I've decided that the end of my term as Associate Vice President for Public Engagement at the University of Minnesota should also signal the end of my Public Engagement blog. I hope to stay involved with some aspects of engagement, and to do significant writing in this area. But my writing should be focused on those aspects, not on daily "news highlights".
Thanks for reading.
Yesterday I received an email announcing the 2007 Fellows of Echoing Green. According to its web site,
Launched in 1987, Echoing Green's mission is to spark social change by identifying, investing, and supporting the world's most exceptional emerging leaders and the organizations they launch. Through a two-year fellowship program, we help our network of visionaries develop new solutions to society’s most difficult problems. These social entrepreneurs and their organizations work to close deeply-rooted social, economic, and political inequities to ensure equal access and to help all individuals reach his/her potential. To date, Echoing Green has invested nearly $25 million in seed and start up grants to over 400 social entrepreneurs and their innovative organizations.
Twenty "Bold Ideas" projects were chosen, involving 25 Fellows. The projects span a broad range, of which some flavor can be gained from this listing of the first four:
On the web site, profiles of each of the projects and fellows are given. Most, but not all, of the fellows appear to be recent graduates, often with advanced degrees. It's heartening to see these talented people use their talent and training to address "society’s most difficult problems."
As I prepare to leave my position as Associate Vice President for Public Engagement and return to the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics, I've been thinking about why I got involved in Public Engagement. Some part of the answer was expressed in a couple of paragraphs from a chapter I wrote a few years ago:
Bloomfield, V.A. "Public Scholarship: An Administrator's View", Ch. 10 in Peters, S.J., Jordan, N.R., Adamek, M. and Alter, T.R. (Eds.) Engaging Campus and Community: The Practice of Public Scholarship in the American Land-Grant University System. Dayton, OH: The Kettering Foundation Press (2005)
I have spent my entire academic career in major public research universities: B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley; Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison; postdoctoral at the University of California, San Diego; and faculty positions at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Therefore I have grown up imbued with the spirit that public research universities are among the most important and contributory institutions in our society. They provide high-quality but relatively inexpensive teaching to a broad range of talented students, they produce much of the research and scholarship on which our modern civilization depends, and they translate this teaching and research to direct service to their society. Given these essential contributions, it has been puzzling and painful to recognize the steady decline in support (as a fraction of state budgets, not in absolute terms until very recently) of public research universities over the past 20 years. I believe that this relative decline in public support can be largely attributed to increasing neglect-on the parts of both the university and society-of the real meanings of civic engagement and public scholarship.
At the University of Minnesota my administrative position is as Vice Provost for Research and Interim Dean of the Graduate School. I also have maintained active teaching and research as a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics. This mix of responsibilities, while demanding, assures that I keep uppermost in mind the raison d'etre of a university-to discover, communicate, and apply knowledge-rather than focusing on administrative issues for their own sake. At the same time, my area of research and teaching-molecular biophysics, specifically the polymer physics of DNA-is hardly the sort of stuff that immediately leaps to mind when one thinks of civically engaged scholarship; so I have been forced to confront some questions of definition that I think are crucially important to the proper understanding of public scholarship. To state briefly a point that I will elaborate later, I believe that essentially all research and scholarship being carried out at modern research universities is deserving of recognition as public scholarship. Lack of understanding of this point, by both the public and the universities, is at the root of declining support for public research universities.
Those last two sentences, I still think, are key.
A recent University of Minnesota news story told about a successfully-completed design project by architecture students in our College of Design, to provide sanitation relief for New Orleans refugees and disaster victimes. To quote from the story:
The Clean Hub is a portable, self-sustained structure that provides basic sanitation services. It contains a composting toilet and a 4,400-gallon water storage tank that is replenished by a rooftop tarp that catches rainwater. Electricity from solar panels powers the lights, water filtration system, and composting toilet.
Under the direction of John Dwyer and Tom Westbrook, students in the Studio 4 architecture class started with an empty shipping container and, over the course of a semester, turned it into a structure capable of providing relief for people in great need.
"This will be the only functioning [sanitation] infrastructure in the whole neighborhood," said Dwyer.
According to Westbrook, the students were aided by the donation of many materials for the clean hub, including the shipping container itself, all of the steel, the toilet, solar panels, water tank, water filter, and sink. And the Clean Hub almost exclusively uses recycled or everyday materials, meaning the hub could be mass produced with relative ease and constructed on site using nearby materials.
For students, it was a chance to put their talents to work in producing something that may have a lasting legacy; in fact, FEMA is interested in the students' prototype.
Aaron Wilson, who worked on the "tank team," said that after three years of learning through books, it was wonderful to build something that will be used somewhere. "It was an amazing learning experience," he said.
"The students worked far more than they should have for this level of class," added Westbrook. What they were able to produce was "nothing short of a miracle."
An animation of the Clean Hub prototype taking shape can be seen at http://www1.umn.edu/umnnews/movie/perspective.html.
Medical and dental students at the University of Minnesota are not just learning their professions, they're learning how their professions need to fit into the life of the state. An article by Deane Morrison in today's UM eNews tells about Minnesota's Future Doctors program:
As an immigrant to the United States from Liberia in 2001, Georgette McCauley has seen more than her share of turmoil. But there's one thing in particular she would like to change in her home country: young women's lack of health information.
"I'd like to go back to Liberia someday and educate young women on how to prevent sexual disease and how to take better care of their bodies," says McCauley, who has just completed her freshman year at St. Mary's University of Minnesota.
She is one of 23 Minnesota college students in a new joint program of the University's Medical School and Mayo Medical School to help increase the numbers of minority, immigrant and rural doctors in the state.
Called Minnesota's Future Doctors, the program is the brainchild of two U medical students, Gareth Forde and Matt Fitzpatrick. It brings in high-ability students during the summer and the academic year to learn about topics like the science behind medicine and how to take the Medical College Admission Test. This summer's inaugural group has already toured the Mayo Clinic and UMD's Medical School, worked on a volunteer project, and shadowed doctors to see how medicine is practiced on a daily basis.
"[Forde and Fitzpatrick] wanted to create future classmates who were more reflective of Minnesota," says program director Jo Peterson. "This project aims at narrowing the disparity and increasing the percentage of persons of color.
"The reason that's important is that persons who work with doctors within their same cultural values [and] community of color feel they have better health care, and they continue to work with that doctor."
According to an AAMC report 2006 and Minnesota Department of Health 2007, percentages of physicians in Minnesota aren't representative of minority communities.
Today's posting is a contribution from Ben Winchester, of the Center for Small Towns at the University of Minnesota-Morris, a small liberal arts campus in the western part of the state.
The Center for Small Towns (CST), based at the University of Minnesota – Morris, has been quite successful over the years by regularly involving talented students in our small towns across western Minnesota. The involvement of faculty, however, has been episodic. To address this challenge, we received a grant from the Otto Bremer Foundation to establish a “Small Town Faculty and Student Fellows” program that connects regional development problems and/or issues with the research interests of UMM faculty. Three regional development projects are now underway this summer!
Project 1: Collaborative School Bus Routing
UMM faculty: Dr. Peh Ng, Professor of Mathematics.
The goal of this project is to develop models of school bus routes both within a school district and between five school districts in west-central Minnesota.
