Reinventing Citizenship: The Practice of Public Work

In this chapter:

• Reclaiming institutions and associations as places for public work is a key strategy in addressing the larger problem of a narrow and fragmented public life. This is an organizing problem.
  
  
• Civic organizing, or citizen politics, is an organizing framework that integrates citizenship into everyday environments for the purpose of developing leadership and the broad base necessary to govern in a democratic society. Civic organizing has three components: civic training, developing public leadership, and organizing.
  
  

This chapter provides a map, not a blueprint, of some of the strategies, processes, and practices useful in civic organizing.

*Peg Michels and Tony Massengale made particularly helpful contributions to this approach.

The Challenge

Learning new concepts abstractly will not alter our practice of citizenship. To become effective public actors we have to develop the arts and skills of public life through our public work. To reclaim public work for citizens requires restructuring the settings and mediating institutions in which that work is done, making more public their behaviors, practices, and policies. This chapter looks at civic organizing and some particular strategies we can use to reinvent citizenship for ourselves and our everday environments.

Information packaged as services dominates the national imagination around public problem solving. Yet it determines narrow roles for citizens who are outside service systems, and limits the capacity of those within (professionals or experts) to identify and provide useful leadership in tackling the large problems we face. This has created an enormous crisis, especially if, as we believe, a democratic society depends upon an engaged, capable citizenry.

The crisis is commonly perceived as the failure to address social and economic problems effectively — from the federal government to communities. In the debate over what to do about it, citizens see themselves outside of the institutions that impact their daily lives. (Recall the taxpayer's lament in Chapter 2.) Even as members of work places, schools, churches, or professions, people increasingly place themselves outside the system of governance. Rather than taking on serious roles in the restructuring of our environments, we have separated ourselves from the power bases, those very settings needed to govern as serious participants.

Consequently, organizations support narrow strategies like down-sizing as the main way to restructure. Such strategies do not solve the larger problem of ineffectiveness. This situation provides an organizing opportunity to engage leaders, tied to organizations and groups yet aware of the narrowness of meaning and ineffectiveness of expertise, in the work of civic renewal.

A Question of Organizing

Restructuring the very fabric of our social and institutional life from the business sector to health, education, government, and community, is an organizing problem:

• What is our plan of action?
• How do we garner the resources and motivation to accomplish it?
• What capacities need to be developed, and which practices need to be changed?
• For what purpose(s) are we doing this?
• What are realistic goals and expectations to have?

Thus it is imperative that we understand the work of organizing in a modern information society. This will require learning the lessons from organizing traditions and applying those lessons to information-based systems. In a complex, information-rich society, questions of power and the need to develop capacity go well beyond the formula of the people versus a corporate elite. They also involve more than advocacy groups pressuring on narrow issues.

To organize means to develop. Its root word, organ, means "a tool or instrument" and in some definitions is directly linked to the concept of numbers and practice ("many at work"). The great contribution of organizing has been to unabashedly link the aspirations and practical work of "the people" to power. This linkage has allowed ordinary people to aspire to and claim serious roles in democratic governance without romanticizing the nature of that work. To do this in a world where power is tangible, yet unequally experienced, requires people to be prepared conceptually for the messy public world, and to develop their public capacities and skills to act with effect in that world. Organizing, then, is a practical concept tied to the work of developing people's capacity to structure and influence a broader world.

Organizing practice this century has given us important lessons to build on. Lessons we draw from organizing practice since World War II include:

Organizing needs to link people's lives, identities, and aspirations to commonly held public values such as citizenship. These values or concepts need to have a history, language, and institutional context that is or can be broadly shared and owned by diverse peoples.

The development of people's practical capacity to influence (to practice power) is central to the purpose of organizing. Power is not an abstraction but is embodied in people's ability to build and influence diverse and practical relationships.

Serious organizing recognizes the need to teach practical concepts that develop people's capacity and confidence to map out, analyze, and act within the various environments connected to their daily lives.

Leadership is developed within and across the groups and institutions that shape people' identities and value systems. Leaders need to own the work done within those institutions and link that work to a larger public world.

However, power based on knowledge has different dynamics from power based on scarce resources. The organizing model for today thus needs to reflect those differences, going beyond confrontation as the principal tool. The vehicle for gaining authority and civic capacity today is the public work of the institution as it engages with constituencies, in relationship to other citizens and broader public goals stretching across institutional and group boundaries. Professionals have to expand their identities in order to create a political link with the broader citizenry. Together, through organized efforts and the incentive of internal and external pressure, citizens inside different groups and outside the particular institution can restructure them to more effectively function.

