 | Manuals
and Guides:
Community
Reinventing
Citizenship
The
Practice of Public Work
An Excerpt
By the staff
and partners of the
Center for Democracy and Citizenship
Published by the University of Minnesota:
Minnesota Extension Service
Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, Center for Democracy and
Citizenship
Copyright
© 1995 by Minnesota Extension Service and Hubert H. Humphrey
Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota.
Introduction
Health care,
crime, teen pregnancy, racial conflict, economic development,
illiteracy-or positively, creating appealing public spaces, educating
our young, conserving our natural environment. Today the failure
of institutions and groups-from government to service agencies
to communities-to solve our common problems and to address. Our
common tasks is a widespread theme of public debate. The resounding
response has been to restructure or reinvent those institutions.
But the first task is to reinvent citizenship.
We need to
renew Abraham Lincoln's vision: democratic government is of the
people, by the people, and for the people-not simply an agency
whose experts act on our behalf. Democracy relies on strong, active
citizenship inside and outside of government.
In American
history, the citizen has been not only a voter or a rights-bearing
member of the nation or a consumer of services. The citizen has
also been a producer, a public-spirited agent in problem solving
and common work. But today, such citizenship is difficult to sustain.
People see themselves in narrow roles, not as public actors. The
service society that we live in-service and information-based,
hierarchically organized, fragmented along lines of specialization-turns
citizens into consumers, clients, advocates, or experts.
Yet addressing
the tough challenges we face today will require people to reconceive
of themselves as citizens. Professionals in and beyond government
will need to see themselves as civil servants, part of the wider
give and take process of problem solving-not as experts with the
answers. Clients, protesters, and volunteers will need to see
themselves, in relationship with professionals, institutions,
and many different associations, as serious actors with insight
and capacity to bring to problem solving in public settings.
It will require
widespread civic involvement that taps the common sense, energy,
insight, and effort that comes from citizens with different talents
and points of view working together, often across lines of sharp
cultural, partisan, racial, and economic differences. Without
active citizenship, we will continue to struggle with narrow,
unfulfilling roles and ineffective institutions. With restored
citizenship, we act as co-creators of history, reclaiming our
birthright as democratic citizens to be full participants in shaping
our common life.
Public Work
Public work
is a framework for reinventing an active practice of citizenship.
Public work stresses practical public effort by ordinary people
in everyday environments such as neighborhoods, schools, 4-H clubs,
government agencies, nursing homes, religious congregations, community
groups, service organizations, and other settings in helping to
create and build-to "produce" the world around us.
Pilot projects
in many of these settings have tested and shaped the concepts
and practice of public work. Pilot projects have been an experiment
in the redefinition of public roles and public work. This work
takes time and flexibility. It often involves conflict and frustration.
Yet it can also lead to greater meaning and effectiveness for
individuals and institutions.
Building
on the work of pilot projects, the Center for Democracy and Citizenship
has launched a long-term national campaign for the renewal of
active citizenship of which Reinventing Citizenship is one piece.
More information on this joint effort with the Walt Whitman Center
at Rutgers University, the Council for the Advancement of Citizenship,
the Lilly Endowment, Extension Services, David Mathews, Kettering
Foundation, and others is in the appendices.
Reinventing Citizenship
Reinventing
Citizenship draws upon the experience of pilot project participants
to illustrate the potential of active citizenship for reinvigorating
public institutions and public problem solving. These are supplemented
by books, articles, and other resources listed in the appendices.
Reinventing Citizenship is built on several premises:
For citizenship
to be serious, it must be tied to a politics of everyday work
and problem solving. The narrow conceptions of politics and public
affairs held today limit the roles we can play in public life.
Politics originally meant of the citizen. It refers to the methods
and practices we use to decide things. All institutions, and cultures
have a politics: the way they approach work, define roles and
relationships, and organize their environments.
Reinventing
citizenship as the productive serious practice of public work
requires recognizing that politics is the everyday activity of
problem solving and building our environments-not a narrowly professional
or partisan activity but part of our everyday lives in our public
institutions. We call our overall framework and philosophy
public work. Citizen politics or civic organizing,
is a method for organizing and change that puts citizens at the
center. This publication further explores these concepts and practices.
