Living Democracy

if anybody's willing to move they'd like you to come forward hello is it on before we begin I'd like to remind everybody that this evening at 8 o'clock Lawrence Jones will be lecturing in the sunroom on the Ezequiel experience and tomorrow at noon in the same place as we are today they are we will have Stephanie Koontz and she will be speaking on families in the American dream our speakers today will be for instance Marla pay in palsy bra and together they're the cofounders of the Institute for the Arts of democracy and MS lepay is the author of several books including diet for a small planet and rediscovering America's values which are both available for sale at the table next to the door she's also co-founded the Institute for food and development policy mr. Dubois has been vice president at Cambridge College and at the College of the Atlantic he also has authored books such as the hospice way of death and modern practices and human service agencies together they have authored a new book doing democracy which will be out later this year we hope you will join us for the rest of this week's activity and we would like to remind you that Tuesday's presentation does begin at 7 p.m. and not 8 p.m. as stated in our brochure and please give a warm welcome to Francis Moore lepay and Paul Dubois if you won't come to us alright okay great just to start we know that a number of you have to leave at 1 o'clock that's fine our feelings are not going to be crushed or whatever if you leave however at 12:59 it's a very different story how many of you were at last night's presentation aha basically on the fringes ok ok we really only have I mean we have considerably less than an hour I guess it's not very much time to talk to talk with you and we'd like to get a sense of how you'd like to spend this time together we really have several options I mean one is that we could spend perhaps as long as say 30 minutes telling you perhaps in slightly different words but pretty much what we had to say last night let's just call that option one for a minute ok and we can kind of recapitulate what we did last night and then you can and and then we can have a have a very short general discussion another is that we could spend about 10 minutes doing that just trying to really synopsize and then you can and then we can have open it up to general discussion for everybody and the third option that we thought of is that we could divide into into small groups after a very short synopsis and we could begin to discuss some of the issues particularly around power in our own lives that that we touched upon last night in other words we could in 10 minutes tell you what we had to say and whatever it is an hour last night and then and then we could have some small group discussions and then maybe we could talk a little bit more generally at the end of that ok so the first option is that we just talk to you for a half hour or so and then have a general discussion how many would rather have us do that anybody ok all right that's a whole bunch ok the main line people not the fringes all right and then how many would rather have us say talk for 10 minutes maybe 15 at the most and then have a general discussion with among everybody okay that's close to half and half but we're getting wheezing and how many wanted how many would like to have some small group discussions and that sort of thing okay all right okay that that's even fewer what do you want to do you think they're more for option one you do God you think there are yeah some of you are nodding I hate to disappoint the fringe element but it looks like there are a lot more people who just Joe I'm sorry just want us to talk a little bit so why don't we do that and then we'll have a general discussion okay I guess all right okay we'll do that let's let's start with with just a pinch is a very short personal statement from each of us about why we came to this work so just so you know something about us and then and then we can get get on to the heart of the of the talk last night okay well as Jennifer introduced me you heard that my first sort of public statement as the person in my mid-twenties was a book called diet for a small planet it started out actually it's a one-page handout and I thought I should know a little bit more about it and it became diet for small kind of sort of I don't exactly know how that happened but once it was out there I I sort of became the Julia Child's of a soybean circuit during the 1970s and it was very different than what I wanted to do that when I wrote that one page handout because what I really wanted to do was to explain to people that hunger is needless it is made by human beings not now we can't blame nature and I thought if I could just expose people to the reality of obviously leadless hunger and helped us to show how concentrated forms of decision making whether we're talking about like our political from the village level to the level of international trade how fewer and fewer people making the decisions was actually cutting people out of the capacity to feed themselves and that was really what what hunger was all about so I tried harder and harder into the 80s as I wrote other books on the Institute I I helped have found food first I finally sort of boiled my message down to one simple theme and that is that hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food or scarcity of land it's actually caused by scarcity of democracy but as the eggs progressed and I got more and more fat 'ok with that message i got more and more uncomfortable and standing in front of audiences because people say okay if hunger is caused by a scarcity of democracy where is that democracy you talk about that's going to end hunger what do you really mean by a democracy that's able to end hunger I don't see it and and how is it possible and so in that out of that discomfort I kept pushing myself out of that discomfort I kept pushing myself harder and harder to try to figure out well how do we talk about the next stage in the evolution of democracy without presenting some model some idealized model that that it's going to disempower people even more because they know we can't achieve that ideal and out of that discomfort tremendous discomfort gradually came the themes that we're going to be talking about today what we talk about when we say living democracy and what I really came to was that democracy has to be seen not as an endpoint that we arrive at not as a model that we ultimately achieved but a process that we engage in every day of our lives and that we have an historic moment now I believe and for many many reasons I think that's true to begin to redefine democracy in the ways that we're going to be talking about today so that in fact it will be vital enough to to end hunger and address the other profound social