How might we redesign local democracy around the day-to-day goals and concerns of citizens? A set of leaders in civic engagement, including representatives of national associations that represent local officials, school systems, funders, and other leaders, met in early 2010 to compare notes on their work in communities and discuss possibilities for innovation. This report describes their discussion and recommendations.

1. Recentering Democracy around Citizens:
A multimedia report on how local leaders, and the national associations that serve
them, can react to pressing challenges and reshape local governance
The skills, attitudes, capacity, and diversity of ordinary people are creating new
opportunities and new challenges for our communities and our democracy. More than
ever, citizens are able to disrupt policymaking processes when they don’t understand or
agree with the values and opinions of decision-makers. Citizens are able to contribute
more than ever to public problem-solving. And it is clearer than ever that the quality of
civic engagement is a critical factor in the economic vitality of that community.
Forty leaders, including a diverse array of public managers, academic researchers,
democracy practitioners, and funders, met at the McCormick Foundation’s Cantigny
Conference Center in February 2010 to discuss these changes in citizenship and local
governance, and to explore possibilities for collaboration in democracy reform. The
group included members and staffers from nine national associations that represent and
convene local leaders: the National League of Cities, the International City/County
Management Association, the League of Women Voters of the USA, the National School
Public Relations Association, the United Way, Grassroots Grantmakers, the National
Physicians Alliance, the United Neighborhood Centers of America, and the American
Planning Association.
Matt Leighninger of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, which convened the
meeting, illustrated the state of local democracy with an offbeat 5-minute ‘home movie’:
[Press CTRL and click on picture to watch short movie]

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Pictures from a (r)evolution: How the associations see the challenges
The “Recentering Democracy” participants prepared for the meeting by reading five
documents describing different aspects of the state of local democratic governance:
 Sustaining Public Engagement: Embedded Deliberation in Local Communities, by
Elena Fagotto and Archon Fung, asks why sustaining this work is so difficult,
describes several communities that seem to have ‘embedded’ large-scale deliberation
in local politics, and lists several conditions that must be present for it to happen.
 The Promise and Challenge of Neighborhood Democracy, by Matt Leighninger,
examines the lessons learned from longstanding neighborhood governance systems,
building on a meeting of local officials, academic researchers, neighborhood leaders,
and city employees who work with neighborhoods.
 A set of slides on the Knight Foundation’s “Soul of the Community” research project
(see p. 9 below).
 Promising Practices in Online Engagement, written by Alison Kadlec, Scott Bittle
and Chris Haller of Public Agenda’s Center for Advancements in Public Engagement,
examines “how the Internet might help build capacity and momentum for inclusive,
collaborative and boundary-crossing problem solving at all levels of public life.”
 Ten Lessons for Talking about Racial Equity in the Age of Obama, a publication of
the Opportunity Agenda, describes how discussions of race can play out within
discussions about how to revitalize democracy.
The representatives of the national associations also brought their own extensive
expertise with local democracy to the meeting. Some of these representatives were
staffers operating out of the association’s headquarters; others were local leaders who are
particularly active members. (For example, Karen Kleinz is the associate director of the
National School Public Relations Association; Ron Koehler is an assistant superintendent
of schools in Kent County, Michigan, and NSPRA’s incoming president).
Before the meeting, the associations provided statements about why “recentering
democracy” was a compelling topic for their members:
Bonnie Mann and Chris Hoene, National League of Cities: “Making democracy work
and making government work have been core values and central tasks of the National
League of Cities (NLC) since its founding in 1924. NLC is carrying out work to assist
cities and city officials on a range of topic areas such as city fiscal conditions, economic
development and regional economics, sustainability, housing and
immigrant integration. Questions of
engaging citizens on issues and creating
effective public deliberation arise in all
these areas. Through its work on
‘Democratic Governance,’ NLC
seeks greater understanding about how
local leaders are mobilizing to more
Chris Hoene Bonnie Mann