The project entails determining optimum models for vehicle routing across our area in a cost- and time-effective way. By determining the location and number of students in the dispersed areas, together with time, models can be built to determine routes, and flows, of student pickups. Mathematically, these are referred to as combinatorial problems. The solutions would allow our school districts to save transportation funds (at the approximate rate of $1.60 per mile) while at the same time providing an efficient solution to overlapping geographic areas brought about by open enrollment. The schools involved in this project are Chokio-Alberta, Clinton-Graceville-Beardsley, Cyrus, Hancock, and Morris.
Project 2: Skills, Careers, Employees and Employers
UMM faculty: Dr. Engin Sungur, Professor of Statistics.
The goal of this project is to identify gaps between employers in the region who have entry-level positions that will lead to higher-wage positions and those individuals seeking employment. Employers report they are unable to find workers who have the necessary skills to enter employment. Prospective employees report they are not able to find entry-level positions in the region. In order to build skills that qualify family members to hold better jobs within the region, it is imperative that we understand what skills are required for positions that allow individuals to move into high-demand, higher-wage positions, directly or through career ladders. This will be completed through interviews and/or a survey of employers, employees, and employee training programs.
The Jobs, Careers and Employability workgroup requested this project. This workgroup is a subcommittee of the Family Economic Success program provided by the West Central Initiative with funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The workgroup will identify a series of questions for employers, adult job seekers and K-12 organizations that provides data to better understand the current gap between the skills that current perspective employees present to the labor market with the skills currently required by employers. In this way, programs or other strategies can be developed to address the gap rather than making assumptions about the needed skills.
Project 3: The Value of Culture and Education
UMM faculty: Carol Marxen, Associate Professor of Education.
The goal of this project is to work with the Long Prairie-Grey Eagle High School to demonstrate the value of culture and education to the Hispanic community. It has been found that Hispanic students that finish high school generally do not pursue post-secondary educational opportunities. The research components of this project will develop curricular, co-curricular, and community-based integrative strategies. The objectives are to provide professional development opportunities for teachers, connect the community to the school to provide role models and mentors, as well as develop and implement a team teaching environment.
This application of knowledge is a perfect example of our land-grant responsibility in action. As our small towns and rural places have changed, we too must change the way we serve our neighbors – and do this in a way that contribute to the sustainable future of our region. For more information about these projects, or if you have any questions, please contact Ben Winchester at (320) 589-6451 or visit http://www.centerforsmalltowns.org.
Two interesting news items today, showing the range of University of Minnesota efforts in engaging with significant public interests:
U of M contributes to the successful recovery of the bald eagle
The bald eagle has been removed from the list of threatened and endangered species. …The Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota's College of Veterinary Medicine made significant contributions to that recovery and preservation effort.
Officials at the Raptor Center have played a key role in restoration programs, investigated the effects of lead poisoning, studied the incidence of chemical contamination in nestling eagles and contributed to habitat preservation. The Raptor Center has treated more than 1,600 eagles during its 30-year history and its work has been critical in providing disease surveillance in the raptor population.
Two U of M leaders to serve on the governor's Next Generation Energy board
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty ... announced his appointments to the NextGen Energy Board, including two University of Minnesota leaders. This new board was proposed by Gov. Pawlenty as part of his Next Generation Energy Initiative that puts Minnesota at the front of states leading the way toward our nation's energy future. The NextGen Energy Board will provide recommendations to the legislature and the governor about how the state can most efficiently achieve energy independence through agriculture and natural resource sustainability.
The University of Minnesota appointees are
Robert Elde,, dean of the University of Minnesota's College of Biological Sciences and the J. B. Johnston Land Grant Professor of Neuroscience in the department of neuroscience. He also chairs the executive committee of the Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment. Elde is appointed as a representative of the University of Minnesota.
Rob King, professor and department head with the University of Minnesota's department of applied economics. He has conducted research on a range of issues related to farmer cooperative formation and management over the past 20 years. King is appointed as a representative of the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture.
I was delighted to learn today that Cindy Gibson has begun her own blog, CitizenPost. Those of us who know and have worked with Cindy value her as one of the most important and productive members of the civic engagement community. Among many other things, she wrote and edited the report New Times Demand New Scholarship: Research universities and civic engagement, "a conference report [on] a collective initiative of representatives of research universities and Campus Compact to renew the civic mission of higher education."
As she writes in her introductory posting,
I do lots of things... write, research, analyze, synthesize, evaluate, communicate, and educate. And I've worked with all kinds of organizations. Right now, I'm doing all that under the auspices of my own consulting firm, Cynthesis Consulting, which specializes in public policy research and analysis, program development, strategic planning, marketing, and communications for nonprofit and philanthropic organizations across the country.
The public engagement blogosphere will be much enhanced by Cindy Gibson's voice. Welcome!
The University of Minnesota has a President's Emerging Leaders (PEL) program that each year chooses about thirty of our top Professional/Academic, Civil Service, and bargaining unit staff to work on five projects of U-wide importance under the sponsorship of U administrators. This year I've been privileged to work with such a group, with co-sponsor Carol Carrier, our Vice President of Human Resources, on "Staff Engagement in the University Community".
The rationale for the project is that staff represent a large proportion of our University community of 80,000 members, and have been major contributors to the Council on Public Engagement. Assessment is needed of staff attitudes toward public engagement, best practices that exist around staff engagement, and recommendations to increase staff engagement both inside and outside the University. The objectives of the project are to determine
The project, along with four others, was reported to the University of Minnesota Regents at their June meeting, and was presented in a poster session. For more information on this and the other PEL projects see the Office of Human Resources web site
Staff are such an important part of this and all other universities, so all our lives will be better and our institutions will be better able to serve society if they are fully engaged in our university communities.
The summer 2007 issue of M, the University of Minnesota’s “quarterly publication for all alumni, friends, faculty, and staff” has a nice article entitled “Making a difference: U students are helping to change the world…while they’re still in school”. It profiles a number of students and lists the different projects in which they’re engaged:
This is a striking set of examples of some of the ways that students are involved in public engagement activities that help both them and the broader community.
Yesterday and today brought a number of University of Minnesota news releases relevant to Public Engagement. They exemplify the marvelous diversity of activities that we -- and most other research universities -- have that connect strongly with important public issues and partners. Rather than writing something of my own, I'll just point you to four of them.
University of Minnesota's Konopka Institute to partner with Kwanzaa Freedom School
The University of Minnesota's Konopka Institute will partner with Kwanzaa Church and the Nia Imani Youth Development Center in North Minneapolis to bring the 2007 Kwanzaa Freedom School to the University of Minnesota campus.
The Kwanzaa Freedom School is a six-week, literacy-rich summer and after-school program designed to create positive learning environments for youth. Freedom School nurtures the belief that young people can make a difference in themselves, their homes and their communities. The program begins June 25 for the nearly two dozen high school students who will participate in Freedom School programs at the university this year. The sessions will be held two days a week for three hours a day and will harness the educational and outreach skills of the university. The Freedom School movement has its roots in the modern civil rights movement and is administered by the Children's Defense Fund. The curriculum is staffed primarily by college-aged young adults -- some of whom will be University of Minnesota students -- committed to community leadership and service to children. Read more...
