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Making the Rules
A Public Achievement Guidebook for Young People Who Intend to Make a Difference, continued

by Melissa Bass, in collaboration with Harry Boyte, Tim Sheldon, Walter Enloe, Jamie Martinez, Ginger Mitchell, Rachel Boyte-Evans, Project Public Life, and The Center for Democracy and Citizenship.

Manual Index

Introduction: How To Use This Workbook
Chapter One: The Framework
Chapter Two: Discovering Your Self-Interest
Chapter Three: Stepping into Public Life
Chapter Four: Encountering Diversity
Chapter Five: Building Power
Chapter Six: Taking Action
Resources

Contents

Chapter Two: Discovering Your Self-Interest
The Story: Looking for Self in a Foreign Land
The Lesson: Uncovering Your Identity

Public Skills: Telling Your Story
Public Skills: Using Self-Interest to Define a Problem

Exercises:
Time Line
Questions About Your Time Line
Storytelling From Your Time Line
A New Dictionary
History Mystery Tour

Chapter Two: Discovering Your Self-Interest

Discovering your self-interest means finding out what matters to you. This section introduces the skills of storytelling and exploring history to learn more about your values. It will also show you how to use your self-interest to define a problem that will get you involved in public life. See the glossary at the back of this book for definitions of words related to self-interest.

The Story: Looking for Self in a Foreign Land

For Cambodian young people who have fled the war in their country and have come to the U.S., it's hard enough to be a newcomer. It's hard enough to learn English. It's hard enough to have lived through the war. On top of it all, it's hard just to be a teenager, sometimes alone in a strange country.

"They suffer from depression and stress," explained Born Chea, who himself arrived in the United States in 1984 speaking no English.

Chea was separated from his family at age eight, so he knows what isolation is like. But Chea quickly absorbed American culture from his adoptive parents, and now he attends Inver Hills community College and works part time as a waiter.

In 1985, Chea and several other Cambodians attended a camp sponsored by the National Youth Leadership Council, where they learned about youth leadership and how young people can contribute to their communities.

Excited by the experience, they decided to pass on to their peers what they had learned. So they secured funding for their idea of a summer camp for Cambodian young people between 12 and 21 years old. They got the names of Cambodian young people in the Twin Cities area from Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services, which run shelters for refugees.

About 60 people attended in 1987. They learned in both English and in the Cambodian languages, how American and traditional Cambodian cultures compare, and how culture contributes to the broader community. Now the project has received further support from dozens of organizations and individuals, as well as the metro-area Southeast Asian community.

Young people who attended the camp have already begun to affect their community, Chea says, by reaching out to elderly Cambodians and by joining groups to preserve Khmer culture.

"We can't do everything, but we do as much as we can."

- Reprinted from Citizens' Guide to 1988,
The Commonwealth Project, 1988.

The Lesson: Uncovering Your Identity

Is this what you think of when you hear the word "self-interest"? Probably not. Most people think that self-interest is selfish and private—doing only what is good for you. However, it isn't self-less, either. That is where you do something only for others. What self-interest actually means is doing what is good for you and for others, at the same time.

In fact, the word "interest" comes from the Latin phrase meaning "to be among." Self-interest always has to do with what you're working for in a group of people. Making the distinction between self-interest and selfishness allows people to tie their specific interests to the needs of the larger community and to larger problems and issues. Citizen politics is built by each person working for what they believe in concert with others. But first, each person has to figure out what that is.

Do you know who you are? Some people imagine their identity to be like a suitcase. They believe that you are born empty and unconnected. And as you go from place to place on your way to adulthood, the suitcase gets filled with things. When the suitcase is full, you have become who you are—yourself.

What are the problems with this image of identity?

Identity as a suitcase has no roots, no ties. It can be filled with things that you buy or acquire. It can be easily misplaced, shed or discarded for a new one. But in fact, identity is not what you wear or buy. Things may be part of your life, but things do not make up identity. You cannot buy your "self."

Instead of viewing identity as a suitcase, what if you imagined identity as a tree? A tree is rooted deep in the soil. Your identity is rooted in your past, in the lives of your family, community, and culture. These roots—this personal story—give you the strength and nourishment to continually grow. As the trunk of a tree connects roots to branches, identity is connected to both your past and your future. Like the branches of a tree, you are always reaching out, growing, and connecting in public ways.