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effectively engage citizens/residents to make decisions, overcome conflicts, and solve
critical public problems.”
Cheryl Graeve, League of Women Voters of the USA: “Throughout 90 years of history
of the League of Women Voters, has played a ‘trusted convener role’ and helped to build
bridges between citizens and government at local, state, national and international levels.
Today, as we face many significant challenges, we also are seeing an alarming rise in the
distrust in government and dissatisfaction of citizens who feel
their voices and interests are taking a back seat to the interests of
those with the most money or political clout. Our nation urgently
needs collaboration and reduction of partisan bickering – it needs
civil, citizen based discourse, in order to move forward in
rebuilding public trust and advancing important solutions to our
challenges. The League is interested in this ‘Recentering
Democracy’ conference because we hope it will help advance the
important voice of the citizen in our decision making processes.”
Cheryl Graeve
Janis Foster Richardson, Grassroots Grantmakers: “Grassroots Grantmakers is a
network of place-based funders in the United States and Canada who are working from a
‘we begin with residents’ perspective – supporting active
citizenship to build social capital, civic capacity and community
resilience among residents at the block level in their
communities. We serve as a locus of learning about grassroots
grantmaking and as an advocate for the practice of grassroots
grantmaking as an essential component of effective place-based
philanthropy. We believe that place-based change and
community resilience cannot be accomplished without the full
Janis Foster Richardson engagement of all people who live in that place. We are
essentially about ‘recentering place-based philanthropy’ –
bringing residents more fully into the picture in their active citizen roles – and thus
closely identify with the broader ‘recentering democracy’ discussion.”
Ian Bautista, United Neighborhood Centers of America: “Before the turn of the last
century, what it meant to be a ‘citizen’ was vastly different than what we understand in
the term today. At the time that Jane Addams, Stanton Coit, Lillian Wald, Robert
Woods, and other pioneers of our movement were establishing their
settlement houses in places like New York, Chicago, Boston,
Philadelphia and elsewhere, many of these visionaries could not vote
– a basic tenet of what we believe is central to ‘citizenship.’ United
Neighborhood Centers of America, because of the legacy of our
movement and founders, but moreso because of contemporary
commitment to our mission, ‘. . . building neighborhoods with
neighbors . . .’ is leading a return to fostering democracy at the
neighborhood level inclusively among all of our neighbors, be they
native-born or new Americans, young or old, men, women or
transgendered, poor or wealthy, functionally illiterate or well-
Ian Bautista

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educated. Our organization and its members, in some cases for over 100 years, have been
the place where democracy has been taught and practiced in many urban neighborhoods.
In heated debates and discussions in dining halls, English classes, lectures, child care
classrooms, public forums, and other physical and social spaces, UNCA’s members have
been a welcoming and essential instrument of democracy and advocate for and with the
citizens who practice it. Now, more than ever, neighborhood centers and other
community-building nonprofit institutions in our network must rise to the call of
leadership to embrace our heritage by remembering and actively embracing our duty to
teach and foster democracy. Some of our members do this extremely well, while others
are re-learning essential democratic ingredients and principles. We are proud to be part
of this convening and other similar discussions. We look forward to learning from others
and also offering up the lessons from the voices of our cherished and highly diverse
neighbors.”
Mike Wood, United Way Worldwide: “For more than 120 years, the United Way has
existed to improve lives. We do this by mobilizing the caring power of communities to
advance the common good in education, income, and health – the
building blocks of a good life for all. United Way understands that
the nation’s most pervasive challenges cannot be solved by any
single institution, nor can institutions alone solve community
problems. Social change is only created when individuals, driven by
their aspirations, come together to address causes larger than
themselves. Organizations like United Way can play an important
role in catalyzing those efforts and being part of the solution – as a
convener and a mobilizer of financial and other resources. But
people have been and always will be the foundation of change.
That’s why United Way believes it is so critical to re-center
Mike Wood democracy on citizens – because if our institutions – including
nonprofits, private organizations, government, and others – operate
apart of the people in communities whose lives we care about, we will never see the
results we all seek.”
Jean Silver-Isenstadt, National Physicians Alliance: “The National Physicians Alliance
believes that civic engagement directly relates to health outcomes and health disparities,
and that a healthy population will advance a stronger democracy.
As physicians motivated by social justice, we aim to change the
culture of medicine into one that expects public advocacy from
doctors and one that encourages community partnerships. The
social capital that accrues to the medical degree must be leveraged
on behalf of patients. This will require physicians to think beyond
the individual exam room, develop new skills, and work in ready
coalition with patients and partners to advance civic engagement
for its own sake and for the health benefits that may follow.”
Jean Silver-Isenstadt
Karen Kleinz, National School Public Relations Association:
“Public education has always been at the core of our democracy because it was and is

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designed to serve all citizens – not just those with wealth, resources or power. But as our
public education system has grown and evolved, so has a disconnect
between the schools, their communities and the citizens they serve.
NSPRA believes that in order to have thriving, successful public
schools, we must also have healthy, thriving communities, and this is
achieved when there is a synergistic relationship that places the
interests, expectations and aspirations of citizens at the center of
community life. In order to recenter democracy, we must first
reconnect all of the institutions and organizations that provide the
operational framework for a community, move beyond ‘turf’ issues,
and work collaboratively to reengage citizens in meaningful ways Karen Kleinz
that allow them to envision and participate in creating communities that truly reflect their
core values and desires.”
Ron Carlee, International City/County Management Association: “ICMA is the premier
association of professional local government leaders. We seek to create excellence in
local governance by developing and fostering ethical professional
managers. The first of our ‘core beliefs’ is ‘serving as stewards of
representative democracy.’ This core belief is further reinforced by
the first tenet of our Code of Ethics: Be dedicated to the concepts of
effective and democratic local government by responsible elected
officials and believe that professional general management is
essential to the achievement of this objective. Tenet 2, in part, calls
on members to maintain a “deep sense of social responsibility as a
trusted public servant.” And, Tenet 4 recognizes that the ‘chief
Ron Carlee function of local government at all times is to serve the best interests
of all people.’ Toward these ends ICMA provides an extensive array
of professional development and consultation to our members. We also conduct research
and partner with other levels of government, professional associations, foundations, and
the private sector.”
Ron Thomas, Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, on the American Planning
Association: “One of the most fertile laboratories for exercising deliberative democracy
has been planning projects and programs from the neighborhood to urban and regional
scales. When practiced at its best, public planning activities can fulfill the promise of
democracy to its citizens by engaging all sectors, all interests and
all facets of the community in considering and committing to
public, civic and private actions to achieve a better shared future.
Moreover, federal, state and many local laws and regulations
require varying levels of public input into planning activities.
However, while listed everywhere as a planning imperative, the
role of the public is often only vaguely defined. Amazingly, very
few accredited planning curricula offer any courses in its theory,
methods or practice. Most distressingly, many practitioners
consider the public everything from an annoying diversion to a
destructive impediment to successful planning.” Ron Thomas