and environmental problems that face us so that's something of how I got here in a couple of minutes rendition and Paul has his very different version well when I was the age of most of the people here it was the 1960s and I guess the 1970s and I was very very much involved in the civil rights movement and very very active I went to jail a total of 42 times on civil rights marches that might suggest a level of failure and and I was I was really seething with anger about the oppression of my people about problems of racism and poverty and so I knew then that I really wanted to spend the rest of my life doing something about this and it was my people black people with who especially it was what was most especially it can important to me and and I became very unhappy with the civil rights there and we could talk about that if he wanted to at some point because the gains seemed to me to be well defined at first and very limited and then the major backlash that occurred seemed to me to to present a barrier that meant that we were going to go nowhere in this kind of tactic I then became the executive director of a large black community organization the largest in New York State and we ran programs in which people had a good deal of decision-making power and I tried to learn some lessons from that that people who this society normally thinks that was not capable of making very good decisions were in fact quite capable quite capable with enough knowledge and enough skill to do to run programs that did them a great deal of good I then tried college teaching for a while partially to regroup and and and and to kind of recover from burnout and and and and and to try a very very different approach of basically teaching the young and I learned from that experience that from a variety of other experiences with planned parenthood and some professional associations and and the the human potential movement and so on I number of lessons which seemed to me to come together and the way they came together it was really fundamentally this that the problems that I have been most concerned about for my life than many of you are concerned about in many many ways seemed to me to not be getting a great deal better that the problems of racism environmental degradation poverty homelessness and so on we all know that and we know that although there have been for example among black people a very large proportion of black people from the games of the 1960s who have entered the middle class they've also fled to the suburbs and that the people who have left behind as Kathleen cleaver the wife of Eldridge Cleaver one of the leaders of the Black Panthers back in the 70s said very recently things have never been worse in her lifetime well I bet that's true for all of us that for those who have left behind in fact things have not been will never have never really been worse than than they are today so what is it what is it that that explains what seems to be to be widespread failure and as in Francis's terms it seems to me that that one what one has to do is to go deeper and when you begin to go deeper you begin to understand that there's something wrong with the way in fact we function as a society or put it another way there's something wrong with the way we practice democracy that democracy the promise of democracy has never come close to being realized here and that's that's where we begin this this talk and that's where we begin this life's work that underneath it that we don't care what you do with the problems that you're most concerned about homelessness environment anything else what we would argue is that until in fact millions more people learn to be engaged in democratic decision-making and learn to lend their creativity to problem-solving and learn to have their values expressed in public policy that in fact these problems are not really going to get substantially better no matter how many millions of people continue to work on them I think in closing there Paul you really laid out the challenge that is that has arisen through each of our life experience and so I all I can do is really try to put it out there in the simplest terms and that is that we are saying that no matter what special interest you have whether it be the environment whether it be issues of gender whether it be poverty whether it be the AIDS crisis whether whatever you're concerned that none of these can be addressed successfully unless we are going deeper to the underlying question of how how do we reinvent a process a democratic process whether it be in our classroom in our universities in our communities in which we those of us who have to live with the decisions have a role in making the decisions and this requires really something quite radical profound rethinking of democracy itself and redefining what we mean by public life it's not just what what celebrities have it's not just what public officials have it's what every one of us here has everyday we walk outside of our homes our intimate relationships and we sit in a classroom where we stand before a classroom we go into the workplace we relate to the media or Human Services and each of those roles we are shaping the communities in which we participate we are making choices even by choosing not to react even by choosing to be passive we are creating the public life in which we all are shaped so that really then begins to suggest a number of themes that we have to rethink and we begin with rethinking what is self-interest because that's a very important element of democracy that is not just simply a set of government structures but it becomes a way of life you know when we ask people as we did last night what you think of when you think of self-interest what comes to mind the first word that we usually get is selfishness we also get the sense from many many people that it's something to be overcome that we all ought to learn to be of service that we ought to somehow and we hear this on Sunday mornings from pulpits all across the country that we ought to somehow learn to set aside our self-interest and act on behalf of the common good and yet what what the successful organizations and people across this country we have been studying have been teaching us about self-interest is that it really doesn't have to be a dirty word and that if you try to set it aside that in fact you're not going to wind up being very successful if you'll turn to handout number three at the bottom of that page you'll see a chart that says rethinking self-interest okay and you'll see three orientations of self-interest one is service the second is selfishness and the third is relational self-interest and what we've been learning from organizations like the industrial areas foundation quite a number of others which have effectively managed to change the quality of life in a variety of poor