A crucial distinction between civic organizing and traditional organizing is the placing of professionals within this birthright of the people. At a time when many people position themselves economically and socially through information and call themselves professional, it is crucial that they not be defined simply as the problem but that they rather are brought inside the work of organizing. The development and training of professionals as public actors, beyond the narrow category of expertise, is central to the work not only to create greater meaning in their lives but for the greater public purpose of rebuilding the institutional fabric of a democratic society. What would such an organizing framework look like in practice? Let's look at health care.

The role of health care professionals would be redefined around a broader and more meaningful definition of work that would recognize that professionals have a responsibility and stake in creating and maintaining groups and institutions that reflect and meet the expectations of the greater public. Nurse's aides, for example, would still be educated to perform therapeutic duties, but in this larger context. So they would also learn the public skills of governance and would be expected to be strategic around the larger social and political questions of health care: they would be educated as citizen professionals and everyday philosophers. (Recall the story in Chapter 3 about the health care class guided by larger public values.)

The questions of restructuring health care settings would not simply be answered by traditional policy makers. They would also be engaged by members of those groups, related professions, and the larger public.

Health care clients and consumers would be expected to play serious roles with health professionals in work around health-related problems, through associations or community-based organizations. This includes designing strategies that address the interrelated nature of health, accepting roles in those strategies, and being accountable for effective solutions. It would also require that communal groups (churches, associations, community-based organizations, for example) be restructured to provide the experience and learning needed for citizens to take on this larger civic role.

The same assumptions of expanded roles and functions around problem solving can be applied to diverse institutional settings, from community organizations and churches to professional associations and large-scale systems, to address the need for more effective organization of resources and problem solving.

Civic Organizing

The civic organizing model for public action and problem solving is based on the concepts of public work. What follows is an outline, not a definitive step-by-step guide, to the principles and practice of taking action to reclaim citizenship and public work in our mediating institutions.

Citizen politics is not like a program that can be added on to existing work without effect. It is an organizing framework. Citizen politics is a means to help reinvent democratic practices of citizenship and politics to more effectively govern and solve public problems. This requires changing how we do work.

Such change requires flexibility and time. Strategies will change in mid-stream. New leaders will emerge and old ones will fade. The environment you work in might be more engaged by the concept of public than the concept of citizenship. People — including you — will need time and space to practice public arts and develop strategic judgment. And changing any group requires time — even years — to develop leadership, educate, organize, and finally maintain the new practices. But along the way you will see a new language emerge, practices change, resources shift to support new approaches. It is hard, challenging work, but results in more effective work based on democratic values and creative, active citizenship.

Civic organizing includes multiple functions, which can't always be found in one person. It requires developing a leadership base that can carry out those functions and tap diverse resources: educators, organizers, people with access to different arenas, knowledge, and people. No one person can do it all, and each leaders' skills and resources will vary. We outline below three Key Areas of Civic Organizing:

civic training developing public leadership organizing

Civic organizing brings leaders into working relationships around a commonly held problem or task or opportunity. Civic organizing is an ongoing process guided by these three general goals, each having more or less emphasis as the work progresses. Consider the following example:

Civic Training

Civic organizing recognizes the need to teach everyday political or civic concepts that develop and sustain people's public capacity and confidence. Civic training is practical conceptual education explicitly aimed at taking action. It takes place formally and informally in settings specifically designated for such teaching as well as through example and practice.

Every person has the capacity to think and act effectively. That capacity is developed and expanded through education and practice. Civic training draws upon an individual's experience and knowledge, and links it to the practice of problem solving, in order to develop that capacity. Like the Citizenship Schools and the most successful community organizing, civic training teaches concepts and skills that help map out the political nature of all environments so that people can experience agency or develop capacity within them.

Teaching civic concepts formally and informally can affect the whole institution. Introduce them at conferences, in-service training, or other programs. In public spaces created for debate and discussion, you can practice and model democratic citizenship. Demonstrate these concepts through your work. Shape the institutional practices and programs you have control over around these concepts: meetings, performance reviews, the way you go about your work and deal with others inside and outside the institution. Pay particular attention to shaping staff development programs, a crucial source of leadership and institutional development.

All settings teach, through their practices if not through formal training. Civic training asks us to be conscious of those concepts, and to strategically shape learning environments and practices around civic concepts. Below are some questions to think about as you plan and do civic training.

