply recipients of services. Youth are working with elected officials and other city leaders to tackle important issues, and similar to Alderperson Resnick, discovering that their voice matters to their communities and taking initiative to make it heard.

For instance, in Boston, with the emphatic support of Mayor Thomas Menino, youth participation in local governance is a pervasive and self-perpetuating expectation throughout the city. Part of the comprehensive Boston Youth Zone initiative, the Boston Mayor’s Youth Council (MYC) empowers youth to act as advocates for themselves and their peers through identifying and representing the needs and desires of the youth community before city leadership.

The council consists of 40 high school juniors and seniors selected from each of the city’s 12 neighborhoods to ensure that the council represents the diversity of youth in Boston. Council members are highly responsive to their peers, and conduct regular outreach to their neighbors and local community organizations. At the same time, MYC staff encourage youth to explore their political interests, connecting them with state legislators, U.S. Senators, members of the White House, among others.

A Youth Participation Framework

In addition to engaging the next generation of civic leaders, cities using effective approaches to youth participation are realizing far reaching benefits such as budget savings and revenue generation; increased support for city initiatives; improved policies and programs for youth; identification as a youth-friendly community; and improved indicators of well-being among youth.

NLC’s Institute for Youth, Education, and Families (YEF Institute) has drawn upon the experiences of communities with the most robust youth engagement initiatives to develop an Authentic Youth Civic Engagement (AYCE) framework consisting of four critical elements for a successful initiative:

A setting in which the civic climate of the community is welcoming and inviting to youth, acknowledging their role in public policy, planning, and decision-making;
A structure in which the organization and system that supports AYCE meets both the needs of the local government and the interests of the young people;
A strategy that offers a wide range of activities and provides youth with a breadth and depth of meaningful opportunities for participation in local government; and
Support from adult allies, both within and outside local government, which enables the young people involved in AYCE efforts to have a real impact on issues that concern them.

Like any other local initiative, there may be no magic recipe for youth participation. But, as noted by Alderperson Resnick, Counselor O’Malley, and Commissioner Daley, it must begin with an acknowledgement that the youth voice matters – that youth are valuable stakeholders, capable of contributing to the vibrancy of our communities.

To learn more about how your community can engage youth in local decision making, contact Leon T. Andrews Jr., at (202) 626-3039 or andrews@nlc.org.

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