Public Engagement

Today's entry is written by Petra Duecker, who presents a detailed and spirited history and analysis of SCOPE. Her account of the emergence of this important student movement is informative and engaging.

My name is Petra Duecker, and I’m an undergrad student of Political Science, Philosophy, and English. More importantly, I’m a member of the Student Committee on Public Engagement (SCOPE), a Student Organization dedicated to developing a University wide public engagement movement.

SCOPE was born in Political Science Professor Jim Farr’s classroom during the fall semester of 2005. Dr. Farr’s course was called “Democracy and Education,” and its subject was civic engagement. As a component of the course, students were expected to gain hands-on experience by either A: coaching a Public Achievement team (http://www.publicachievement.org/) or B: working with National Director of Public Achievement, Dennis Donovan, in an effort to expand Public Achievement within the University of MN.

The students in “Democracy and Education” were a particularly energetic bunch. Several of us, from sheer enthusiasm, signed on to participate in both options A and B. From various academic and experiential vantage points, we had all learned about the merits of public and civic engagement prior to enrolling in Dr. Farr’s class. What’s more, we’d all come to look on public action and community involvement as avenues for positive change in our University, city, state, nation, and world. And we were ready to work to promote it.

Almost immediately, Dr. Farr’s course requirement blossomed into a full-fledged student led movement. Our group expanded to include student leaders from all facets of the University, and our efforts were no longer confined to Dr. Farr’s class or to the proliferation of PA specifically. We became SCOPE; a group of student leaders committed to promoting a globally engaged culture. SCOPE remains devoted to the pedagogy of PA, but our vision, now, is to use that pedagogy to create space in society for everyone to be active, involved, expressing a voice, and empowered to mold their communities. We plan to start with the University of Minnesota because this is where we happen to be.

We were wisely coached to begin as all experienced community organizers begin - we talked to people. We talked to faculty, administration, staff, all sorts of student groups, student governments and student leaders ... and we were astonished to see: Wow. There are a lot of people who care about the same things we do. Who believe what we believe about civic and public engagement and who are, in each of their individual ways and in their individual sections of the University, working to promote it.

These findings were both an encouragement and a challenge. Though there are many groups with goals similar to our own, they do not always communicate with one another. In many cases, they aren’t even aware of one another.

SCOPE rose to this challenge by creating the Civic Summit on March 30th, 2006. The Summit was designed to be a way for everyone interested in promoting Civic and Public Engagement at the University to meet one another. We hoped that individualized efforts would organically unite into a movement once leaders started talking to one another. Our hope was realized.

At the Summit, leaders from across the University were asked three discussion fostering questions: 1. What do we value as a University community? 2. How are we living those values effectively? 3. How are those values being compromised? The discussion yielded very similar observations from all participants. Despite all the efforts and all the interest in public engagement at the University of Minnesota SCOPE learned of, the broader behavioral trend is one of isolation and disempowerment. Overall, our University’s culture values individuals over community. We see hierarchical, top down approaches to change rather than a focus on democratic, multi-leveled input. As a result, students, faculty, staff, and administrators often choose to be publicly apathetic - an option easier than it's alternative: true education and public expression.

Participants at the Summit agreed - these are cultural trends that we, as citizens of the University community, take fundamental issue with. They’re not what we want our University to look like, and they’re not the values we want to live by. Furthermore, since this is a public, land grant institution, and since we’re as much citizens as students, faculty, and staff at the University, our hope for cultural change is not bred from mere desire. It’s bred from a right to see our education be what we want it to be.

But Summit participants also recognized that no one will emerge from apathy without a clear path and some motivation. So, as a body, we drew from our collective pool of talent to think up avenues for efficient and effective change. Many awesome ideas came out of that discussion; SCOPE is still struggling to sift through all the vibrant, action oriented data we collected in that few hours. Most importantly, the groups and individuals who met at the Summit continue to communicate with one another.

So far, from the discussions at the Summit, SCOPE has extracted five different but interrelated areas to focus our collective energy and take united action. They are meant to be broad platforms for creating broad change; while enacting these initiatives we intend to remain flexible and vocal, ever presenting ourselves as a movement seeking the promotion of civic and public engagement in our University culture as a whole.

Those five action initiatives became the foundation for SCOPE’s Summit follow-up effort: the Capstone Conference. At the conference, students, faculty, and staff reconnected with one another in action-based discussion of the following prospects:

1. Paid student organizers: An effort to recognize the value and power of mobilized students, and to utilize that power by fiscally supporting student mobilization.

2. Future of SCOPE: What does the University Community need from SCOPE? What can SCOPE give? Who is SCOPE?

3. Environmental Justice: Building safe and healthy neighborhoods.

4. Free Spaces: In order to be engaged, University members need to talk to one another. So, in the tradition of Hubert Humphrey’s family drug store, of neighborhood conversations on front porches in America's south ... indeed, of ALL great historic spaces for public communication - SCOPE plans to start making space at the University of Minnesota. As part of that mission, SCOPE is working to initiate a “silicone bracelets for free spaces” campaign this summer. We'll distribute public engagement’s equivalent to “Livestrong” bracelets; wearing a bracelet would identify a person as open to engaging in conversation about public issues. The bracelets will be the U of MN’s mobile front porch.

5. Democratic Student Organizations: If, as a public insititution, the University of Minnesota wishes to produce public actors in a democratic society, these realities must be altered: A. Student organizations are forcibly governed by non-democratically oriented University policy. B. Student leaders don’t have any real systemic power to shape the University community as a whole.

Almost immediately following the Capstone Conference, several members of SCOPE participated in the Spring Engagement Conference hosted by the Student Engagement Initiative Steering Committee. It was a very exciting event. Along with two fellow SCOPErs, I gave a brief talk on the student led Public Engagement effort. As we spoke, I saw our presentation physically enliven the crowd of University citizens present. Faculty, staff, and administrators were genuinely interested in our words…and were perhaps more interested in the Engagement Initiative after listening to us.

Through all our efforts, SCOPE has retained two defining characteristics. First, we do not organize ourselves in a hierarchical structure. We have no President, no Chair; everyone comes to the table with an equal say and an equal vote. We call one another “co-organizers,” and we accomplish tasks according to interest or ability. Second, we work with and in the University’s management structure. We are happy to have worked with administrators and faculty members. Though SCOPE is distinctly student led, we don’t move in opposition to those who shape the culture we seek to modify. We simply desire access to the shaping process.

As SCOPE continues meeting into the summer, working on the five action platforms listed above, we remain cognizant of the call to foster a broadly conceived Public Engagement movement. Our vision, our SCOPE, has not been reduced: we plan to work long and hard for a globally engaged culture. To do this, we must continue expanding. With that necessity, however, comes a difficult toggle between our democratic values and our need for efficiency; how can we bring 60,000 people to the table without some sort of structure? We’ll need continued support from faculty, staff, and administration. We’ll need an office and some funding. We’ll need to go on sacrificing our time and our talents to the effort at large. Most of all, we’ll need to remember: we are part of a community devoted to learning, and SCOPE is a learning process. We are learning to organize. We are learning to build public relationships. More than that, we’re learning that education is about experience, and the SCOPE of our experience is priceless.