Reinventing Citizenship: The Practice of Public Work

A Conceptual Approach to Civic Education

To realign institutions, groups, and less formal networks with democratic principles and to more effectively solve problems and address common tasks, leaders have to go beyond the identity of client or expert to claim the identity of citizen. Citizenship becomes relevant through practical civic education.

Public work has proven to be a powerful framework for reinventing such active citizenship. Public work develops our capacity by teaching public skills and political concepts based on practice and experience. It draws upon the power of broadly held concepts and values tied to serious governance. A conceptual approach, public work is flexible and dynamic. It provides a map, not a blueprint, for achieving these goals.

Techniques, quick fixes, narrow expertise, and crisis management dominate our society. Few people have time to think deeply about what they do. Some even believe thinking wastes time or is a luxury. Concepts are the purview of live white men in ivory towers, or other experts. They seem bloodless, abstract, not applicable to real life. In many ways, the service society has done to concepts what it has done to public life: made them narrow, fragmented, ineffective.

But concepts also are the foundation for imagination, flexibility, transformation, and engagement with the world. The ability to generalize or conceptualize from particular experience gives all people, not just an educated elite, the power to link their specific work to broader categories, issues, and goals and to conceive of a serious role for themselves and others within that larger world. Without this ability, we are stuck in our immediate experience and knowledge. Furthermore, in an information age, civic renewal depends upon changing the patterns in which ideas are generated, engaged, and transmitted. Thus, conceptual and reflective thinking is not a luxury but fundamental to creative lives and effective public work.

That is why conceptual approaches to political work have been very effective. At Project Public Life, we have used the lessons of two particular experiences — the Citizenship Schools of the civil rights movement and community organizing as practiced and developed by Saul Alinsky and his Industrial Areas Foundation — in our own work. They further illustrate the power of a conceptual approach.

The Idea of Citizenship: The Citizenship Schools

Dorothy Cotton, the former co-director of Citizenship Schools for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the civil rights movement, tells powerful stories of the transformation evident in this program, catalyzed by ideas.

Wrestling with questions such as What is a citizen? participants in the civil rights movement moved from seeing themselves as powerless victims to claiming their right to be first-class citizens. As they would discuss and debate what a citizen is, someone would remember that there is a major law relating to citizenship. As Cotton explains, "I'd jump at this opportunity to introduce or pull from the group some sense of the Constitution of the United States. What is this constitution? The supreme law of the land we'd eventually come to. It has amendments. What's that? Here we'd get into the fourteenth amendment as establishing our citizenship rights; the first as the right to petition the government for redress, and on and on until, as one woman said, 'The cobwebs come just a-moving from my brain.'"

The "cobwebs" in this woman's brain were removed by the powerful idea of citizenship, tied directly to her own interests and experiences. She and other participants discovered in such sessions a middle ground between government and private life in which ordinary people could claim the right to be involved in addressing the problems of their lives and communities. They redefined themselves and their role in the public world. They discovered that democracy is not something that is, but something you do.

Concepts Map Out the Public World: The IAF

Community organizing has acted upon Saul Alinsky's insights linking people's communal base to the daily practice of power and to the role of ideas in people's development. Alinsky's organizing theory encouraged people to conceptualize or use ideas that map out the world in order to create strategies that consider their interests, cultural identities, and values in the context of the larger world.

Much activism today, though, is tied to narrow, technique-based methods that demand or offer little in the way of critical and flexible thinking. Canvassing and direct mail are striking examples. Conventional organizing training emphasizes useful but limited techniques such as how to chair meetings, do a leaflet, or organize a hearing.

Alternatively, groups which use a conceptual approach have most significantly impacted local politics and successfully taught public leadership skills and identities. For example, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) — founded by Alinksy and now a network of more than 40 large, low-income community organizations across the country — teaches a repertoire of concepts that are useful in helping people map out and negotiate their political and social environments. These include the idea of a public world different from private life, and dynamic, relational understandings of power and self-interest. Learning to apply such concepts in the process of problem solving and policy formation creates unique experiences for ordinary people, often relatively uneducated in a formal sense, to develop skills and confidence in critical, conceptual thinking and action.

Public-spirited, concept-centered training experiences like those in the Citizenship Schools and community organizing are potentially as powerful today for addressing our widespread political disengagement and strengthening our civic skills.

Concepts of Public Work

Several concepts are important parts of the public work framework. We've talked about citizenship, understood as many-sided public contribution, and politics, understood as a part of our everyday public work. We also stress the concept of public work as action and space as well as a dimension of individual and communal life, diversity understood in the context of problem solving, and power and self-interest as dynamic and manysided.