U of M launches VIRTEx, a new program to promote higher education for youth
The University of Minnesota is launching a new program designed to engage high school students from diverse backgrounds in undergraduate and graduate education. VIRTEx, which stands for Vertically-Integrated Research Team Experience, creates research teams made up of a high school student, an undergraduate student, a graduate student and a faculty mentor to work on a research project over the summer.
Three research teams began projects on campus June 18. These teams will investigate schizophrenia, the role of emotions in political decision-making and discrimination and its effects on mental health. Participants will develop their academic skills and get some real experience in science. This exposure and hands-on participation promotes a deeper understanding of academic pursuits. Read more ...
U of M Center for German and European Studies to hold major health-care forum
The Center for German and European Studies at the University of Minnesota will present a forum on innovation in health care on Monday and Tuesday, July 16 and 17. Participants are experts from Germany and the United States, representing government, business, insurance, health care provider and health educators.
Innovation and change are at the core of medical treatment, technology and any good health care system. Minnesota has a track record of developing exciting new approaches to healthcare policy, while across the United States an unprecedented number of initiatives are being developed at the state and federal levels to improve healthcare. Dialogue between stakeholders from different but comparable national systems can highlight new opportunities. To that end, U.S. and German speakers -- including Germany's federal minister of health -- will present the positions of all stakeholders on innovative health care. Germany, for instance, recently overhauled its health care system and early results indicate that the reforms maintain quality and access while containing the growth of costs. Read more ...
U of M looking for citizen input on the environment - State leaders working with U of M officials to build a conservation plan for Minnesota
Safe water, more forests, the condition of state parks; the state of Minnesota wants to know what environmental issues matter the most to Minnesotans. And the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment has a Web site that allows residents to let their leaders know what they think.
The information gathered from the site will help form the Minnesota Statewide Conservation and Preservation Plan, which is being developed by the Institute on the Environment with consulting partners Bonestroo and CR Planning. The plan will chart a long-term course for safeguarding Minnesota's natural heritage. Read more...
Yesterday evening I attended a program entitled "Civic Minds: Civic Renewal" co-sponsored by the Citizens League and the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. Two Humphrey Institute Policy Fellows shared findings from a 2006-02007 project that investigated good citizenship in Minnesota, and Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, also on the panel, gave his views about public engagement in Minnesota.
The ensuing discussion covered a wide range of topics, but one that particularly struck me was the role of community radio stations and newspapers and the Internet for telling true stories about matters of civic importance, at a time when the major news media are seen as increasingly irrelevant and in the control of moneyed interests.
Which led me to think about I.F Stone, whose Wikipedia biography characterizes him as "an iconoclastic American investigative journalist." The Wikipedia article links to a fine article, "I.F. Stone" by Victor Navasky, The Nation July 21, 2003, which summarizes Stone's work and personality in engaging detail. Of particular relevance to our topic is Navasky's description of Stone's working method:
... although he never attended presidential press conferences, cultivated no highly placed inside sources and declined to attend off-the-record briefings, time and again he scooped the most powerful press corps in the world.
His method: To scour and devour public documents, bury himself in The Congressional Record, study obscure Congressional committee hearings, debates and reports, all the time prospecting for news nuggets (which would appear as boxed paragraphs in his paper), contradictions in the official line, examples of bureaucratic and political mendacity, documentation of incursions on civil rights and liberties. He lived in the public domain. It was his habitat of necessity, because use of government sources to document his findings was also a stratagem. Who would have believed this cantankerous-if-whimsical Marxist without all the documentation?
Navasky quotes the journalist Andrew Kopkind about the impact of I.F. Stone's Weekly:
it "organized the consciousness of its readers somewhat in the way a community action group organizes a neighborhood: for awareness, understanding, action." In other words, it mobilized and nourished a community of resistance.
Given the amazing access the Web affords to public documents, position papers, and the like, the information gathering of an I.F. Stone would now be considerably easier, as would be the dissemination of his analysis. His extraordinary intelligence, memory, insight, and determination would be harder to duplicate. But not impossible, particularly if done by a collaborative of committed people. I guess what I'm describing as blogging with depth, persistence, and objectivity: evidence-based but also with a point of view. Without it, it's hard to see how we'll get the honest information and informed democratic perspective we need to maintain a meaningful citizenship.
My colleague at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, Nick Jordan, is lead author on an important Environment Policy Forum in the June 15, 2007 issue of Science, entitled "Sustainable Development of the Agricultural Bio-Economy". The other authors are from Louisiana, Kansas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and California; from a range of disciplines; and from research and policy institutes both inside and outside the academy.
The paper begins by noting that "A 'bio-economy' based on agricultural biomass is emerging in the United States that offers an avenue toward energy independence and a more 'green' economy." Focus is currently on very large-scale farming of monocultures such as corn and soybeans, but this approach suffers from various unfavorable environmental impacts, requirement of large subsidies to close the gap between low commodity prices and cost of production, and growth of farm size precluding entry of new farmers thus "harming rural communities socially and economically". The potential large-scale conversion of corn to biofuel is only exacerbating these problems.
Jordan and his coauthors advocate instead the potential virtues of "multifunctional production systems". They write "Agricultural multifunctionality is defined as the joint production of standard commodities (e.g., food or fiber) and 'ecological services.' Examples of the latter include increased recreational opportunities in agricultural landscapes and protection of biodiversity and water quality."
They propose creation of a network of research and demonstration projects, in watersheds of medium size and "managed by groups that encompass multiple stakeholders and levels of government" , to investigate tradeoffs between such factors as biomass production and wildlife habitat, and to provide a basis for revised federal farm legislation that will best support both biomass production and other desirable outcomes.
What impresses me about this work is how it exemplifies the best of engaged scholarship: a crucial societal issue, addressed in a highly multidisciplinary way, using expertise both within and outside the university.
I spent a couple of hours today at the Powderhorn Phillips Cultural Wellness Center in Minneapolis, at a presentation and discussion of how communities can obtain support from philanthropies using cultural rather than academic approaches.
There were strong challenges to the presumed academic approach of objectivity, personal distance, striving for individual reputation, etc. By contrast, the community cultural approach was stated to rest on history, knowledge based in community elders, group consultation, etc.
Without wishing to oversimplify a deep and important discussion, I maintain that there's more concordance between the academic and cultural approaches than may be immediately apparent. At base, academia is also a culture, with its own customs, expectations, initiation ceremonies, and even elders: leaders of the disciplines, people with long experience and deep acculturation, who embody the history and set the standards of the disciplines. They are both respected and challenged by the young people in the field, and I suspect that challenge by the young is not unknown in traditional cultural communities.
We were also told that discussion in traditional cultural communities values "symbiosis" and related concepts that emphasize collaborative and integrative approaches. I think there's a parallel with academia's growing valuing of "multidisciplinary" approaches, integrating rather than dissecting to help solve the complex problems that we face.
There are differences between traditional and academic cultures, to be sure, but I think there are more similarities than meet the eye - enough to form a strong foundation for fruitful mutual exploration and collaboration.