communities across this country and and middle-class communities also is that relational self-interest says to you you know there's really nothing wrong with acknowledging that in fact you have some important interests that have to be taken into account when you become active in your public life and your public life as Francis was pointing out really includes everything how you how you behave in school what happens in your workplace what happens at the human service agency or the hospital or the clinic that you visit and so on right down the line what happened to you where you live what kind of housing you have and all the rest of it and and and how you deal with banking and and so many other important institutions everything outside of your immediate small family you interests in all of this and it is perfectly appropriate for you to learn to express those interests and to learn to tie those interest to connect those interest to the interests of other people and it is this relational self interest it is this connected interest mine with yours that enables us once through enough discussion through enough understanding your of my interest mine of your interest to to act effectively at act in unison and it's a very very different message this business of self interest than what we usually hear which as I said is usually you know it's got to be dog-eat-dog and get what I want or it ought to you know we ought to play mother Teresa now what do we do in order to learn how to relate our interests back and forth and to develop a sense of the larger and relational interest well we've got a lot of skills that we've got to learn and if skills related not only to self interest but also to power quite a variety of other things that we've got to learn in order to be effective citizens in this society if you'll turn that page over to handout number four no I'm sorry excuse me you'll turn it to handout number five where we talk about the arts of democratic life you'll see that we've listed there nine I guess it says okay of the kinds of skills that we really don't practice very much and it's interesting isn't it that you can get all the way through even a college education at a good university and in fact I think if you were to grade yourself on how good a listener you are how good you are dealing with conflict dealing with anger negotiating interest mediation envisioning a future for your society for your neighborhood for your organization for yourself and engaging in dialogue or coming together with others at public judgment or evaluating and reflecting what really happens within your own that in fact you have to admit as most Americans do that we have almost no experience at any of that isn't that true isn't that effectively charming wouldn't you really have to give us all pretty low grades at all of these kinds of skills and yet this is precisely what is necessary in order to have an effective democracy a democracy that works to solve our problems and I think it's an eye-opener to realize that we can get that we can be well educated people with great futures for the most part effective in this society we think and yet not be able to function effectively in public life to solve the problems that that are on the hearts and minds of so many of us why don't we stop talking about the arts and move to power for just a few minutes both of these both of these themes that Paul has outlined of self-interest and these the missing arts the in the arts that really don't get visibility in the society don't get the emphasis that we're saying they would if we took democratic practice a democratic problem-solving seriously all those really are ways of expressing power so to understand what we mean by a democracy vital enough to actually solve our public problems we have to rethink power and just like Paul said with self-interest we get bombarded with with messages that that actually paralyze us messages like you know squelch your self-interest well Lisa V power we also get very negative messages we last night we asked the audience what is the first thing you think of when you hear the word power we got words like manipulation coercion money men Paul added white men a lot of mega we got one positive at the very end love but generally speaking we think of power as dirty because it's corrupting it has to be by necessity manipulative and I think that we think of power as kind of a commodity and entity that either you got it or you don't and if Paul hasn't I don't and vice versa I mean it's it's either/or and we think that both of these notions that power is dirty it's corrupted and that it's it's an either or both of these are very disempowering and in fact inaccurate because if we look more deeply into our own lives and without this sort of messages coloring our our experience what our teachers and again I want to underline everything that we're saying today is a condensation of the lessons that we are being taught by quote-unquote ordinary people all around the country our research today is not going into the UN documents like I used to to write books about world hunger it is sitting in people's living rooms in their halls and their churches and their synagogues listening to what is working for them how are they discovering power and that's what we're talking about this morning what we are learning from from them not what we have just invented out of our own heads so back to power so what people are discovering is that what works is thinking about power always as a relationship we all indeed are these social beings embedded in relationships and power is always operating in relationships and so that what I do even if I if it's just to sit passively in a classroom it affects what goes on in front of that classroom because there is a relationship there there was a response to sitting passively in a classroom a professor then in front of that classroom response to that passivity we could give you a you know thousands of examples but the point is that our behavior because we are these social creatures affects each other so that power is always in operating in a relationship and once you realize that and start to think of it that way then you realize that you have to get out of the simple blaming mode it's his fault it's her fault it's the boss's fault it's a professor's fault it's the administration's fault it's the president's fault and see that in some way there is some opportunity for you to affect that relationship there are some openings for power that maybe you didn't think that you had and then what happens with the citizens that we been talking with because they start to discover sources of power that never had occurred to them before they started discovering say for example the kind of power that knowledge gives them that they can dig out the information they want to know Paul gave an