What conceptions of public life are taught by the culture of your environment? By you? For example, are people encouraged to participate? Do they? How is power organized and is it acknowledged? Are your relationships more public or more private?

What types of in-service, continuing education, staff development or other educational processes exist in your institutional environment? How would you describe the nature of the learning in those settings, for example, conceptual, technical, quick fix? (see Knowledge chart in Chapter 2)

How can you strategically incorporate more conceptual, democratic, civic education into your work setting? Into formal training sessions?

Developing Public Leadership

Civic organizing, like serious community organizing, sees problem solving as the way to develop public leadership. The value of mentoring or developing people's public spirit and capacity is founded on a fierce commitment to people's right to be serious creators in the world. It is only through public creation and usefulness that we reach our full human potential. But for that capacity to be fully realized we need to be challenged and taught throughout our whole lifetime to claim public positions in the world as it is with all its imperfections and inequities. Taking on problems that directly affect you becomes the vehicle for developing that capacity and authorship. In this way, developing public leadership is strongly tied to civic training.

Civic organizing needs a leadership base that can carry out multiple functions: for example, educating, strategic thinking, recruiting other leadership, translating civic concepts into the language and practice of the institution, seeing the big picture, and getting the little things done.

In recruiting and developing leadership, and in carrying out your work, keep in mind two things.

1. In the strategic work of reclaiming environments, it is important to involve positional leadership—those within the hierarchical system who control resources, or direct your work, or have influence throughout the group or institution. Acknowledging their self-interest in the work protects the work; establishing such relationships may also directly affect how the organization runs, as the individual develops a stake in the work and the larger mission of developing public capacities and reclaiming the group for public work. The kind of relationship you develop with positional leaders will depend on their skills and interests, especially their interest in the problem and their interest in the larger mission.
   
   
2. It is also important to create relationships that cross internal and external boundaries: to work across departments or disciplines, and to engage leaders linked to, but outside, the group (e.g., clients, volunteers, funders, people in related professions or institutions). This builds strong support for the work, develops a broad leadership base, and provides a larger stage for civic training and actually changing practices.

Key political concepts that can be taught in the development of public leadership include: figuring out "diverse interests," realizing that not all interests are shared but can still be engaged around common problems, accepting the need to work with people without liking them or personalizing the situation, analyzing the power relations surrounding any endeavor, learning to be strategic in everyday work.

Use public spaces to learn and practice these concepts and skills. Public spaces might include meetings within your institution or with the leaders you are working with, conferences, one-on-one interviews, informal and formal spaces in which you do your work. Learning to draw the greatest insight from experience takes time. Experience enriches intellectual capacity and, in turn, conceptual categories more effectively direct the work. Time and space to think, reflect, and evaluate is the foundation of democratic governance and effective public work, and is absolutely necessary for developing leadership and acting strategically.

The key to successfully developing leadership is the practice of public relationships. Important principles of public relationships include keeping focused on the problem, being accountable, and evaluating your work together.

Developing Public Relationships

Public relationships develop capacities for leadership of all involved. They make the messy, contentious work of public problem solving more effective and meaningful.

• The public work to be accomplished is the reason for the relationship and is the larger goal to keep in mind as the work gets tough.
  
  
• Pay attention to self-interests: yours and the leader's. They will develop and change over time.
  
  
• Take time for conceptual development. Link civic concepts to prac tice. Wrestle together with the different meanings words have when they come out of a civic culture versus the particular institution's culture.
  
  
• Be accountable. If they cannot count on you, they will not be account able to the work either. Accountability is the foundation for building the trust required to do the hard work of problem solving.
  
  
• Develop a public relationship. Have clear boundaries. Respect their work and interests.
  
  
• Evaluate. Reflect on your work together. Evaluation provides time to learn from and correct mistakes. It leads to accountability. It is a public process: it is not about laying blame, but about doing more effective work.

Public Spaces

Leaders need to intentionally create public spaces where citizens gain the political skills necessary to govern. Such spaces are used for conceptual learning as well as strategic planning and learning skills, because conceptual understanding increases the ability to create and thus must be part of the everyday work of citizens.

These spaces are centered on problem solving that is recognized as important to a broader public. They are pragmatic, political, and diverse places for debate, conflict, and strategic thinking.