Scott Peters has written an interesting paper, "Changing the Story About Higher Education's Public Purposes and Work: Land-Grants, Liberty, and the Little Country Theater", #6 in Imagining America series of position papers on "Foreseeable Futures". The paper is based on Peters's keynote address for the joint Imagining America/Outreach Scholarship conference in 2006. An abstract is available at http://www.ia.umich.edu/position-papers.html.
Peters, on the faculty at Cornell University, makes a compelling case that the history of the relations between land-grant universities and the rural communities they have served is much more complicated than we generally realize. He makes that case through three contrasting stories, or narratives.
According to the "heroic meta-narrative",
… land-grant colleges democratized higher education in three ways: first, by providing the common people with access to a college education… ; second, by expanding and equalizing the curriculum to make the professions of the common people … as worthy of study as the classics and the professions of elites; and third, by not only developing but also actively extending new scientific knowledge, technologies, and expertise. … [E]ach of these purposes is viewed as serving mainly … technical, economic, and material ends.
In the "tragic counter-narrative",
… most farmers play roles as futile resistors or hapless victims [of the modernization of agriculture in service of a "cheap food" policy], while land-grant faculty are cast as technocratic experts, colonizers, and oppressors. This is not a story of the "democratization" of higher learning, but rather its opposite.
Noting that both of these narratives have significant short-comings, Peters constructs a third, "prophetic counter-narrative", based on the writings of Liberty Hyde Bailey (founding Director of Cornell's agricultural extension program in 1894, and later Dean of Cornell's College of Agriculture). Peters points out that Bailey, who is viewed either as hero or villain in the first two narratives, had a much broader view of the public purposes of land-grant colleges.
… Bailey viewed the pursuit of a "self-sustaining" agriculture as a multi-dimensional project that had technical, scientific, moral, economic, cultural, political, and even spiritual dimensions. According to him, this project would both require and result in the development of a new rural civilization "worthy of the best American ideals" [not just material well-being, but also] the democratic ideal (and practice) of self-rule, through which the common people, functioning as citizens, work as cooperative producers not only of the commonwealth, but also of the culture and politics of their own neighborhoods and communities.
There's lots more to Peters's paper, which deserves wide reading and discussion. But it's obvious that the prophetic counter-narrative, assuming it moves forward, is a perfect example of what we hope public engagement will achieve.
We talk earnestly about the importance of cultural awareness in our interactions with communities, but do we really understand what that means? After reading Neither Wolf nor Dog by Kent Nerburn (New World Library, 2002, ISBN 1577312333), I realize how far short of understanding I am. To quote the review by Kevin Roddy from Booklist, reproduced on Amazon.com:
Readers looking for another red-man-departs-wise-words-to-white-man-to-lessen-white- man's-guilt will be disappointed by the tone and content of this work. Realists wanting a truthful, fiery, and, ultimately, cleansing dialogue between Indian and white will definitely want it. Nerburn reluctantly agrees to a meeting with Dan, a Lakota elder who asks him to construct a book from a motley collection of notes, diatribes, and political and social commentaries written over seven decades and kept in an old shoe box. Void of the hypocrisy rampant in many books that have whites adopting the ways of "the great spirit," Nerburn exposes the real truth, which whites are unwilling to face: that in "the hunger to own a piece of the earth, we had destroyed the dreams and families of an entire race." Joined by a dog named Fatback, Dan gives Nerburn the ride of his life as they cross the vast Midwest in Dan's Buick. Along the way, Dan alternates between rage and melancholy, and Nerburn between shame and confusion. Nerburn unintentionally touches nerve after nerve and elicits an almost unbearable flood of anguish and despair. The truth revealed in this book will be difficult for most whites to face, but it is painfully necessary if healing is ever to begin.
When we wonder why it's so hard to enlist American Indian students in our minority student programs, or to deal with the issues of poor health and poverty in Indian communities, we might begin by reading this book. It doesn't point to any easy solutions—or any solutions at all, for that matter. But it gives a much deeper view of the nature of the problem: at root a lot more ours than theirs.
I'll be traveling for the next couple of weeks, so no more postings until after June 10. Thanks for reading
I'll be traveling for the next couple of weeks, so no more postings until after June 10. Thanks for reading
Harry Boyte and Dennis Donovan teach Public Affairs 1401: "Community Organizing Skills for Public Action" in the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota. The course description reads
This is a hands-on introduction for undergraduate students wanting to develop skills, confidence, and knowledge to make positive change in public affairs. It shows how to get past the culture of critique and pessimism that often dominates in higher education. It acquaints students with hopeful examples of successful citizen organizers and organizations working to tackle tough public problems, from racism to teen pregnancy, failing schools to environmental degradation. The course will educate students about a new, broad movement for civic revitalization beginning to stir in Minnesota, and how students can make contributions to it. In PA 1401, students will gain concepts and practical skills such as thinking politically, forming partnerships across lines of difference, understanding diverse self-interests, mapping power, and knowing about the culture, history and social networks needed to make change.
Harry gave me copies of some of the Final Reflection papers, and I present excerpts here, with the permission of the students.
Before enrolling in your class I did not consider myself to be very political. This is not because I did not have any interest in politics, which I did; it was more because I was always taught that politics were not something to be concerned with. Through this class and our discussions I have come to find that politics are not a taboo subject. Politics affect society and our everyday lives and to not be concerned with, or participate in them is detrimental to our society and our personal lives. In a way I am kind of agitated by this class - but agitation is good, right? I am agitated because now I find myself interested in participating in my community. I feel that because of this class my lifestyle and attitudes have changed. I know that this may sound drastic, but I do feel very affected by this course. Maybe it will be most helpful if I discuss what I have found to be the most influential aspects to me.
I must agree with you when you told us about people feeling powerless. I remember feeling saddened and maybe even a bit offended when you said this, but after further consideration, I found it to be painfully true. I did not want to think of myself as powerless, but reflecting on my life I realized that I would make excuses and find contentment in my everyday mediocrity. Now I find myself as shockingly quite competent. I feel not only like I can have a say in my community, but I also feel as though it is my responsibility to do so.
Honestly, the most important and blatantly obvious aspect that I took away from this course is the power and possibilities of people working together. I have never been in a class with such interesting and talented young people. Obviously you both can relate to what I am saying. It was a moving experience just to see people of my own age with so much potential and so much passion for changing our world. Like I stated in class, this course has given me a sense of pride in my generation. I no longer look in history books longing to have been a part of something meaningful and worthwhile because now I realize that I am a part of something meaningful and worthwhile. — Maggie Kalda
===== Last semester I took a course in global studies; I had to do a research assignment on shanty towns in Lima, Peru. It was one of the most depressing things I have learned about. When I studied slavery in junior high or the Holocaust in high school they were problems of the past…so as tormenting as they were to hear about, it was something I did not have to live with. But now in the present, billions of children are living in shacks and are drinking out of contaminated water. And if I were a pessimist, I would list the other thousands of problems in the world. In history books a hundred years from now children will be reading about these conditions and probably be appalled that people allowed their fellow mankind to suffer. I left my global cities class at the end of the semester with a heavy heart, feeling that the most I could do is sponsor a child and send them twenty-five dollars a month—because hey, saving one life is better than saving none.