example last night of low-income citizens who dug out the information about financing for housing particularly in their in the inner city and how banks were taking money out of the inner city and what could be done they ended up learning more as one professor told us that the most finance professors know about such things and ended up pushing through national legislation that brought 8 billion dollars in bank investment back into the inner city the power of knowledge is discovered the power of humor the throwing you're throwing people off guard by being able to to turn a situation into a humorous one and we gave examples last night so on on handout we've included on handout number three on the top of the page we've covered my first points here about power the contrast between power as as something that is dirty and always manipulative to something that is in fact mutually expanding and that exists in a relationship and that therefore can be freeing when it is collaborative and on the backside of that same page we've included just a few of the examples of what happens when people break out of the old notion of power and walk into the notion of power as a relationship in which they have some perhaps now invisible sources to cultivate and that once they focus on those then that sense of powerlessness which is one of the easiest ways to to you know to feel to feel cynical cynical as a simple cop-out that is it simple there's nothing I can do because I have no power so therefore you can't blame me for not doing anything well once you rethink power in this way there there are no more easy outs and we begin to see that no matter how much less power we may have in any given situation we are never totally powerless so that's some of the general orientation about some of the themes that we're learning about those who are beginning to turn our democracy from a formal static institution or process to a living process that we can all be engaged in so I like that last phrase we can all be engaged in let's think about questions that you have and how we can all get engaged here in a discussion of this really rather strange kind of notion isn't it I mean and most I've been a professor of public policy and political science and public administration and it's interesting that in all of those courses and all the courses that I had to take in order to get my doctorate and all this sort of thing that you hardly ever hear anything about democracy this is a very very new subject and it's a for most people so we'd love to get your questions but we'd also like to kind of get you engaged if we can in a in a conversation about you know what you think about some of these notions let me just tell you that the kinds of lessons that we've been drawing as we tried to explain last night are from quite a wide variety of institutions and success stories that we've been very privileged to go around the country and discover people have been very very successful poor people middle-class people wealthy people coming together black people white people in quite a variety of settings about the schools within classrooms and entire school districts including the entire city of Chicago learning to have parents and teachers and students come together to make many more decisions about the schools then then it is the usual case and within classrooms professors and teachers high school teachers elementary school teachers learning to involve students in in in the educational process and in making decisions about what it is they're going to learn how they're going to go about learning it so therefore what they feel is a sense of ownership of the process they learn more they stay in school longer they do better the same with regard to economics and you know Francis just mentioned the the cases of low income people really effectively changing the way large banks in this country do business vis a vie the inner city we have examples in the media examples in Human Services examples in local governments some of those are very very briefly summarized in the first handout that you got in that first page just a few true stories I mean if you know they will give you just a sense and in order to do the book that we've got coming out later this year we you know we're really very very lucky we've been allowed to basically travel around the country find these stories and let ask these people what are the lessons that you've learned over years of struggle to produce these kinds of successes so why don't we open it up great what I'll tell you what we'll just let me just start and go around this way names and addresses are how to do it how to do it are in the book we are assembling these resource guides you know the interesting thing is it's sort of how to do it that's part of our Institute's mission because there's so little throughout this throughout this entire democracy of a quarter of a billion people about how to do democracy by the way the title of the book is doing democracy in any case why don't once you two want it why don't you explain just a little bit about the Institute and the sorts of things we're trying to do well let let me say just we emphasize what Paul just said that that those of you who who begin to feel any of the passion that we do about about this this very very important approach to problem solving to really let think of it in this way when it requires on all of our parts is is yes looking to see what other people have done but also realizing that we ourselves have to be the inventors because we are charting the waters we we this is not something while there are many examples that we use in our book our last chapters is some is the how-to chapter and it includes stories from people across the country and a resource guide of training programs but they're just a handful around the country we have to all be inventing them with the in our own universities and our own organizations we have to be creating programs one of the things that the groups do for example that we have been most educated by ourselves is and you can do this in your own classrooms in your own clubs in your own churches and synagogues is begin simply by being conscious of after every major event or every meeting to really do an in-depth evaluation what worked here and what didn't in terms of the participatory arts that we're trying to to further how did we deal with conflict begin to do that sort of review how can we ourselves just the reflection do better in terms of integrating diverse views create an environment which is open to to conflict and dissent so there's a beginning practice that we can all engage in wherever we are whatever level we are simply by being beginning to be reflective but again as Paul mentioned we do have a resource guide that we can send you that mentioned some of these training organizations and the last chapter of