Citizenship
is continually developed over time. Citizenship requires
practice. Our skills, concern, and understanding as citizens are
constantly evolving and changing. Citizenship-the ongoing contribution
of citizens to solving community and public problems and creating
the world around us- and its skills and values are best cultivated
in everyday community and institutional contexts.
Active citizenship
is practiced and developed through associations and mediating
institutions. Mediating institutions and associations are the
spaces in which we do our public work and through which we govern
our society. From schools to community groups to 4-H clubs, they
connect individuals and communities to the larger public world.
Yet these settings have largely lost their public missions and
the active practice and development of citizenship as we have
moved toward a service society.
Reinventing
citizenship takes place in the context of renewing these institutions,
associations, groups, and the larger relationships which tie them
together. Educating individuals alone will not alter our conceptions
and practice of citizenship. To reclaim public work for citizens
requires changing the places in which that work is done. This
publication outlines a process and some strategies based on citizen
politics for using public work to restructure places where serious
citizenship is learned and practiced.
William H.
Hastie, the first black Federal judge, described democracy in
terms that can also be applied to citizenship: "Democracy is a
process, not a static condition. It is becoming, rather than being.
It can be easily lost, but is never finally won." In this spirit
we invite participation and feedback from our readers. Citizenship
is an open, contested idea. It requires discussion, debate, and
practice. And, like democracy, it must be created and sustained
by us all.
Chapter
One
Reinventing Citizenship
In this chapter:
- Today,
our public life has become fragmented, polarized, and dominated
by expertise to such an extent that our public work is ineffective
and often trivialized. Reinventing citizenship is a means of
renewing public life.
- We have
strong democratic traditions to draw on in reinventing citizenship.
- Citizenship,
though a contested term, connotes the greatest common denominator
for diverse people to claim a common identity and basis for
collaborative work at the heart of a vibrant, democratic public
life.
- Politics
is everywhere. To
revitalize public life, we need a new conception of politics
that we can use as a tool for effective public action where
we live and work.
- Public
work is broader than politics. It is an understanding of the
world as something we constantly make and remake, and it is
an understanding of ourselves as productive, creative people,
who make and build things.
A
Declining Public Life
The man on
the television talk show was furious. "The savings and loan crisis
is a terrible thing," he said. "Taxpayers shouldn't have to pay
for that mess. Government should pay for it!"
The talk
show participant expressed a widespread belief: Government is
over there, somewhere, doing something for us, and not very well.
Private citizens, as innocent outsiders, are not responsible for
the mess. They are just clients or consumers of the state's services.
At the same time, public officials have become specialized experts
or professionals, based on their narrow expertise and responsibilities.
Indeed, experts in every arena are responsible for solving our
problems, and we have increasingly come to seek their services
as the solution.
The narrow
roles and outsider/consumer consciousness symbolized by the taxpayer's
lament have crippled our capacity to govern and to solve public
problems effectively. And they have undermined sources of meaning
and empowerment in our lives. We have lost both our civic muscles-our
political capacity-and our instruments and tools-our institutional
and social environments-for acting as citizens who are CO-creators
and producers of society. This is the crisis we face in America
today in many settings and institutions, not simply in government.
A fundamental
problem underlies the failure of our institutions and less formal
groups to effectively address critical issues and to engage and
fully develop the leadership capacities of all people-experts
and clients, voters, and protectors alike. This is the erosion
of a democratic public life and the idea and practice of productive
citizenship. Our public life has become fragmented, polarized,
and dominated by expertise to such an extent that our public work
is ineffective and often trivialized.
Reinventing
government, the community service movement, total quality management,
the politics of meaning: these and other approaches to this crisis
have been touted. Yet these approaches address only parts of the
problem or fail to address its underlying causes.
We argue
that reinventing active, participatory notions of citizenship,
work, and politics, altering our roles and practices as individuals
and institutions accordingly, is an effective way to address this
crisis. Our approach, called public work, builds on our democratic
traditions and today's practices for effective civic organizing
and citizenship education. Public work is a way to renew and reclaim
an active, democratic public life, inside and outside of government.
Using terms
like citizen, work, public, and politics can be problematic. People
rarely ever consider themselves citizens; for some the term is
even oppressive. For many, politics is not fulfilling, engaging,
or productive.