I've always felt like making a difference in the world could only be done if you were Oprah, Brad Pitt, or the President. Like a lot of people, I always felt powerless, I always waited for a super hero to be elected and change things. …
I think something is stirring. I think there is a lot of energy—both positive and negative—out there, but I think eventually this huge movement is going to take off. I can feel it. And I hear you guys say all the time that we are making history, and that gives me chills too because I know you're right. — Kelly Heskett
===== When this class began, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Someone simply told me about a class called "Organizing for the Public Good," and told me that it would be amazing. I had no idea. I came into the class with the mentality that what I was about to experience was going to be challenging coursework, a lot of reading, and a lot of writing. What I actually experienced was a complete shift in the way I see the world and the way I live my life.
As a person, I had to reevaluate my beliefs. I had thought of power as something that was built through relationships, but I don't think I really believed it. As this class rolled onward, I began to truly believe it and it changed the way I see everything. … Instead of trying to gain power through control, we can gain power by sharing it and sharing responsibility.
When I realized that power wasn't what I thought it was, I also realized that I was a powerful person. For the first time, sitting in a position of power with a title didn't define powerful for me. For the first time in my life, I feel like I can really change things and really have an effect on the decisions that are made around me. For the first time I don't feel powerless to change the problems I see in the world around me.
What does it mean then to be a student and a citizen? I know it doesn't mean that I should go vote. It doesn't mean that I need to choose a political party and rally behind their flag. It doesn't even mean that I have to choose a political issue like abortion or gay rights and fight for it with all my energy.
What it does mean is that I am the expert and I am the activist. I am not waiting for other people to fix the problems I see, I can fix them myself and with those around me. As a student, I realize that I have agency and that I can work with others to get things done. It means that I can take power back for myself and return power to those around me. There is no "expert" who will take care of me; I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself. …
What does it mean to be citizen-students? It means we are going to change the world. — Alexander Fink
I'll bet we all wish we could have such impacts on the students in our classes. Perhaps if we put public engagement into what we teach, we would.
I've been dipping into Voices of Hope: The Story of the Jane Addams School for Democracy, the lovely book edited by Nan Kari and Nan Skelton, about which I wrote on May 1. The last chapter, by Kari, is entitled "Shaping Connections with Higher Education". It is a thoughtful account of how the Jane Addams School experience has broken down the distinctions between the roles and allegiances of people in the community and in college, how it connects college students with real life, and how it provides great service-learning and work-study experiences.
I began to wonder, however, how the Jane Addams School experience is relevant to the distinctive role of a research university like the University of Minnesota: to train graduate students to do cutting-edge research and develop their skills and insights about issues important to both scholarship and the broader society. Harry Boyte and I talked about this recently, and came up with a few ideas of what the JAS could provide:
Doing such research would require great skill and sensitivity so as not to reestablish the power differentials and class distinctions between community and higher education that the Jane Addams School community has so successfully broken down. That's the challenge—and the opportunity—of engaged scholarship.
A supplement to the May 2007 issue of TheScientist that just landed in my mailbox deals with "Autoimmunity: Diseases, Mechanisms, and Therapies". The scientific and medical challenges associated with autoimmune diseases (roughly 80 have been identified) are enormous, and it's asserted in the leading editorial that "the overall price tag for treating autoimmune diseases approximates that of cancer and heart disease. What is more, the chronic nature of autoimmune diseases drags whole families into crisis."
Perhaps it's this last factor---the devastating effects on families---that leads to the remarkable number of organizations for specific autoimmune diseases. The last two pages of the supplement list 24 such organizations---a "sampling of international associations, foundations, and societies"---largely organized and funded by patients and their families, that fund research, disseminate information, advocate for services, and even publish medical journals. A sampling of the sampling's web sites
shows the scope and influence of these organizations on the research and treatment of these diseases. Much of the research, and a good deal of the treatment, is done in university medical centers; but it is clear that these activities are strongly influenced by these public patient advocacy groups.
It's an important---if not always recognized---example of public engagement as defined by the CIC Committee on Engagement (2005): "Engagement is the partnership of university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, …"
I just got the program for the 9th Annual MCH (Maternal and Child Health) Summer Institute on Addressing Health Disparities: Culture, Communications and Health, to be held July 24-25, 2007 at the Humphrey Center, University of Minnesota West Bank. According to the program,
This Summer Institute will focus on the role of health communications in reducing health disparities affecting women, children, families and communities. Exciting keynote speakers and in-depth breakout sessions will focus on issues of culture and health literacy; the implications of communications inequality; the health communication needs of specific communities of color; and new strategies to increase communication effectiveness. A special feature of the Institute is a sneak preview of the upcoming PBS documentary: “Unnatural Causes: Is Health Inequality Making Us Sick?"
The Institute objectives are listed as
This strikes me as very important, both practically and conceptually. Everything we have learned about working with communities tells us that clear, honest, culturally-appropriate communication is essential to effective public health efforts.
Harry Boyte (personal communication, 2007) argues convincingly that civic engagement is not just "an array of good deeds that can be simply enumerated, without qualitative differentiations", but instead that it is "a field of expanding research that needs to be employed in assessing the nature, quality, and impact of various forms of 'service' or 'voluntarism.' He continues
The most important point to make is that there is, in fact, an interdisciplinary field of public engagement, with parallels to other emergent fields in the past such as environmental studies or women’s studies. This makes “civic” or “public” engagement much richer and more intellectually rigorous than is suggested by simply a listing of voluntary and service activities. Indeed, advances in scholarship and research allow a good many distinctions and judgments. We know, for instance, a great deal about what kinds of experiential learning, pedagogies, and content make for robust, lasting civic and political engagements, knowledge, and inclinations. We also know a lot about what makes for effective deliberative processes in local communities and institutions, or sustained local civic culture change, or effective civic practice by professionals. Since the coin of the realm at research universities is the quality of research and knowledge generation and since special distinction goes to those who are seen as key innovators in important areas of human discovery, it would seem especially important to make the case that there is an important emergent field here…
I'm very much in sync with these sentiments (though I wouldn't totally dismiss well-done volunteering) and would like to see them taken even further. For example, practitioners of community-based participatory research should document their claims that it yields better results (better-designed studies, better subject recruitment, better compliance, more honest responses) than standard community-based research. Practitioners of engaged agricultural research might document—quantitatively rather than anecdotally—that it yields better crops, happier farm families, higher farm income per hour worked, less soil erosion, etc., than traditional agricultural extension work.
Evidence-based demonstrations of effective methodologies and outcomes are rightly expected in medicine, science, and other fields of research. Should publicly-engaged scholarship be held to lower standards?
The Ginsberg Center at the University of Michigan is one of higher education's preeminent centers for civic engagement. Itts mission "is to engage students, faculty, and community members in learning together through community service and civic participation in a diverse democratic society."
One of the Ginsburg Center's most prominent activities is the sponsorship of the John Dewey Lectures. Although Dewey is generally identified with the University of Chicago and Columbia University, he began his academic career as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan in 1884, and left for Chicago ten years later.
The Dewey lectures, begun in 2001 when Nancy Cantor was provost at Michigan, have featured some of the most prominent university voices in public engagement: Ira Harkavy (Penn), Judith Ramaly (Vermont), Barbara Holland (Indiana), George Sanchez (USC), Charles Payne (Duke), and the University of Minnesota's own Harry Boyte. Remarkably, Boyte has been the John Dewey lecturer twice, in 2003 and again in 2007.