our new book will be the the how to's chapter but we all have to be inventors so I'm just saying you can't look to any other sort of Institute to do it we all have to be part of this invention can we get a couple of students to respond to that I mean he's talking about you right well and professors to obviously the university the mass media we you know we are really taught there's a necessary connection between what they in effect you know I mean I spent three weeks in now why do you say it was a democratic society and then I want to ask you I mean are you in you functioning in a democracy why do you say that where you were this summer well I'd like to answer that but going back to what Gary said because the only way I'm convinced after after years of trying to do it another way is the only way that people begin to work through the myth that simple simple capitalism is equals democracy our simple free-market is by doing and I think of an example I used last night for the view of you who were there very briefly in Connecticut an example of a broad-based that it's an organization that includes unions and churches and synagogues and other citizen groups and what they have done is challenged the corporations that want to just flee and leave people with no benefits they have challenged and successfully bought out there in several cases successfully bought these companies they have set up a state trust fund of workers by their firms they have set up a community and Trust to to fight speculation on housing costs that keep people out of that make people some people homeless and so it's by the doing of democracy that these people in this community we I talked particularly about a 63 year old woman who had never been involved really outside of her church before and she's now very acting this organization and it was through Teresa's experience of actually despite discovering by doing that she could be an economic decision maker that she didn't have to simply be at the mercy of what the corporation's leaders decided or simply what the market would dictate and that she could be a player in making sure that the market and the corporate interests in the community also were responding to her needs and so it was through doing it that she could she became I'm sure less vulnerable to the simple propaganda that the market is the be-all and end-all of freedom and democracy so I think again it's back to the doing of the experiencing of it that we learn the lessons sort of come around and be there with somebody back here can you can you all here no okay why not to say that again and then explain it a little bit more yeah you mean what we're talking about is just a tad radical okay why why is this so very very different it's always interesting to me in a very simple sense that we can give up so much power to people but it's in the very one of the things that we discovered in the very screwing up that has happened that in itself is we've talked to people who Chicago School System these people what makes you think you can do anything couldn't do anything worse than they've done and so that's part of why we have a sense of hope now because so many people are realizing that the quote-unquote experts up there who were supposed to have done it but the nature of today's problems it just can't be solved you know Jimmy Carter once dead in an off-guard moment that the reason he ran for president is because he became governor the white house and found out really almost the same lesson but the person who was president was certainly not least martyr than he was and you know still wanted all the way along the line we talked to people who say you know I have a sixth grade education you know that's as far as I got and yet in fact I'm finding out a few things I can do it least as good a job at public affairs when I learned the skills as the people who I've been selecting to do it and the second thing I'm pointing out is that it really changes my life for the better and then in fact I grow my spouse grows and then in fact I'm having a great time and now I wouldn't change it for a thing I remember talking to two people we haven't used this in the speech recently but I remember talking to two African Americans in Philadelphia who are heavily involved in the Acorn organization which is an organization that managed to redirect eight billion dollars worth of bank lending to the inner city and they used to be heavy TV watchers and as they slowly grew in all of this they wound up saying we don't have time for TV anymore we're having a lot more fun and they actually compared what they're doing in terms of fun to watching TV into the usual sort of American pastime and they wound up saying hey their lives are much much better these days and so where the lives of your children let's go over the edges can you all hear well I think I society and people need to change and this is a long way from the living democracy but it's interesting in the past few years how Colin maybe all were maybe all we do all we can do right now is carpet one another I mean we're ugly we're a long ways from deciding like the Cuba what our communities are going to be people are starting to at least call in it's a real distancing sort of thing but also the institution's listen to these folks one bad moment and that lasted about four or five seconds and it was when somebody told us last night that there's a huge number of people on campus but you know you're right you're really happy if you look over that list of of Arts of democracy and that last handout what you see there it's something that takes this very bare beginning of you know people trying to express their views a great deal further I mean after all we not only have to spout our own opinions and our own prejudices we also have to listen and then we have to find out how in the world we can begin to to merge what we've listened with what we feel and what we what we experience and how we can develop a common sense of direction and then finally we have to really bring that to a point that we call public judgement and then we can all act upon and that's a very different democratic process than simply shouting some prejudice at somebody you know but but you're right at least shall we is a lot better than I suppose I guess it's better than keeping quiet you can already hear the the gist of what he was saying our isolation and again back to the lessons that we're learning by it by listening is that precise that the successful organizations that we're looking at start right there they start with reconnecting people they don't start with an issue they start with a campaign they start with house meetings where people are reconnecting and listening to each other's concerns in fact in Memphis probably it's been very long time early decades before that since there have been blacks and whites sitting