Public

The conceptual framework of citizen politics is deeply grounded in the concept of public. Concepts of self-interest, diversity, and power come out of an understanding of public life as a space in which we act on diverse self-interests to solve common problems and address common tasks using our collective power.

The Public in Action

In American history, the idea of the public as an actor referred to the citizenry as a whole, not just the government. Three traditions of public action stand out: the deliberative public, the problem-solving public, and the insurgent public.

In 1776 in a letter to his wife, Abigail, John Adams expressed confidence that the citizenry of the newly emerging nation would be able to act wisely on the great challenges before them. "Time has been given for the whole People, maturely to consider the great Question of Independence and to ripen their Judgments, dissipate their Fears, and allure their Hopes, by discussing it in News Papers and Pamphlets, by debating it, in Assemblies, Conventions, Committees of Safety and Inspection, in Town and Country Meetings, as well as in private Conversations."

Adams's view captured one basic meaning of public — the concept of the body of people created through a process of discussion, debate, and dialogue about current affairs. Such a sense of public took shape through the press, libraries, clubs, education groups, coffee houses, electoral debates, and other associations that created awareness of a larger thinking world beyond family, friends, and narrow interests. American educational and media institutions have their roots in this understanding of the public as deliberator about political issues of the day. Similarly, public libraries were created through citizen efforts, and justified as arsenals of democracy.

Problem Solving

The public was, secondly, a direct actor in problem solving. This understanding of public was reflected in direct democracy, like the New England town meeting, which combined deliberation and action on public affairs. More informally, it appeared in our rich traditions of voluntary efforts born in the nineteenth century.

Immigrants from every corner of the world brought with them strong practices of community action. In English history, for example, problem solving by villagers about access to and maintenance of common lands, footpaths, foodlands, and fishing areas, as well as common buildings like the village church, gave to middle level peasantry a constant, daily schooling in democracy. Such traditions flourished in a vast array of American voluntary activities: religious congregations that combined worship with community effort, barn raisings, quilting bees, immigrant mutual aid societies, and voluntary fire departments. They also generated organizations like the National Council of Negro Women, 4-H, the Red Cross, the YMCA, the YWCA, and Rotary. Americans looked to their own initiative, rather than large governmental or business organizations, to address public problems. Indeed, most programs later run by government were first designed and developed in community associations.

Struggle for Reform

Beyond deliberation and problem solving, a civic-minded, reform-oriented citizenry has combined struggles for power and reform with the assumption of responsibility for public affairs. In the most dramatic instances, such groups were the seedbeds for large social movements which advocated expanding the citizenry itself by including groups that were left out of formal definitions. Thus, abolition, women's suffrage, the Farmers Alliances and Knights of Labor during the nineteenth century, and the civil rights movement of the twentieth, all sought to make political society more inclusive.

The Public World

The public world is an arena of creative public work, of discovery, of power, of freedom. It connects one's own individual life in a particular environment with larger settings and goals. The public world is open and fluid. Beyond the world of family and close friends, it is characterized by diversity of outlook, interest, and perspective. Our relationships and actions in the public world are more strategic and guarded. The public world is a place for debate, developing public judgment, wrestling with other points of view, as we work together to solve common problems. Ambiguity is inevitable in the public world, and people can and will change their minds, interests, and perspectives. Public is a pragmatic concept, recognizing the complexities of public life, and it is also guided by democratic values. Public work puts public back into environments and behaviors; in public environments, citizens can claim authority, take ownership around public processes and create their world with others.

Building on these traditions, our concept of the public world reclaims the middle ground where diverse citizens work with each other to solve public problems and create a common public world. It recognizes that every person has public, as well as private, dimensions. Those public dimensions include the capacity to participate effectively in the public world, and the human need to participate in the shaping of that world. Public life grows out of, and is connected to, private and community life. But it is helpful to distinguish between these dimensions of social life.

In private life, we look for belonging, trust, nurturance, and intimacy. In public, principles such as recognition, strategic thought and action, negotiation, and accountability are essential bases for action. Today, the lines between public and private life have become blurred. Public encounters have become radically personalized and intimate. In schools and other public settings we stress personal development, self-esteem, expression of feelings, and learning how to care about others, especially on an individual basis. Although these things are important, an excessively personal language disarms people when dealing with diverse, difficult public settings where others may or may not care about you in personal terms. And while working with others can often create strong ties and new relationships, the purpose in public settings is not self-expression, nurturance, or getting support but rather accomplishing significant public work around tough problems.

Community comes from the Latin word communitas, meaning common, or unity, and suggests strong commonality and face-to-face, enduring relationships. Communities, like private relationships, are important settings where people learn trust, belonging, a sense of dependability, and basic aspects of one's identity. Communities, if they are strong and vital, develop their own rituals, customs, and memories that help structure daily life.

