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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
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