down together in homes on a regular basis and this is how this very successful organization there is operating what is it 456 House meetings involving thousands of Memphians ended up just beginning by listening now beginning with an issue or campaign just listening ended up creating an agenda for the city that involved very important school reform that then because the relationships have been established there were enough volunteers to put together 110 teams of people black and white to go in and interview staff and students and an auxilary staff and all the public schools in Memphis and then to develop out of that a a very sophisticated plan for reform that the parents and others could get behind in other words but my real point is going back to your observation that it started with relationship building because that's what's missing in our isolated our isolated lives and in this case it began primarily through organizations coming through that the churches because certainly in some cities that the churches are still because the churches synagogues are still the most important social grouping where people have at least some sense of least reputable and recognizing each other when they walk through the doorway Sunday or Saturday and they began there and then work from there so I think your observation is right and that's really why the successes have to start with the reconnecting each other I want to throw out a hypothesis and it's really only a hypothesis but connecting the comments of the last two people who spoke them from the audience you know learning evaluating and Francis was pointing out a little while ago just start doing it about any issue that interested about any subject that interest and we'll continue the conversation and I'd like people to respond to what you're just saying but I know it's been hard for some people to listen but I know this is exactly the moment actually waiting for long so exactly it was interesting it's not just the elementary level apparently it's like about three grades and there was a fourth grade teacher who went this conference and everybody was all excited that a fourth-grade teacher was there because it was like our education and there's been this sort of cooperation and now then you send a couple of kids off together to do something and they're trying to emphasize not just emphasize I think they're trying to focus the curriculum on cooperative learning this is the impression my help and I listen but the goal would be someday to institute this but how they calculate you know I mean they're talking about retraining elementary teachers yeah kindergarten to fourth grade teacher no that's out of place until the system accepts that this is also appropriate my complaint your mind my hole you know we would agree that you've described exactly the sort of beam teaching where the whole class remember that that school that we just talked to the principal in Boulder now will venturi School where the teachers got together and then decided on a theme for the entire class for the whole semester there was a question they were pursuing and that integrated the knowledge that and we've seen that model working in a number of schools around the country one of the the ones that now it's become a prime example that people are traveling all over the country to observe so our hope is that sort of this combination of the kind of dissatisfaction that you all are expressing combined with the sense that that those who used to benefit from this narrow sort of teaching aren't benefiting in a way that they want to that there will be a more and more interest in in pursuing some of these different approaches I don't the reason I don't care is that there are lots of monster phrases lots of different approaches that you know pick up a piece of this very large picture but what I do know is that the kind of trained apprentice was just talking about really is occurring across all of these sectors it's occurring in corporations that are finding out that people can in fact collaborate a great deal better and that's the kind of system top-down and all of that authoritarian system doesn't really work nearly as well as they thought and it's occurring in the media where newspapers were learning that in fact if they're going to increase their leadership which they're going to hold on the leaders they've got and and some of the and you know that in fact they've got to start listening to people more and we see this explosion radio and TV of two-way interactive kinds of media and and you know corporations and of course you can talk about it in school the key here I think is that once he left the genie out of the bottle the genie being you know that you can't put it back in and the genie has something to do with people discovering that all of us can have fun in growth and in collaboration and in these kinds and in learning these sorts of skills and that we can wind up with a better community or a better country because of the kinds of activities that we can become engaged and so the genie of engagement whether you want to call it at and second-grade cooperative learning you know or you want to call it one of literally twenty or thirty other things matter what does matter is that in fact of almost everywhere people are beginning to discover that I've got just as much going for me as the so called leaders and that it's fun and rewarded for me to be involved and that's that's a whole other kind of story then you know then what we do we've been taught once that the assumptions start shifting you know it happens at the college level okay I mean there are colleges in which all students which all students come together on Wednesday morning to discuss anything about the college that anybody wants to bring up from the budget to who the next president is going to be I mean there are places where where that happen once you've had that education try going to Iowa State or any place else you know and and not talking about we we visited a public school public school in upstate New York where students come together like this every week and make policy to the entire school now this was a renegade French French school about 20 years ago today that principle is sought after by everybody as an adviser on school reform but why because he's schools working everybody wants to go there now so I mean again it's the genie out of the bottle in fact the same school these children last year voted to increase their own high school graduation requirements so you know others people look at this cruises and they say how do they how they're doing it and they're doing it because it's the kids themselves feel it's their school we have this wonderful quote in our book about you know this is our school we make things happen here so of course we're going to be more active throughout our whole life because