Knowing who you are will take a lifetime of discovery. Self-interest, like a tree, grows, changes, and is constantly transformed by the outside world. Discovering who you are and how you related to others can be exciting, joyful, painful, and difficult. We all have stories about ourselves that help to explain why we are who we are. Learning and telling your own story is a powerful way to understand what motivates you and what's most important to you. You enter public life based on what you care about—and learning your own story is a way to find out what you care about most.

As you'll see in Chapter Two: "Stepping into Public Life," by listening to other people's stories you encounter images, memories and experiences that can remind you about who you are. Some people may have stories that are similar to yours in some ways. When we hear stories that are different from ours, we learn about different pasts and different memories. They also suggest different futures.

But other stories can help you understand yourself, too. You partly know who you are by knowing who you're not—and in important ways, you can never be anybody but yourself. Learning who you are by learning to tell your unique story is the first step toward working in the public arena.

Wait a Minute!

Do you agree with what you just read?
Is there anything you didn't understand?
What does this mean for what you want to do?

Public Skill: Telling Your Story

Tips from Storytellers

You might not think of yourself as a storyteller. Maybe you think you don't have enough creativity or imagination, or you're too shy, or you lead an unexciting life. Unfortunately, movies and television sometimes reinforces these feelings by showing us people and stories that are polished and well rehearsed.

The fact is, we already tell stories in our daily conversations, and we each have an "audience" that we feel comfortable with: our closest friends, cousins, or younger brothers and sisters. And t.v. stories aren't half as important as ours. By storytelling, we mean describing scenes in our lives that can give others clues about who we are. The process of telling others about what we've done and what we know is important, because through it we came to understand ourselves.

Although we all can and do tell stories every day, there are some skills that can make our personal stories more meaningful to other people. Two people with these skills are Elaine Wynne and Larry Johnson, from the Key of See, an organization of professional storytellers and teachers of their trade. Here are some of their tips for telling stories in a group setting.

Find a story. Coming up with a "kernel"—an idea for a story—is the hardest part for people who feel that "nothing happens in my life." Often the beginnings of a story is just a fragment or situation you remember. Listen to the stories of others—sometimes this reminds you of a story you have. It helps if the group selects a particular topic to tell stories about. Here are a few ideas for story topics:

• the most frightening thing that ever happened to me
• the most unusual person I ever met
• my greatest learning experience
• the person I will never forgive
• my most memorable holiday
• a time when I was really angry
• my first memory
• the most influential person in my life

Fight Fear. Nervousness is good—it shows that what you're doing is important. But if you're too fearful to tell a story, your ego is probably telling you that you're "in danger" of imperfection. Concentrate on the story that wants to come out, not on yourself telling it. Remember that when you're drawing on your own life, there is no wrong answer, and there are no bad stories.

Try the "Glop Method." Make a series of round blobs on a sheet of paper. Inside each one, put a phrase or drawing to represent different parts of the story. These cues help you remember to include important pieces of the story without actually writing a script: written versions can trap you into one particular way of telling a story. Switch the blobs around or add more as you think of better ways to tell the story.

Picture Yourself in a Comfortable Place. Some people find it easier to think up and tell a story if they imagine themselves with friends in their kitchen at home, or sitting on your bed at night. If this takes away some of your shyness, do it!

Have People Listen. It's good for your story to have people listen to you tell it, not just once, but through a few versions. Listeners notice things that will help you communicate more with your story. "What happened to that other guy?" and "I don't get the part about the care accident" are comments that can help make your story better. (Besides, that's what a story is for!)

Listen To Others. You can learn a lot about what makes a story interesting by listening to other people tell theirs. The infinite variety of stories you hear should reassure you that nobody can judge your story, because it's one-of-a-kind.

It takes practice to tell your public story. The exercises at the end of the chapter will start you on your way!

Public Skill: Using Self-Interest to Define a Problem

- IHM/St. Luke's Public Achievement team member

Discovering and telling your story is a key to figuring out your self-interest, what is important to you. Once you know that, you can use it to get involved in public life. People get involved in public life because they see something important that they want to change. Depending on who you are, where you come from, and what you've experienced, you will see different problems or look at problems from a different perspective than people who are unlike you.

When you and your team decide to jump into public life, you will have to agree on a problem you want to work on. You'll need to take everyone's self-interest into account—that's not an easy thing to do. Here are some tips.

Tips for Defining Public Problems

Brainstorm: Have your team brainstorm a list of issues or problems you see in your school, community, or even the world. These should be things you and your teammates believe are important, and it's okay if they aren't the same things your coaches, teachers, or parents think are important. Then narrow this list to a few that most interest your team. Are there problems that everyone on your team believes are important? Remember to really listen to each other. See Chapter Three: "Encountering Diversity" for more on this.