The seven Dewey lectures are now online, at http://www.umich.edu/~mserve/faculty/lectures.html. They make rich reading.
Jim Kakalios, my colleague in the Physics Department at the University of Minnesota, has made a great name for himself as the author of The Physics of Superheroes, in which he discusses the possibilities (and impossibilities) of the physics seen in superhero comics and movies.
In an op-ed piece in today's New York Times, Jim writes about Spider-Man's nemesis, Sandman, in the latest hit movie "Spider-Man 3". He explains that, once you get past the villain’s mutation into living sand, the properties of sand that he exhibits are generally correct — and often counterintuitive.
I won’t attempt to summarize the discussion: read the piece, and see the movie. What I do want to point out is that this is a good (if unorthodox) example of engaged scholarship, in the sense of Boyer’s "scholarship of application". It takes a popular phenomenon, applies cutting-edge physics (yes, understanding the behavior of sand-piles, or marginally stable piles of granular material generally, is cutting-edge physics), and returns something educational and accessible. A nice partnership of popular and academic culture.
Kathy Draeger, Statewide Director of the Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships, sent me a copy of a report, “Community vs. Corporate Wind: Does it Matter Who Develops the Wind in Big Stone County, MN?”, authored by Arne Kildegaard and Josephine Myers-Kuykindall in the Department of Economics, University of Minnesota-Morris. Some excerpts from the report’s Introduction set the stage:
Big Stone County on the western extreme of west-central Minnesota is in many ways emblematic of the challenges facing rural America in general, and the Great Plains in particular. Aging, declining population and stagnant agricultural incomes in many cases directly threaten the sustainability of communities. Often it is the high fixed-cost rural schools and other government and community institutions that feel the pinch first.
One of the few promising opportunities in the region is the possibility of commercial development of the wind resource—and in fact, in Big Stone County, there are presently several projects in various stages of development. …
Recently, a number of researchers have focused on how the development of wind takes place, and what consequences this has for local incomes and economic development. Wind developments can be categorized as either corporate- or community- owned. …
An increasing body of empirical research indicates that corporate and community wind development structures are not equal in terms of their local economic impacts, not limited to the owners themselves. In particular, mounting evidence points to the idea that community wind has greater economic impacts on local economies during the operational phase of the project, due to local spending multiplier effects associated with the higher income streams.
The study concludes
Our simple scenario analysis for a 10.5 MW project suggests that community wind has 5 times the economic impact on local value added, and 3.4 times the impact on local job creation, relative to a corporate-owned development. These numbers should probably be considered an upper bound on the differential impacts, since most projects in practice will involve an outside-the-region equity partner, or at the very least a discounted sale of the PTC.
The report is online at http://cda.mrs.umn.edu/~kildegac/CV/Papers/IREE.pdf. It was supported by IREE (Institute for Renewable Energy and the Environment) and the West Central Regional Sustainable Development Partnership. As Kathy Draeger says, “It is a wonderful example of University research supporting and empowering community owned renewable energy.”
Chip Peterson, a geographer in the University of Minnesota's Learning Abroad Center and a member of our Council on Public Engagement, sent me an interesting Op-Ed piece entitled “Community Geography” from the March 2007 issue of the AAG (Association of American Geographers) Newsletter. The article was authored by Don Mitchell from Syracuse University.
The article describes how the Executive Director of a hot food program in downtown Syracuse contacted the Geography Department to ask whether the department could help to create a “Syracuse Hunger Project” (SHP) to “map the face of hunger in the city”. He suspected that the locus of hunger in the city had shifted over time, but that the social services needed to respond had not followed that shift. The piece goes on to describe how a GIS course was reoriented to make the issue a class project, and how, when
… the students’ maps were presented to SHP meetings, the whole tenor of the conversation changed. Those who had been working on hunger forever began to look at the problem in a new way. They saw that indeed thee were large-scale shifts in the geography of poverty … without a similar shift in service provisions. But even more importantly, they began to apprehend the importance of finer-scale geographies… This resulted in … a raising of critical questions about how entitlement programs like food stamps intersect with the social geographies of the city. … In instance after instance, the maps grounded what had heretofore been quite abstract discussions, providing a specific focus for discussion and debate.
The article goes on to describe how this project led to broader initiatives, including the establishment of a “Community Geographer” , “someone with both social-geographic and GIS/spatial analysis skills, who would have full access to departmental and university facilities, students and courses, and the support of the university’s Center for Community and Public Service, but who would be paid by the community. But then, alas, adequate continuing funding could not be found, unless for narrow purposes, because foundations were unwilling to fund something that is open-ended rather than project-based, and town-gown issues made full university funding impractical. Mitchell writes
This conundrum is doubly frustrating because both the Syracuse Hunger Project and the Community Geographer have significantly transformed our department: how we approach our work, how we interact with students, and what our position is in the city and university. Faculty in other departments urge their students to take our classes and to consider geography as a dual major, students report that they have sought out our classes after hearing about SHP and CG work, student evaluations in classes linked to, or that draw from, the work of the SHP and CG indicate a genuine excitement about geographical learning and thinking that is strikingly different from a half dozen years ago. One of the things students report is that geography is becoming known as a place where “real work” gets done …
One can hardly imagine more eloquent or persuasive testimony that public engagement is not only valuable for its own sake, but that it enriches teaching and scholarship.
I spent late yesterday afternoon passing out certificates and medallions to recognize twenty students who have completed the University of Minnesota's Community Engagement Scholars Program.
According to its web site, the Community Engagement Scholars Program
The requirements of the Program are substantial:
One important reward of completing the Program is a Community Engagement Scholar notation on the official academic transcript, something that many colleges and universities have not been able to arrange.
Some of the projects that the students described briefly but movingly at yesterday’s event:
As Jerry Rinehart, our Vice Provost for Student Affairs, said in his closing remarks, it’s from these engagements with real-world, important issues that students truly learn.
I’ve been reading “Pursuing the Endless Frontier”, a collection of essays by Charles M. Vest written during his tenure as president of MIT from 1991-2004 (MIT Press, 2005). Those years were eventful ones for higher education in general and MIT—with its heavy focus on the STEM disciplines and research agendas strongly shaped by industry as well as federal funding—in particular. Vest’s ruminations on those events, and the underlying principles by which they should be understood and managed, are well worth reading.
In the public engagement/technology transfer context, I was particularly interested in Vest’s reflections from 1993-94 on the changing relations between industry, government, and research universities. In this period, he writes (pp. 75-76), such relations were rapidly changing.
As the cold war faded into history, military security as a dominant motivation for federal support of university-based research and advanced education faded with it. The challenge of the highly competitive global marketplace drove fundamental transformation of the R&D function in U.S.-based corporations. Industry generally ceased to do research with moderate or long time-frames and absorbed R&D directly into its product-development process to accelerate product cycle times and improve manufacturing quality and efficiency. Various federal policymakers and appropriators sought to focus more university research on near-term application and commercialization; policy debates raged about the relative merits of “applied research” versus “basic research”.