We bring democratic understanding of public work, self-interest, and power to public spaces. Everyone is seen as a stakeholder, as having a self-interest in the work that may differ from yours. Everyone is expected to contribute, to make crucial decisions, to be held accountable, to be recognized. Power in public spaces is understood relationally; while everyone does not have equal power, their authority based on experience, position, knowledge, or skills is recognized and used.

Examples of public spaces include staff meetings, conferences, a place and time set aside for debate or strategic planning. They occur on different levels, and vary in how public they are. A strategy team operates in a public space, although it may be less guarded a public space than a conference and may be more consciously framed by democratic principles.

Organizing

Organizing is central to public problem solving. Thus it is also a vehicle for developing leadership and teaching civic concepts, as well as the means of restructuring mediating institutions.

The charts on The Practice of Organizing that follow show different dimensions of organizing. Listed vertically are ongoing, regularly revisited elements of organizing:

• defining the problem from diverse perspectives;
• doing political analysis and political mapping;
• developing strategies that engage diverse players; and
• evaluating

The horizontal axis lays out steps for developing an institutional base with a civic purpose for taking action:

• assessing your base;
• building your base;
• designing and implementing strategies; and
• institutionalizing those policies and practices that solve the problem

All of this work is done keeping in mind the larger goal of reclaiming the setting as a civic institution.

Throughout your public work, it is important to regularly revisit and evaluate your problem definition and analysis, and strategies you develop and implement. You will define and redefine the problem as you assess self-interests, analyze the politics of the environment, engage other diverse citizens, develop strategies, and take action. Analyze and consider the changing politics of the environment and the self-interest of leaders, stakeholders and others along the way. Engage the broadest range of self-interests and link them to the largest possible problem or arena through your problem definition and strategies. Evaluate and re-evaluate the problem, strategies, players, goals, roles, and practices of yourself and your leadership team. Doing these things throughout your work will make your solutions more effective; but as importantly it will provide opportunities to develop critical public capacities and to practice democratic citizenship.

Taking action over time, keeping in mind the above elements of organizing and the larger goal of institutional change, involves four general steps briefly outlined as follows.

© Project Public Life

Assess the base

You have an idea of the problem. You want to take action. So you need to do some groundwork: to find out what other people think the problem is; what resources are available to address the problem; where leadership might come from; and what the patterns of power surrounding the problem are. Get clear about your self-interest, why you want to be at the table. Determine the self-interests of others (how they define the problem, what role they might play in solving the problem) through one-on-one interviews.

Build a base for taking action

Develop a leadership base that can accomplish the challenging work of strategic planning and organizing action. Leaders will have different skills and resources, and will be connected to different institutional settings and departments. Building a base requires developing the capacities of individual leaders, pushing their commitment, advising on strategy as they work with their own power bases. The principles of public relationships apply here.

The base for taking action will require different levels of leadership, from key strategic planners to those you'll keep informed and draw upon for particular purposes. Not every interest needs to be part of strategic planning; that particular leadership base needs to be able to get things done, yet stay in relationship with interests not represented.

Develop/implement strategies

Break a problem or task down into manageable and practical parts, while keeping in mind the larger issues and values connected to it. Organize the work so particular steps lead toward the larger purpose. Engaging diverse players in developing and implementing strategies will make them more effective, just as it makes the definition of the problem more complete. Never lose sight of the larger purpose of the work, developing citizenship and reclaiming your group or institution as a place for public work. Implementing strategies will require another level of organizing, beyond your leadership base, that will use the same principles and practices but involve a broader public.

Institutionalize

To really solve the problem, and to reclaim your institution or group, you need to have an impact on the institutional settings in which the problem takes place and/or can be solved by altering practices, policies, and resource allocation (like time, staff development, or money). This final step rests on all the previous work you have done: the leadership and base for action that's been developed and strategically positioned; the power and authority gained by effective problem definition and the organizing and implementation of solutions; the teaching of civic concepts through your practice and other formal and informal means; the firm understanding of the politics of the group.

It is most likely that this step will happen gradually, as people learn new behaviors, policies are changed to reflect public goals and the work convinces leaders that the approach is worth resources. And with repeated practice and conscious efforts to impact the environment as a whole these changes incrementally add up to affect policies and practices throughout the organization, not just around a particular issue or problem. Through this work you create a civic culture which can shape the development and implementation of the work, and guide the allocation of resources and policies and practices, from hiring procedures to evaluation processes.