Finally, people often think of "public" as simply government.
But we believe these words are important. Moreover, they can catalyze
the renewal of public life in our everyday environments. In this
and the following chapters we'll explore the traditions behind
citizenship and public work, what we mean by them, and why we
use them.
Democratic
Traditions
Active, participatory
understanding of citizenship and public work are not new. Throughout
our history, Americans from all walks of life have used voluntary
associations, movements, and other institutions to solve public
problems and develop public leadership, from insurgent movements
like temperance and populism to ongoing institutions like the
YWCA and unions.
Such experiences
should not be romanticized. They were often parochial and exclusive.
But through them, many people reamed civic skills and developed
a civic identity. People encountered an intergenerational mix
of ages, interests, and points of view. They learned to argue
artfully, to think strategically about their public work, and
to work together across lines of difference. Public work was understood
as the way to deal with public problems and do public tasks, and
took place in many settings, not simply government.
The
Immigrant Experience
Vibrant histories
like those of the immigrant area of the West Side of St. Paul
tell how people became citizens, in their view, through street
comer debates, activities at the settlement house, the formation
of groups like the Workmen's Circle, and the work of building
schools, parks, churches, and synagogues. These stories portray
not only community involvement but also people's sense of public
work on the larger civic stage. For instance, people from the
West Side talk about helping to create the New Deal. When asked
what they mean, they say they were involved in the union or the
settlement house or the local school, and that work fed the New
Deal and Minnesota politics.
Through such
experiences people learned a number of public skills, building
on the democratic heritages they brought with them and found here:
how to deal with different kinds of people, the give-and-take,
messy quality of public life, the art of argument, ways to map
out power relationships and the politics of particular environments,
and ways to be connected to the larger world. That process created
a common fund of wealth and resources in the society. It was an
experience of politics and citizenship as public work that taught
skills and wider understanding of civic identities which included,
but was not limited to, their role and stake in the nation.
The
Civil Rights Movement
In another
example, an understanding of freedom as public participation and
citizenship was at the heart of the civil rights movement. Charles
Gomillion described efforts to bring about political equality
in Tuskegee, for instance, as "civic democracy . . . a way of
life in which all citizens have the opportunity to participate
in societal affairs."
Public participation
and citizenship were central themes in the movement, generating
Citizenship Schools and Freedom Schools. These schools registered
disenfranchised black voters, but also taught thousands of local
leaders new approaches to citizen action. Teachers and students
were peers. Lessons drew directly on participants' experiences.
The formal political process was connected to problems in people's
daily lives. This experience generated a transformative sense
of politics. Unita Blackwell, a leader of the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party who was elected mayor of Mayersville, described
her experience: "We found ourselves involved in working in political
work. We still ain't figured all of it out yet, but it's been
just wonderful."
This sense
was echoed in the movement's freedom language. Freedom meant the
capacity to participate and contribute as full, independent, and
powerful citizens in public affairs. Public participation-made
real in the movement's rallies, sit-ins, demonstrations, voter
registration drives, Freedom Schools, and other activities-generated
the movement spirit, despite violent opposition and situations
of great danger. Freedom involved self-naming, taking the definition
of one's self back from others. The theme of freedom lent a new
sense of collective power, the ability to act with others around
expansive ends, to shape the larger public world.
It is to
fulfill this democratic promise of creative, serious roles in
the shaping of our common world that we argue the need to reinvent
citizenship and public work.
Why
Citizenship?
Citizenship
is a powerful but contested theme. In this nation comprised largely
of immigrants, citizenship has many layers of meaning for various
communities. To some, a good citizen votes and obeys the law.
Others think citizens also have the right or duty to monitor government
for corruption or fairness. Some see citizenship as participation
in a shared community of values. We all share certain values because
we're Americans. In these terms, citizenship can be sentimentalized,
or turned into a "right" way of thinking, as in the slogan, "America:
love it or leave it." Today, while more people may be defined
as citizens, few would claim the term in a strong way. The substance
and meaning of citizenship has become thin and weak. And as the
term private citizen reflects, it has lost its connection to public
life for many.