This turmoil gave universities a rare opportunity to respond to changing national needs and to sort out and clarify the relative roles of industry, government, and universities in funding and performing research and development. We needed to form a broad consensus that it is a necessary function of government to support the conduct of research of a fundamental and/or a long time-horizon to potential application, and to seek recommitment to the U.S. system in which universities are the primary performers of such research. The elegant system in which federal dollars do double duty—supporting the research and creating the next generation of researchers and scientific and engineering leaders—needed to be reaffirmed. Modern industry, fast-paced, innovation-driven, and globally connected, presented fascinating new intellectual challenges to engineering and management researchers. Industry and universities needed to find new ways of working in partnership, ways that would add value to each other, enhancing education and filling the developing national void in research that has medium time-horizons. While doing so, universities needed to reaffirm and adhere to basic academic values, and to establish sound and effective policies for avoiding conflicts of interest.
It’s interesting to read these paragraphs in the context of the critique by Jennifer Washburn that I wrote about a few weeks ago. Vest clearly believes that universities have a responsibility to work for the betterment of this country, and one important way of doing so is to work with industry. This is so not primarily for economic reasons, but rather because the research problems—if properly chosen—are basic and important; new areas of research and teaching are opened up; and students are given an education about the real-world issues that they’ll face when the leave the university.
In later essays Vest recurs to this topic and presents some ideas that would deal with Washburn’s worst criticisms. First, that applications of intellectual property rights should be flexible, so as not to impede basic research. Second, that more than one company from an industrial sector should be involved in university-industry collaborations. This would help to mitigate some of the biggest concerns with the deals that UC Berkeley has made, with Novartis some years ago and with British Petroleum just recently.
Most engaged teaching, learning, and discovery in higher education tends to originate on campus and connect outward. However, in the arts the direction is frequently reversed. A notable example is the 13th annual international conference of Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed (PTO), May 31-June 3, 2007, at the Rarig Center on the University of Minnesota West Bank campus. Information about the conference, which features Augusto Boal, the cofounder of PTO, is available here.
According to its web site,
PTO is a not-for-profit (IRS 501C3) organization with the following mission: To challenge oppressive systems by promoting critical thinking and social justice. We organize an annual meeting that focuses on the work of liberatory educators, activists, and artists; and community organizers.
This organization developed from a series of four conferences held in Omaha, Nebraska from 1995-1998. The conference was based on the ideologies and works of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal. Using pedagogy and theatre, they each worked with oppressed peoples of the world to develop critical literacies and actions to overcome social systems of oppression.
Biographies of Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire are on the PTO web site. They provide striking examples of how critical social thinking, and art that exemplifies and dramatizes that thinking and moves it forward, can arise out of dire sociopolitical circumstances.
Another noteworthy aspect of the conference—and of engaged scholarship generally—is that it brings together educational institutions that don't often connect with each other: The Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota hosts the conference with Metropolitan State University Urban Teacher Program and St. Paul Central High School. Sponsorship is provided by the Institute for Advanced Study and the College of Liberal Arts Scholarly Events Fund at the University of Minnesota, and Macalester College. The media co-sponsor is KFAI Fresh Air Radio.
Today's e-newsletter from the University of Minnesota's Academic Health Center contains an item that reminds us of an eventuality we hope won't happen, but had better be prepared for if it does.
The University's Center for Bioethics has joined with Minnesota Department of Health and the Minnesota Center for Health Care Ethics to develop an ethical framework for allocating essential health care resources during a severe influenza pandemic. To accomplish the goal, the coalition will recruit a broad-based panel of experts and stakeholders to outline the framework and develop recommendations for its implementation. The proposed framework will balance the competing priorities of caring for the sick, preventing spread of the illness, and maintaining critical social systems and economic activities. Jeff Kahn (Center for Bioethics) said, "These are not easy issues, and we appreciate the investment of the Department of Health in efforts to address some of the critical and pressing ethical questions that will arise in the event of a pandemic flu outbreak. We look forward to working with a diverse group of experts and stakeholders on these issues.
This points out how important it is for university, government, and private organizations to work together on crucial societal issues. The university contribution takes a wide variety of forms, and is rarely the whole story.
Today I was shown an article by Brian Rosenberg, President of Macalester College, in the Spring 2007 issue of Macalester Today. I was struck by a passage on p. 17, in which Dr. Rosenberg says
Of the three chief purposes of higher education—career training, self-enlightenment, and preparation for citizenship—it may ultimately be the third that is both the most difficult and the most important. It is the most difficult because it is the one goal of education that is not chiefly about the betterment of the self, to which we might naturally be inclined, but about the betterment of and service to others, toward which we might need to be encouraged and around which advanced civilizations must be built; it is the most important for precisely that same reason.
This connects remarkably with a new position statement on the web site of the November 5th Coalition, which "calls for new federal policies to encourage serious public participation in public education." In particular, note the second of their nine "basic premises":
The purpose of education is not just generating outcomes (such as test scores) that are determined by experts. Education is the process by which a whole community chooses and transmits values, skills, knowledge, and culture to the next generation. Communities must discuss what values they wish to transmit.
Two different but eloquent ways of saying the same important thing.
I've begun reading Voices of Hope: The Story of the Jane Addams School for Democracy, edited by Nan Kari and Nan Skelton (Kettering Foundation Press, 2007, 144 pp., ISBN 978-0-923993-19-1), a fine book that celebrates the 10th anniversary of the founding of this important "school" in Saint Paul, Minnesota. As the jacket copy makes clear, the JAS is different from, and much more than, a traditional school:
The Jane Addams School for Democracy (JAS) was founded in 1996 to create a space for democratic education and practice for new immigrant families, college students, and faculty. It was conceived as a democratic organization—one with minimal, non-hierarchical structures that would allow participants to shape its agenda. Ten years later, more than 1500 participants at JAS—Hmong, East Africans, and Latin Americans—have become U.S. citizens. This book tells the story of the Jane Addams School in many ways through many voices, including those of nonnative English speakers.
The JAS is one of the key exemplars of public engagement at the University of Minnesota (the College of St. Catherine and other colleges have also been involved) and arguably one of the most important and influential experiments in civic education. As Peter Levine wrote in his Civic Renewal blog on March 18, 2004
The Jane Addams School in St. Paul, MN is important to me. In the summer of 2001 (when it was 102 degrees in the Twin Cities), I visited the school. As on most nights, there were scores if not hundreds of people present: mostly college students and neighborhood residents. The majority of people who live in St. Paul's West Side are new immigrants and refugees (Somalis, Hmong, and Latin Americans). I observed a staff meeting and then participated in a project, the "Hmong Circle." We tutored Hmong immigrants to take the Federal citizenship test, and in return they told us about Hmong culture. I was so impressed with the buoyant, democratic, creative spirit of the place that I decided I wanted to start something similar in Maryland. When I found partners with similar motivations, we created the Prince George's Information Commons.
I hope to write more about the Jane Addams School for Democracy as I read further in Kari's and Skelton's book. However, I urge all of you to get hold of a copy. It's an attractive, reasonably priced ($19.95) paperback with lots of charming photos and eloquent text. It's not a textbook, but I can't think of a better place to learn about both the practical realities and the spirit of public engagement.