we we know that we can do it here I have three company went okay very brief I said three very quick comments one of the danger is about focusing on government and the reason we try not to do it in these talks is that as soon as people start talking about democracy they immediately start thinking about government and what we're saying is that the mantra see relates to government media Human Services your hospital at your streets your anything your school or whatever and that it's all aspects of your life essentially so we always have I always get just lightly tense when somebody brings up with some to be governor because because I want to be sure that with it you know we make that distinction we're not talking about government on the other hand we're going to include government second thing I want to say is that there's a book out by Taylor and an equal call reinventing government and it's becoming very very popular Osborne and yeah okay and it's called reinventing government it's becoming very very popular among public officials and public administrators across the country and it's taught in a variety of ways about the fact that in fact government is learning a number of lessons the government's all across the country literally thousands of them are learning a number of lessons and so this very royal revolution that we've been talking about the school is happening in government also and the third thing that I want to say is that our own brokers coming I mentioned governments local governments that are redefining their relationship with citizens and citizens redefining a relationship to don't mean there are various ways to do that so that we're not stuck in a very narrow model of simple representative government I mean what does it mean when you have a simply a City Council that makes all the decisions we're getting sued okay that's one kind of government but then there are governments that have left that intact but then have established neighborhood councils in which lots and lots of decision-making and lots of coming to public judgement takes place and those are transmitted to government and in some cases I've been saying all for example that kind of system has been in place now for 20 years and it changes the public culture entirely so that mayors and City Council people know damn well that they don't come close to making important decisions until in fact lots and lots of people at the council at the small neighborhood level have have had a major role in coming to terms with all of that and as they point out it when you get for any government it's quite a number of other places it may mean that the governmental process takes longer but it also means that it is qualitatively dramatic in fact it's funny to say that that book we did you government you can order from my Institute in Chester and the other thing I looks more probably the other thing is that a lot of things we could say today are summarized in the book collectively produced called living democracy which is a is a a condensed version of the first part of our book and Sophie it wasn't taken so what we've decided is that the next several decades of our lives is about gathering material and distributing material and producing material on our own that begins to chart some of the kind of change that we're talking about in every sector yeah I wonder if I want to do as coined experts ought to be why don't you explain this well I think but that it's the question of how is the values ground within which this applied last night we use the example of Oregon or go to people in organ coming together to decide how it's the best way to use the limited number of public health dollars and so they the people in this interactive process hundreds of thousands of people with hundreds of house meetings they grappled with the values which how do we make decisions these kind of life and death decisions and of course to do that they had medical expertise coming here to tell them about what are the implications of their different choices this tremendous amount of expertise in their to be applied that the citizens had disgusted by when we care about and they had to make some tough choices that weren't medical choices they were values is it more important to people Baby Alive for brain for two weeks or is it more important to have there are so many thousands of women covered in prenatal care those are questions they're not medical questions so I don't think anything that we're saying undercuts the need for experts by saying that Oprah's audience there what we're saying is that more perspectives have to come in and that's what we're talking about and yes the information right but what was so moving to us about the Oregon experience is how much common ground when you get enough people talking and reflecting together there wasn't a lot of distance there weren't you know demonstrations I'm for keeping a baby alive at all costs and I'm sure you know prenatal care people make choices and we've seen this so many instances and that's where the arts of democracy comes how do we create the environment in which people feel that they are listened to and therefore they're able for the first time which had given birth to a baby with no brain you'd wind up with one kind of decision from that audience but if you didn't have Oprah's audience but in had opens audience but in fact it wasn't just a panel of those people but it was all the other people with claims on the healthcare system and it wasn't limited to a one-hour show and it wasn't about a show and it wasn't drama but was in fact about us learning about the needs of all the people in our community and beginning to balance that out and having to come up with a budget eventually that has priorities about where the healthcare dollar is going to go it wouldn't be anything that would appeal to Oprah Winfrey but it would in fact be something about public judgment that could express the values of the entire community and I dare say that there are people who would back may have babies born without brains who may begin to understand some of the needs that other people could also put on the table televise what they call issue forms where they remember the story about how they brought together elderly people who thought that their health needs were not being adequately addressed in person when they had their agenda but they were in this issue's form process who had health care was so much worse than anything that the elderly had to say that they reassessed their own needs in light of what they were hearing from people in the community they wound up saying what our needs are important and we want to see how much of that we can get met but we also recognize legitimacy of these other needs and in fact they were willing to say that some of these other needs are even more have more immediate pressings demand