To romanticize community or to collapse it into public life leads people to expect this kind of commonality in the public world. But the public world includes people from many different communities. Thus in public life we are linked not necessarily by common values, histories, cultures, or interests, but rather by common problems and opportunities.

Slighting the public dimensions of community or the need to work with other communities narrows our capacity for creative action. Community members have less opportunity to develop political skills like bargaining, listening, and the demanding, challenging practices of accountability that are essential for taking on many difficult issues. Most of the problems we face today have origins or impacts beyond any one community. By not developing political skills and not seeing the linkages between the community and the larger world, the community is unable to effectively address those problems.

Diversity

In the context of public work, diversity — including different skills, knowledge, and interests as well as ethnic, racial, religious or class backgrounds — is neither simply celebrated nor denigrated. These diversities are used as sources of knowledge and resources for solving problems.

Public problems, often a product of multiple, interrelated forces, are too big for any one perspective or power base to effectively solve. Problem-solving initiatives need to create environments that seek diverse interests and engage those interests in ongoing work if effective, multidimensional strategies are to be generated and implemented. Conflict and debate are inherent in such situations and, moreover, are useful tools in defining problems, identifying resources and strategically directing actions toward solutions. The concept of diversity is important, then, not just for recognizing and understanding difference. It is a way to create stakeholding and effective solutions around public problems.

Self-interest

The concept of self-interest grows out of the diversity and fluidity of public life. Self-interest is what brings people to the public world. Self-interest is one's motivations, background, hopes — it's what matters to someone. Self-interest locates individuals within their histories, families, beliefs, and practices. The word interest comes from the Latin roots inter esse, meaning to be among or between others. Self-interest is who you are in relationship to others. In a particular problem-solving context, it is your connection to the problem and your reason for working with diverse others to solve it. As you work with others and on a range of problems, your interests and concerns can broaden and take on more dimensions.

The concept of everyone having an interest sounds simple, but it's difficult to practice because it means coming to recognize that others don't have your self-interest as their first concern, that their self-interest is probably different from yours, and that their and your self-interests will change over time.

Self-interest is a critical concept in changing the expert-client relationship. The language of expertise reflects the idea that experts who come in from the outside are objective, disinterested, and neutral. They supposedly have no personal stake in what they're doing. Experts are only here to help put themselves outside the interactive give-and-take of public work. Identifying the fact that everyone has interests begins to alter this narrow relationship.

Understanding diverse self-interests can open up the world, as we discover that many situations are dynamic, fluid, and full of potential for change and creative action. For example, Project Public Life has worked with the Division of Epidemiology at the University of Minnesota on a project around teen alcohol use, called Communities Mobilizing for Change on Alcohol. As the organizers from different communities in Minnesota and Wisconsin have applied the concept of self-interest through one-on-one interviews with members of their communities, their stereotypes and sense of the areas were transformed. People they interviewed had far more complexity, creativity, and imagination than the organizers had ever considered.

Power

The final key concept is power, understood as dynamic, interactive, and relational. Like self-interest or politics, people's first associations with "power" tend to be static and narrow. People tend to think of power as something a few people have and most (including themselves) don't. People feel victimized and abused because they feel they don't have power, and this tends to lead to righteous indignation — but not necessarily to effective action or creative roles. In fact, it often feeds into the expert-client pattern of relationships dominant in the ways we do work today.

Yet power is a far more dynamic and complex concept. It comes from the Latin word poder, meaning "to be able." Literally, power is the capacity to act.

For public power, such capacity has to be well-organized and directed in a thoughtful, strategic fashion. The more diverse resources that can be brought to bear on a problem — can be organized — the greater the chance for rich, effective solutions.

If one learns to think carefully and strategically about the relationships one needs to build power, as well as the interactive nature of power, the world begins to look far different. For instance, we find in our work with teenagers that when young people learn that schools are not simply run by dictatorial individuals, but involve an interplay of complex relationships, their sense of possibility changes notably. For the first time they realize, as one young woman put it, "there are many ways to do things," and that they have, or can tap into, the power needed to act effectively.

Power doesn't just come from control over capital or financial resources. It comes from a variety of sources. Moral appeal can be a mighty source of power; think of the power of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech in the civil rights movement. Power can come from the communal authority accorded someone or something through the living traditions, habits, rituals, and practices that people believe in and participate in. Power can also come from information and expertise: the American Medical Association, for example, is an organized form of power on a massive scale, based on knowledge.

Knowledge power takes many forms. As we've described elsewhere, institutions based on information often have power structures that are hierarchical and bureaucratic, based on the model of organization around scarce resources. But knowledge, unlike a scarce resource, is not used up when it is shared; rather, its power often increases. It lends itself to democratic access and can be used to create. Knowledge reframes problems and situations, so that all kinds of resources — people, capital, expertise — can be directed strategically toward a common goal. Learning to pool and develop in public spaces the knowledge-power that comes from diverse points of view and diverse interests is the way that publics (or communities) move from narrow, polarized opinions to public judgment, or common sense.