Last year I posted a guest blog by Dennis Donovan about Public Achievement. I recently was given an Evaluation Brief, which summarizes the nature of Public Achievement as follows:
Public Achievement is a youth civic organization initiative intended to help students learn the habits, skills, and commitments of citizenship necessary to be lifelong contributors to their communities. Sponsored by the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, the specific goals of Public Achievement are to help youth develop the desire, insights, and talents to address society's problems and improve the world. Students learn basic methods for taking public action and develop a conceptual framework for learning by doing. During the 2005-2006 school year, Public Achievement programs served 800 K-12 students at 40 sites throughout the United States.
The evaluation found the following positive impacts of Public Achievement:
In other words, the active citizenship approach espoused by Public Achievement and the Center for Democracy and Citizenship benefits both the students and their schools, as well as planting the seeds of future citizenship. Given concerns about whether schools are adequately preparing students for productive lives, the Public Achievement approach seems well worth expanding.
This is the second in a three part series examining a recent trip that University of Minnesota student Steve Mullaney took to North Carolina to observe the student group and non-profit Nourish International. The first part looked at innovation at NI and the third will look at the implementation of exciting new ideas.
The story of why Nourish International is a high-functioning, successful, non-profit and student group is also the story of NI’s culture, created around engagement and involving people in the leadership process.
In a lot of student organizing at the University of Minnesota there is a constant search for more members, usually conducted with great zeal. The goal is numbers for the sake of numbers instead of really trying to find a win-win situation in which both organization and student benefit. Usually what happens is that numbers will be very high for the first couple of weeks or so, then plummet as individuals find they do not have the opportunity to become co-producers of the group’s output. When a small elite—no matter how well-intentioned—controls the decision-making process, there will be alienation and disengagement. When individuals are thought of as prizes (tokens?) and the goal is putting butts in seats instead of developing mutually beneficial strategies for newcomers to innovate and lead, there will be dropout and abandonment of the organization.
Conversely, NI creates many natural entry points to the organization for newcomers, and then encourages them to take on more leadership until they are seen as "voices of wisdom" for the next crop of newcomers.
The case study for this at the UNC chapter of NI is a guy named Graham Boone. When NI-UNC decided to hold the 2006 version of its highly successful series of poker tournaments, Graham wanted to be a dealer and through one of his friends was given that opportunity. As he met more and more people in the organization he took on more and more responsibility. This year, as a sophomore, he organized and led the 2007 version—one which raised $8,000 and is believed to be the largest poker tournament in North Carolina history. Next year, he’ll be turning over the reins and acting as a mentor to the next person.
Why? This culture helps bring in more people in an organic way. Graham could act on his ideas because the organization empowered him; the next person to run the tournament will be empowered in a similar way and there will be fresh ideas and innovation.
Why else? Needing to pass on the leadership puts a premium on relationships, the currency of engagement. Teaching, learning and innovating brings people together, builds relationships and strengthens the community. In my experience, folks are more likely to take active roles if they are accountable to other people instead of to a faceless entity.
Why else else? Without intentionality, those with the leadership experience will graduate and then, lacking experienced people, the organization will crumble. Organizing students in an undergraduate environment is challenging because of the constant turnover. Instead of moaning about this problem, wise student leaders should embrace the challenge and the potential it holds for a constant injection of new ideas into the organization.
Ultimately, in building a culture of engagement it’s important to look beyond the surface “do we have numbers?” question to a deeper “how can we create win-win situations?”. On a deep level most people want to give back to their communities. However, building a culture that can embrace new leadership and harness relationships into action will function on a higher level than one that uses coercion and artificial numbers-based goals as yardsticks.
A couple of short items today. First, from Terry Cooper at USC, a notice of the 35th anniversary of the USC Joint Educational Project, which he thinks may have been the first service-learning project in the country. Be sure you're on a fast connection if you try to access the pdf newsletter, since it's about 30Mb. Terry writes:
I imagine most of you know of the USC Joint Educational Project (JEP) which may have been the first service learning project in the nation and which has come a long way over its 35 years of work. I am providing below the link to the online version of the 35th anniversary JEP newsletter for those who might be interested.
http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/jep/resources/newsletterjep2007_spring.pdf
By the way, I was a witness to the founding of this program in a very "up close and personal" way. I was working on my Ph.D. while leading an experimental urban studies program called "Urban Semester"--a highly experiential learning program in which the 40 students each semester took their entire 16 units of work in an integrated program with 5 faculty and 5 TAs. Barbara Gardner, the founder of JEP, occupied an office across the hall from mine and we often chatted about her vision for the JEP program. My lasting image of her is looking across a narrow hall seeing her bent over her desk talking to someone on the phone with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. She was a woman with a mission and the sales skills to persuade others of its worth.
Second, we've added a new blog to our list of links, from the new Institute for Law and Politics (http://www.politicslaw.org) at the University of Minnesota. Not to belabor the obvious, law and politics are two of the crucial areas in which active citizenship plays itself out.
This is the first in a three part series by University of Minnesota student Steve Mullaney, examining a recent trip that he took to North Carolina to observe the student group and non-profit Nourish International (NI) www.nourishinternational.org. The second part will look at the culture NI built around engagement, and the third will look at the implementation of exciting new ideas.
I’m on a million mailing lists.
There are days when I actually believe this and am sure that they deliver solicitations for money to my apartment in a dump truck. Or a tank.
Unlike most people, I read all of my mail. As a college student I’m always hopeful that the free gift is a car and not just mailing labels with my name misspelled. So I was very excited to peruse Heifer International’s magazine Noah’s Ark. I really like the model of sharing livestock that Heifer uses; it seems sustainable, plays to the strength of community partners, and just seems cool.
As I paged through the magazine an article caught my eye: “UNC Students Fight Hunger on Their Lunch Break” which described how students raised money to fight poverty and hunger with a lunch that everyone threw in a little for. A month ago I guest-posted about how community engagement worked gathering people around meals. Naturally, this idea appealed to me; I maneuvered over to NI's website with the idea of learning as much as possible. Fortunately they’re incredibly user friendly and I quickly made contact with the organization—and within a day they responded.
SCOPE, a student group that I’m a part of, had the funds to send me to North Carolina for a week, and I spent two days observing NI and how they functioned. In short, NI is an incredible source for innovation. But innovation (as my title suggests) is not for the weak.
Innovation requires people to admit that they do not know everything and that they should be open to new ideas. In spirit this is easy—but in practice we fall into set patterns of the-way-we-always-do-things (TWWADT™). Frequently, innovation only happens when TWWADT™ isn’t working; the challenge for those engaging communities is how to strive for constant improvement.
Ultimately, innovation is not a one-time only slate of new ideas, but rather a way of going about work. One of NI’s strengths is the way that it naturally renews its leadership by giving younger members the opportunity to take ownership of the process and ventures they undertake. They make sure to have seniors act as advisors, not leaders, encouraging younger students to take an active role This year they even started a Freshman Executive position to give first year students the skills necessary to lead over the next three years. Giving up control is scary: intuitively I feel like I need to hold on to things that I’m leading. However, when that happens there’s a limit to what can be achieved. Especially for student groups at the undergraduate level a constant reenergizing is necessary to avoid staleness and burnout. The only way that I know how to do this is to lay a foundation in the hopes that those who come after can build it higher. Innovation isn’t for the weak-stomached, but it’s sure a lot better than stagnation.