Yet as people
learn the leadership skills of effective action to solve public
problems and as they learn to relate their efforts to the larger
well-being of communities and the nation, citizenship takes on
new life and resonance. Historically, citizenship has vividly
come to life in the democratic movements that fought to expand
the definition of citizen-to recognize African-Americans, women,
the poor, and working people as citizens with full rights. Or
in the settlement houses where immigrants, working class people,
and the settlement house workers reamed and practiced active citizenship
as they built and maintained strong communities.
Citizenship
raises particular questions and conflicts born of the historical,
political, and legal experience of people of color in America.
For the Native American, it may symbolize a status imposed on
them by force. For Latino and Asian-Americans, it brings up questions
of legality and documentation. For African-Americans, full citizenship
became imaginable only after slavery was abolished but seemed
possible only after their own self-determination and resolve fumed
aspirations into action through the sweeping movements of the
1950s and 1960s. As Dr. Martin Luther King stated, "This growing
self-respect has inspired the [African-American] with new determination
to struggle and sacrifice until first class citizenship becomes
a reality."
For communities
of color, citizenship offers either a conceptual stumbling block
or entry into the American dream of promise for full participation
in democratic governance. Stripped of its legal denotations, though,
citizenship connotes the greatest common denominator for diverse
people to claim a common identity and basis for the collaborative
public work at the heart of a vibrant, democratic public life.
Active
Citizenship
Active, public
citizenship begins and is grounded in our everyday institutional
environments-the places we live and work, go to school, volunteer,
participate in communities of faith. It is public-spirited and
practical; not utopian or immaculate but part of the messy, difficult,
give-and-take process of problem solving. Citizenship links our
daily life and interests to larger public values and arenas. Through
citizenship we build and exercise our power.
Active citizenship
is tied to an understanding of public life as diverse, contentious,
and linked to, but distinct from, private and communal life. Thus
the role of citizen can connect people across lines of difference
for the purpose of governing and problem solving, drawing on cultural
identities and other communities while remaining distinct.
Reinventing
this active understanding of citizenship is important today, in
our view, for at least three reasons:
- A birthright.
Human beings have both the birthright and the capacity to help
create the world, not only in their immediate environments,
but also on the larger public stage. Claiming and developing
that capacity has a dramatic, often transformative effect.
- Effective
problem solving. It is increasingly obvious that Americans cannot
successfully address the problems we face without the reinvention
of citizenship, inside and outside government. Crime, drugs,
teen pregnancy, school reform, and a host of other issues will
not be dealt with in sustained, full, or effective terms without
widespread civic participation or without enlisting the insights,
energies, and talents of the diverse citizenry.
- A vision.
Citizenship, understood as the challenging, difficult, ongoing
work of creating
our society together, of rebuilding the nation from the bottom
up, is the avenue through which we can develop a larger vision
of America and address the crisis in meaning widely discussed
today. What we need is a concept of our nation as our common
creation, our common work, our commonwealth. Through wide participation
in common tasks we will be able to realize a more just and free
society, as well as to clean up the mess of social problems
that we threaten to leave to later generations.
Why
Politics?
That is the
challenge and the rationale for citizenship. But in order to reinvent
citizenship as part of our everyday life and the way we effectively
participate in shaping the public world, we also need to reinvent
politics.
Today, most
people want to avoid politics, especially in everyday environments
(i.e., office politics or school politics). They see politics
as sleazy, corrupt, and cynical, and they imagine themselves as
innocent outsiders. As a result, most people also lose the middle
ground of public action where the point is neither to win nor
just to talk, but rather to engage in the complex work of creating
the public world.
A strong
sense of citizenship requires a broader understanding of politics:
Politics is an aspect of the public work of problem solving and
governance, full of ambiguity and practical tasks and taking place
in everyday environments. This understanding allows people to
recognize and develop their varied public roles and capacities.
It highlights the fact that politics is everywhere: every individual,
institution, community, or arena practices some kind of politics.
Politics here is understood as cultural practices of power and
governance, how decisions get made. It includes the customs, habits,
structures of power and governance, and formal and informal rules
in the environments in which we live and work.