on the dollars available and they could do that once they could begin to enter into relationship and could begin to to listen a great deal more than we ever can you know on the you know Oprah kind of format or any other format that usually available where are the public forums these days in which Americans can face each other and begin the sources my those are now in decline so the first step is what are the remaining how do we start with what we have and to change change the way they operate and particularly the religious community under way there which is using the congregation as the starting time and when it was in each conversation now about 40 in that city have a meeting where a certain number of conference agreed to house maybe in their home where they just listen the concerns of other people and it just begins again not with an issue but begin with relationship building and then there's a network of religious organizations and now they also they're including these public housing project in this in this house meeting process but beginning not with okay I'm gonna go out and reform a there it's a very different process there but something we're looking at inspiration in 1986 they put together in 4/4 they put together what they call division mm say in this case a 1700 people participated to begin in sort of half tight meeting in a in a process of first putting up you know what are our priorities for improving Chattanooga and then narrowing that down and put in and out of that process came about Oh hundreds of goals of which eight years later about 85 percent has been met I mean some very special characteristics about Chattanooga that made it possible but but the process again of an open wide open cross race cross class process but whose visible so the you know many people in Chattanooga would run by the old boys network and yet because it was totally open woman shelter to a new State Aquarium so that's something you might want to read their number of cities that have gone through this process public visioning concepts we don't want to minimize the difficulty needed Francis mentioned how long it can take can also be very very difficult and there are drawbacks that every single bit of it if you're doing congregation based organizers for example because that's the last institution left in your city you also know that they're going to be a number of people who are not going to participate precisely because it is congregation based and you know it's because of his congregation base there are also some limits to how far they will go you know how much you know how much time and effort you have to pour into just getting some ministries one rabbi to go along with you and to permit this kind of thing and so on so it's it's you know there are limitations in Chattanooga they had this wonderful process and the reason I was thinking about Chattanooga minute he goes and I'll tie this in in just a second but he had this wonderful process of citywide process and yet the fact is that some of the poorest and some of the darkest of all the citizens of Chattanooga really didn't participate in the last round but they expect to participate eight years later in the way I literally have just begun this past week and their environmental concerns and the toxic dumping in their poor communities not addressed the first time around there are limitations they're always going to be criticisms they're going to be valid and yet in fact the process moves forward and most of the people of these communities feel that they're better off well it's just that what Paul described the notion that citizens have a lot more to say about this community then simply voting to elect a given you know official every few years and that starts to get back to the genie out of the bottle that that that Paul was saying to Jennifer's counters that once those assumptions start shifting about what citizens role should be how can you you know go back to a process in which citizens aren't consultants so that it begins to open up the thing that I wanted to relate the question about Chattanooga who was appointed by China maybe to the question about by experts was that Chattanooga's came together as Francis said in this vision 2000 kind of process and now they're talking about revision now in which they established all of these goals throughout the city in these in these meetings and thousands of people contributed that anybody who had anything to say was considered legitimate and those goals went up on this large sheet and then they began to kind of boil those down and they discovered that there were three parts of the city that they wanted to focus on one of them was the downtown area where they wanted a good deal more physical development they wanted a bridge restored and they wanted a new aquarium and they wanted this imatinib riverfront park and so on that then is where the experts came in that once the values had been established the framework the priorities had been listed then the experts could come in and could begin to come up with some of the options as to how that might might happen that's something like an architect we know who's a very very good architect it says I can't design your house for you until you tell me what he called your program once I know what you're really going to do what you really value large kitchens and small bathrooms or vice versa or whatever it is or where you want to play where you want to study or with then I can begin but I've got to know your values first that's exactly what we found in the fight organization almost well more than two decades ago when we took poor people who had never been involved in any decision that public decision-making process thus bigger than said all right look we now have gotten the major federal grant to build low-income housing and you're gonna have since we're taking your land you're gonna have first call on the units what do you want these units to contain and in meeting after meeting they began to discuss all sorts of things that had turned out that things that the architects were originally drawn up some ideas had never thought of turned out to be very very important they didn't want the central laundry facility they wanted a washer to be people with large families obviously it sounds obvious now but they wanted a washer and dryer in every single apartment and they didn't give a damn if they had to give up some carpeting in some room in order to get the washer and dryer they were willing to make the trade-off but the point is that the experts came in later if they had been held on tap they were not on top they were not making the decision and the most important final decision they were being drawn on and in fact as Frances said to what we really needed in the process were even better experts than we had we need to wrap this a fairly super go ahead