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Center (since renamed Everyday Democracy), the National League of Cities, the League of Women Voters, America Speaks, Public Agenda, the Kettering Foundation, and the National Civic League. These recruitment tactics seemed to demonstrate an old and recurring phenomenon: if you want to mobilize citizens, you have to make them feel that they are part of something larger than themselves. Asking people to join a fascinating small-group dialogue usually isn’t enough to tempt them. To persuade them to spend some of their free time this way, organizers had to show citizens that high-profile leaders had “bought in” to the idea, that many different organizations were involved, and that taking part would give them a real opportunity to effect change. Citizens needed to know that their small-group discussion would be one of many—one small part of a community capable of solving its problems. Just as they learned how to recruit large numbers of people and involve them in productive meetings, local leaders also learned how to help those citizens achieve tangible changes in their communities. For some organizers working on issues of race, action planning didn’t seem important at first; some of them saw racism as mainly an interpersonal challenge, and they felt that creating civil, educational discussions would be sufficient. But in the small-group sessions, it became clear that talk was not enough. Participants wanted to see changes happen, and they didn’t always expect – or trust – government to put their ideas into practice. To help people move from dialogue to action, some organizers began holding large-group events for all the participants after the small-group sessions had ended. They used names like “action forum” to describe these meetings, which were designed to categorize and prioritize the enormous variety of ideas that emerged in the small-group meetings, match promising ideas with sets of people willing to work on them, and highlight action efforts that were already underway. The forums followed different formats in different places: in some communities they looked like volunteer fairs, while in others they resembled old-fashioned political conventions, but most of them succeeded in attracting public officials and other decisionmakers and giving participants a chance to connect with other problem-solving allies. At some of these concluding forums, local leaders launched new task forces or committees to take on action ideas that were popular in the smallgroup discussions. Many of these new citizen groups foundered once the enthusiasm of the forum had worn off and the group members had begun to feel isolated and powerless again, but organizers realized that they could overcome some of these challenges. In some cases, they recruited people with professional expertise and authority to assist the groups (for example, police officers for a task force devoted to crime prevention). In others, they worked to get media coverage of the task forces. Other, more basic techniques were also successful, such as simply checking in with task force leaders periodically, or holding a subsequent forum several months later at which task forces reported on their progress. One particularly successful task force emerged from a civic experiment on issues of race in Fort Myers in 1997. Over 600 43