Evaluation

Public evaluation is a key, multipurpose tool to use throughout civic organizing. It provides space for learning, strategic thinking, developing accountability. It is a public process; not for placing blame but for increasing the effectiveness of the work and deepening the civic learning process. It is useful for clarifying roles, avoiding misunderstandings, giving a sense of accomplishment, providing a clear direction for the work, and developing a public chronicle, or history, of what was accomplished and learned.

What is public evaluation?

The ability to pose a problem and assess how effective you have been in addressing it. It requires a conscious application of ideas to practice, and is a learned art. Public evaluation is intended to develop the civic confidence and capacities of citizens.

Why is the concept and practice of public evaluation important in a democratic society?

Public evaluation is an important part of making our public work, and the places associated with our work, schools for self-governance, or citizenship.

Evaluation usually means someone from the outside coming in to tell you what you did wrong! The evaluator is seen as being objective, or not having a stake in the outcome. Although outside assessments are often useful, evaluation is even more important as an art we learn to do ourselves in our work on a continuing basis.

Evaluation brings seriousness to public work. It directs our work toward larger goals or a mission. Without evaluation our work too often becomes a series of unrelated activities leading to failure or burnout.

Public evaluation is also a way of creating more democratic ownership of knowledge. In an age of information, what one knows, or the categories of knowledge with which one frames action, forms the basis of authority and validity in the larger world. Too often the framing of public work and the naming of lessons from it is left to experts at the top of the information hierarchy. Through a more democratic practice of evaluation, this knowledge can become a resource more broadly used. Public evaluation is one way citizens and citizen-professionals can work together to consciously create and name the categories or concepts that drive effective work.

When should we evaluate and who should be involved in evaluation? What format should evaluation take?

Evaluation is about consciously knowing what is happening, what has happened, and what should happen. Evaluation, then, should take place whenever you (as an individual or group) need to learn from your actions, or to redirect work to better accomplish a collective mission. In-depth evaluation is especially important for those most closely associated with the planning of an action or strategy, and those whose leadership is being developed. Evaluation can be used:

At the end of meetings. Did we accomplish our goals? What tasks were assigned to whom? What else needs to be done? What do we need to talk about next time?

After larger public meetings. Did we accomplish our goals? How well did we play our roles? What did we gain or lose in the event? What were the power dynamics? The self-interests? Did the event meet the self-interests of staff, key players? What needs to be done to followup?

To evaluate specific strategies (see questions, above) or
To evaluate the work as a whole at different stages. What were our purposes and goals? Did we meet them? Were they realistic? Did others become more important? What roles were we playing and how well have we played them? What could we do to improve our individual and collective work? What have we learned from the work?

Public actions involving significant individual or group energy, resources, or credibility, usually generate strong emotions as well. Emotions should be named because they are an important part of public work. But they should be separated from the analysis during evaluation.

What about evaluating individuals?

We need to recognize that many people seek or avoid public life as a reaction to their own personal history. Therefore public critique can be very emotionally jarring if it is not artfully done. In particular, the work, problem, event, or goals need to be the focus of critique, not the character of the person being evaluated. It can be enormously freeing for the individual to have public discussion of their actions so that unstated opinion does not become the operating mode of the group. Most importantly evaluation allows for public capacity development.

The Lazarus Project, an initiative of Project Public Life, has developed a set of rules for public evaluation of individuals:

• Make I statements. Always claim your thought/critique by saying, "I think/feel ...".
  
  
• State your critique within the framework of the larger outcome of the action. This keeps the focus upon public outcome rather than personal issues. The purpose of public evaluation is to be more effective in attaining your collective goals or mission. Personal critique is not the purpose of public evaluation.
  
  
• Be accountable for posing another option if you disagree with the one taken. This clarifies that your concern is the public outcome, and you are not responding from personal opinion. It also signals that you are accountable to the collective, public mission or goals of the organization/group.
  
  
• The person critiqued must acknowledge that he or she has heard.
  
  
• Remember that the purpose of evaluation is to learn from experience. It is not to affix blame.

The information given in this publication is for educational purposes only. Reference to commercial products or trade names is made with the understanding that no discrimination is intended and no endorsement by University of Minnesota Extension is implied.

Produced by Communication and Educational Technology Services, University of Minnesota Extension.

In accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, this material is available in alternative formats upon request. Please contact your University of Minnesota Extension office or the Extension Store at (800) 876-8636.

University of Minnesota Extension is committed to the policy that all persons shall have equal access to its programs, facilities, and employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, disability, public assistance status, veteran status, or sexual orientation.