Focus: Hone these ideas into a workable problem. Ask yourselves, "Why is this important to us? Where is this a problem? How does it affect us?" This can move your team from large-scale issues, like the environment, to a problem your team can tackle, like starting a recycling program at your school or even saving the wetlands in your county.

Tie your problem to a larger public issue: If you start with a workable, narrow problem, relate it to something bigger. This is key to understanding how your issue affects others. For instance, if your team decides that there should be after-school activities for kids at your school, tie that to a bigger issue, such as the lack of safe alternatives to hanging out in the streets, joining gangs, etc. You'll still work on solving your smaller problem, but you'll see how it fits into the big picture. Making this connection will help make your team's work political. You'll be more likely to develop strategies that tie the team to other people with different interests and power.

Know the difference between problems and solutions: Be sure you are defining a problem, not articulating a solution. For example, one Public Achievement team began by defining their problem as "getting a pop machine at school"—except that's not a problem, it's a solution. When they worked backward to define a problem, they decided that it was the horrible school milk. Once they did that, they could look at a wide variety of solutions—including getting better milk, getting juice, or getting pop. That gave them more power to negotiate and a better chance for success.

Make it public, not private: Make sure your problem is a public problem, not a private one. Does the problem affect only you, or does it affect others as well? Can you tie it to a larger public issue? Having a fight with your best friend is a private problem, while violence and lack of respect in your school would be a public problem. The two can be related, but they are still different. See Chapter Two: Stepping Into Public Life for more definitions of public and private.

Mission Building

Once your team has agreed on a problem you want to solve, you can create a mission statement. Writing a mission statement is useful for a number of reasons. First, they help you lay out your purpose. Does everyone really understand, and agree about, what your goals are? Building a mission statement will show you yet again how diverse interests can work together to solve a common problem. Second, a mission statement is an example of public accountability: A statement of what the team is all about can be shown to others to get their feedback, and can be used to gauge how far the team is progressing.

To form a mission statement, work with your team to:

• State clearly what problem you want to solve.
• State clearly why you are interested in the problem. Why do you care?
• State clearly where the problem happens and how it fits into a larger public concern.
• State clearly what you want to accomplish. How will that help solve the problem?
• State clearly how you plan to solve the problem. What are you going to do?

You might want to write your mission statement on a big piece of poster board and set it out each time your team meets. It'll help keep you on track!

Mission statement example

The situation: A Public Achievement team at Hypothetical Jr. High was concerned about the large amount of trash they saw being collected from their school everyday. They believed that no effort was being made to recycle.

Resulting mission statement: "We, the Public Achievement team of Hypothetical Jr. High, will no longer stand by as our school ignores the pollution we cause in our community and the world. As a first goal to reduce our negative environmental impact, we will work with the administration, staff, and students to develop a recycling program in our school."

Citizen politics is about taking action on public problems, and before you can act on a problem you have to know what you want to act on. Mission statements put your problem, and plan, into writing to help guide your work. Take some time with your team to figure these things out. It'll be worth it!

I've learned how to solve problems step by step, by making charts, brainstorming, and just writing all of your ideas down on a piece of paper.

- Phala Hoeun, 6th grade Public Achievement team member
Washington Technology Magnet School

Exercises

Time Line
Questions About Your Time Line
Storytelling From Your Time Line
A New Dictionary
History Mystery Tour

Time Line

This exercise asks you: To see whether and how your personal history has affected what you believe. What you know about your private life that will help you understand what you understand what you do in public life. Use your neighbors and family to discover other things about your life.

It relates to citizen politics because: We carry our private lives into public in the form of self-interest. We must understand our self-interest before we can act on it.

Instructions: Mark important events in your life on a "time line." Start anywhere you want to and use your own rules to decide what kinds of things to include. Time limit: 30 minutes.

When you have time, find out more about your identity by asking your parents, grandparents and long-time neighbors and friends for details about your past. What questions will you ask them? How have their lives influenced yours? Bring your time line and get them to help you fill in the blanks.

Tips for coaches/group facilitators:

If you are working with a team of younger kids, you may want to show them an example, then have them complete their own time line at home with the help of an adult.

Questions About Your Time Line

This exercise asks you: To draw from and use your "Time Line" as you create your own story.

It relates to citizen politics because: Taking time out to look at the value of what we do is how we learn from our experiences. Also, listening to how others respond differently to the same question shows us how important it is to identify our own beliefs.