In this chapter we introduced the concepts of public, power, diversity, and self-interest, the building blocks of citizen politics. Because public work is a conceptual approach, it is adaptable to many different environments and situations. Next we look at civic organizing — some strategies, based on these concepts, for reclaiming our roles and institutions for public work.

The Citizenship School program grew out of the work of Esau Jenkins and Septima Clark on the islands off South Carolina. Their goal was to teach blacks, often illiterate, to read and write in order to pass arduous literacy tests that authorities used to disenfranchise poorer citizens of both races. It was adopted by the Highlander Folk School, a training center for organizers and activists, and later by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) as the civil rights movement expanded.

From its beginnings the strategy of Citizenship Schools stressed the importance of connecting voting and literacy to a dynamic conception of citizenship itself. To that end, organizers of the schools avoided normal academic approaches and treated "students" as adults who could come and go as they pleased, bring sewing to classes, or chew tobacco. They used as their basic primers documents like the Constitution of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, and Biblical scripture.

SCLC developed a training program for local "teachers" at Dorchester, Georgia, where the curriculum included much more than the mechanics of registering and voting. Students learned how to conduct voter registration campaigns, combat illiteracy, win government benefits for the poor, and talk about the meaning of American citizenship in ways that would inspire ordinary citizens. As Dorothy Cotton put it, they taught "a whole new way of life and functioning." Civil rights activists saw the movement as designed, in Martin Luther King's words, "to make real the promise of democracy." By democracy, moreover, they meant not simply formal rights but active citizenship. "The more important participation was to be not just at the moment when the ballot was cast but in all the moments that led up to that moment."

In the sixteenth year of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides recounted, Athens sent an armada of thirty-eight ships and several thousand warriors to the island of Melos, in the Aegean Sea. Unlike most of the islands, Melos had allied with Athens's chief enemy, Sparta, because, said Thucydides, ancient though distant ancestral ties existed between the two. The Athenians had a simple demand: the Melians must switch sides.

As the Greek historian depicted the encounter which took place in the fifth century B.C., the Athenians were unswerving. From the beginning, they spoke a language of power. "We on our side will use no fine phrases," said their envoys. "We recommend that you should try to get what it is possible for you to get, taking into consideration what we both really do think; since you know as well as we do that, when these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept."

Thucydides's vivid account sets up an encounter between abstract ideals and power politics that resonates across time and space. The Melians repeatedly argued on the basis of their hopes, appealing to the Athenians' own ideals: a long-range understanding of Athenian concerns for honor and stability in its empire; the possibility of last-minute help from Sparta or from the gods; the integrity of their 700-year history.

The Athenians referred to the concrete realities of the situation: "Do not be like those who, as so commonly happens, miss the chance of saving themselves in a human and practical way." Not eager to destroy or even humiliate the Melians, they suggested that their rule of power politics was to "stand up to one's equals, to behave with deference toward one's superiors, and to treat one's inferiors with moderation." They proposed that alliance with their cause need not mean abject surrender: "There is nothing disgraceful in giving way to the greatest city in Hellas when she is offering you such reasonable terms—alliance on a tribute-paying basis and liberty to enjoy your own property." But they were immovable in their demands. The Melians were "true to their ideals"—and blind to other realities. The Athenians laid siege. The Melians resisted for a time. Then, recounted Thucydides, "the Melians surrendered unconditionally to the Athenians, who put to death all the men of military age whom they took, and sold the women and children as slaves. Melos they took for themselves, sending out later a colony of five hundred men."

Saul Alinsky, dean of the American community organizing tradition, used this account by Thucydides as a basic training document. The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), which he and his associates formalized out of a loose network of groups in 1969, developed from the story a drama to begin every training institute for organizers.

Their use of Thucydides was a dramatic device to have students (who came from many settings—civil rights, religious activism, student involvement, and other causes) refocus from what Alinsky called "the world-as-we-would-like-it-to-be" to the "world-as-it-is." Alinsky-style organizers drew from Thucydides's story the lesson that the Melians' "all or nothing" approach failed to understand the process of conflict, power, self-change, self-interest, and negotiation that always is the medium for the expression of ideals in politics. At the end of the 1960s, the IAF was speaking about the interactive nature of power in a way that had been largely forgotten in a protest politics that counterposed "power elite" to "power to the people," with little understanding of the dynamic interaction.Today the IAF is a network of leaders organizing around the nation, working with diverse populations to rebuild communities from New York to Los Angeles.