Citizen politics
starts from this understanding of politics and adds democratic
goals and practices. With citizen politics, politics becomes a
deeply responsible form of activity, through which people come
to see themselves as accountable public actors who are able to
combine their ideals with effective strategies for dealing honestly
with the world as it is, full of messiness and compromise.
In Chapter
4 we further explain the conceptual foundation of public work:
public, diversity, self-interest, and power. The next two chapters
will explore in more depth how we currently do politics.
Why
Public Work?
Public work
is cooperative civic work that is visible and widely acknowledged
as significant. Public work helps build our larger common pool
of wealth and resources-our commonwealth.
Public work
can be paid or voluntary. It can be done in communities. Or it
can be done in institutions and across institutions as part of
one's regular job. In fact, adding public dimensions to one's
occupation-recognizing the larger potential significance and impact
of what one does as a teacher or nurse, as a county extension
educator or a computer programmer or a machinist or a college
professor or anything else-often can turn an unsatisfying job
into much more significant work.
American
citizenship in its most expansive sense is understood as public
work-visible effort on common tasks of importance to the community
or nation, involving many different people. This older view of
citizenship is grounded in people's everyday workplace and living
environments. Public work is work that the public believes important.
Thus, it is always subject to argument and interpretation. Public
work makes things. It builds things. It creates social as well
as material culture.
Our most
common associations with the idea of public work are "public works,"
in which the focus is on the products themselves. Public works
include water mains and roads, sewer systems and bridges, and
other parts of the infrastructure. Cities have departments of
public works. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal organized a Public
Works Administration.
Public works
also extend beyond function and usefulness. Public works can express
the grandeur, the beauty, even the highest aspirations of a civilization.
In the United States, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge is a
public work, as are the majestic figures carved from Mount Rushmore.
The Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials grace the capital, conveying
our democratic traditions. Though public works of a cultural and
social nature may seem more difficult to identify than roads and
public buildings, they are nonetheless a vital part of our environment.
Music, dance, and art, like other cultural practices, can be public.
When the
emphasis is simply on the product, however grand the creation
or however noble the aspiration, democracy is not part of the
equation. The work activity itself-those who do the work and how-remain
hidden and in the background.
In fact,
public work understood simply as products may convey the opposite
of democracy. Public works can conjure up the image of oppressed
and brutalized masses, like the Hebrews enslaved in Egypt, or
"coolie labor"-the abused Chinese workers who built the American
railroads. The invisibility of work in those things that are grand
public creations highlights a painful contrast: while the importance
of the thing itself may be recognized on the largest public stage,
those who create the thing may be rendered insignificant in comparison.
When "public
work" as a term first appeared in America, it a had a broader
range of associations than it does today. Public work was understood
to create public goods, even if by private businesses and corporations,
that were thus subject to public deliberation and regulation.
Farmers, artisans, teachers, merchants and others often saw their
work in more public terms than is now common.
In the fullest
sense of the term, public work takes place not solely with an
eye to public consequences. It also is work of a public, a mix
of people whose interests, backgrounds, and resources can be quite
different. This requires political skills such as listening, bargaining,
understanding diverse self-interests, and being able to map power
relations. Everyday politics (or citizen politics) is an important
aspect of public work, but it is not the same thing.
Public work
focuses attention on something that we have largely lost sight
of in our age of high technology, a point larger than politics:
we help to build the world through our common effort. Public work
develops our core identities as citizens who are broad producers,
rather than simply consumers or clients or experts or any narrower
role. It liberates our talents and capacities. What we build and
create we can also recreate. Thus, public work also makes clear
that the world is open and fluid, not static and fixed. It helps
to regenerate hope in our time.
Questions
At the end
of each chapter we will pose a few questions, mainly aimed at
applying the chapter's theory to your situation. They can be used
by you personally, or with a group for discussion. Add questions
you find helpful. Investigate the reference materials at the back
if something interests you, or if you disagree with something.
Evaluate the theory presented here against your own experience.
1. How do
you think about or define citizenship? Politics? Public work?
2. Where
did you learn those ideas? What traditions or practices are they
based on or what reinforce them?
3. What
other historical or cultural conceptions or definitions are you
aware of?
4. What
do you associate with the word public? What aspects of your daily
life are public (at home, at work, elsewhere)? Private?
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