Instructions:

Individuals: Look back at your time line from the previous page and write down answers to the questions below. Time limit: 10 minutes.

As a group: Discuss your answers. Time limit: 15 minutes.

How does knowing your family's history help you know yourself?

Do you have brothers and sisters who showed up on the time line? Where do you fall in your family (oldest, youngest girl, etc.)? Do you think that made a difference in whether you showed your brothers and sisters?

Did you go back 10 years? 5 months? 2 weeks? How would your time line change depending on how much time it covered?

Is your time line empty or full? Explain why. Are there spaces you want filled in?

Is there a place on the time line when private events cross into public experience?

Was doing the timeline useful? Did it show you anything new?

Storytelling From Your Time Line

It relates to citizen politics because: Describing our self-interest to others helps us define it better to ourselves. Storytelling is a path of communication that allows us to understand one another's points of view.

Instructions:

Individuals: Choose an important event from your time line. Choose one that taught you something about yourself. Refer back to the page, "Telling Yours: Tips from Storytellers."

Using the "glop method" make a series of drawings or phrases that would help you talk about this important event. The event can be funny, sad, embarrassing, or something you're proud of. In addition to remembering how the event happened, try to think how the event shaped the point of view you have today. Time limit: 10 minutes.

As a group: Tell your story to the group. Time limit: 10 minutes per person.

Tips for Coaches/Group Facilitators:

• Sit down as a group.
• Make sure that everybody understands that it's okay to "pass" and not tell a story.
• Set a 10-minute limit on stories. Short stories are fine. If they're very short, encourage the short-story-tellers to tell two.
• Consider using a "talking staff," an object that gets passed around and allows only the person holding it to talk.

A New Dictionary

It relates to citizen politics because: Like politics, language belongs to those who use it—not just the "experts." Most dictionaries try to give words meanings that everyone can accept, without any personal interpretations. This is an exercise in putting self-interest back into the words we use.

Instructions:

Individually or in pairs: Without looking at a dictionary, define the words listed below. Also, think about how these words relate to your team's work. Time limit: 15 minutes.

As a group: Discuss your definitions. Time limit: 25 minutes.

Words:

Anger * Citizenship * Conflict * Democracy * Imagination * Listening * Negotiation * Maturity * Politics * Problem * Public * Private * Racism * Self-Interest * Sexism * Judgment

Are there other words you think need new definitions?

Some of these words are defined by Project Public Life—see Resource B.

History Mystery Tour

This exercise asks you: To develop awareness and respect for the details that made and make a community what it is.

It relates to citizen politics because: Pride and interest in their community are what cause many people to enter public life. If people feel like they know and belong to their community, they are more likely to work for it. Identity is often closely tied to one's communities.

Instructions:

Group activity: Visit a cemetery—the older, the better. Notice what is says about the surrounding community. How old is the oldest gravestone? When did diseases sweep through? How big were families? What languages are the family names from? Which families have the fanciest gravestones? If the cemetery you find is run down, consider "adopting" it by making regular visits to care for the grounds and un-do any vandalism. Find out where your relatives are buried.

Or: Visit a local monument.
Or: Visit a home for the elderly and ask residents about their community memories and experiences.
Or: Visit the local library or historical society and find photos of what your community looked like 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 20 years ago, etc. 100 years ago, what was on the land where your school is now?

Time limit: 1 hour.

Group discussion: Discuss the following questions. Time limit: 25 minutes.

What happened during your visit? Did anything surprise you?

What did you like about the visit? What would you have done differently?

What did you learn about your community? Did it seem worthwhile? Why or why not?

What's important to people about "ancestors" and knowing about the past?

What causes people to have a respect for the past? Do you think it's rare or common in U.S. society for people to respect the past?

What are other ways to find out about a community's identity?

Wrap Up: Looking Back On Your Work

Individually or as a group, answer these questions on Chapter Two: "Discovering Your Self-Interest." Go ahead and send us a copy!

1. What did you learn?

2. What did you like about this section? What didn't you like?

3. What was useful about the section? What wasn't?

4. Were there other things about self-interest that you discovered that weren't covered in this book?

5. What did you learn that you could use in solving problems/tackling your team's project?

6. What recommendations or ideas do you have to improve this section?

Manual Index

Introduction: How To Use This Workbook
Chapter One: The Framework
Chapter Two: Discovering Your Self-Interest
Chapter Three: Stepping into Public Life
Chapter Four: Encountering Diversity
Chapter Five: Building Power
Chapter Six: Taking Action
Resources