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Matt Leighninger framed the meeting with a set of slides that describe the big picture of
democratic evolution and innovation:
Recentering Democracy
around Citizens
McCormick Foundation
Deliberative Democracy Consortium
Cantigny Conference Center
Wheaton, Illinois
February 16-18, 2010
[Press CTRL and click on picture to view and hear podcast]
The “involvers” and the “involved”
Many of the “Recentering Democracy” participants represented the perspective of
“involvers” who typically initiate and support public involvement efforts. These projects
– which are also described as “public engagement,” “deliberative
democracy,” “democratic governance,” or “citizen participation”
initiatives – have proliferated dramatically over the last fifteen years,
as a response to the new challenges and opportunities in local
governance. They reflect the belief that “The relationship between
government, formal institutions, and citizens in community
governance is changing dramatically,” as Mike Huggins put it. “The
issue is to what extent you want to impact that.” When successful,
these efforts engage large numbers of people in discussion,
Mike Huggins
deliberation, and action planning.
Typically, these projects are focused on a particular issue or public problem, and are
initiated by an organization, elected body, or agency devoted to addressing that issue:
school administrators involving parents and other citizens in issues like redistricting or
school finances; city councils or city managers involving residents in city budget
deliberations; human relations commissions involving people in
issues of race and diversity; planners involving residents in land
use decisions; community organizers or YWCAs or neighborhood
leaders or chapters of the League of Women Voters or local
nonprofits involving people in other meetings on other topics.
The meeting participants compared notes on what they had
discovered through this work. Gail Leftwich Kitch facilitated the
discussion. It became clear that though they focused on different
Gail Leftwich Kitch

7. 7
issue areas, they had learned many of the same lessons, and encountered many of the
same challenges:
The State of Participation
What do involvers want?
How have they been successful?
What are the limitations of their efforts?
What are the challenges they face?
[double-click to view slides]
Overall, the “involvers” felt they had been successful in several ways:
 Recruiting large numbers, and a diverse array, of people (although there was
broad agreement that recruitment is particularly difficult and time-consuming
work)
 Producing an atmosphere of reasonable discussion, and building good will and
trust among citizens, public officials, and public employees (due in large part to
the use of good group process techniques)
 Generating action ideas, informing public decisions, and bringing new problem-
solving capacity to the table (though there were frustrations too with action and
implementation; see below)
Questions of race, diversity, and equity prompted a great deal of discussion, with
participants noting successes, challenges, and different ideas about how to move forward.
There was shared commitment to the notion that race and equity must always be on the
table (no matter the issue), and a recognition that involvement efforts
must pay particular attention to recruiting “underrepresented”
populations. Some meeting participants noted the continuing
difficulty of reaching the “hard to reach,” and others noted the lack of
diversity among decision-makers and public employees as an obvious
barrier to better communication and collaboration. “Some of these
experiments suffer from the same limitations as the old paradigm,”
said Carolyn Farrow Garland. “The ones that are obvious to me are
race, class, exclusion of young people. We have to be conscious of
that in the way we structure them.” Carolyn Farrow Garland
There was some discussion of a strategic difference among the different strands of civic
engagement: the “social justice” approach, which argues that underrepresented groups
must be over-represented in public involvement efforts, and the “deliberative democracy”
approach, which argues that involvement projects should strive to mirror the
demographics of the broader community and aim to establish a relatively ‘level playing

8. 8
field’ within the discussions. (For a more thorough exploration of this question, see
Creating Spaces for Change: Working Towards a ‘Story of Now’ in Civic Engagement.)
The meeting participants felt that public involvement, as currently practiced, has some
limitations when it comes to producing tangible changes. Some people noted that the
timing of involvement efforts doesn’t always match the timing of the policymaking cycle,
so that citizen input can affect decision-makers at one point in the process and yet not be
sustained adequately to influence a ‘final decision’ that may be made months, or years,
afterward. Others pointed out that projects that are too focused on policy decisions are
unlikely to ‘make everyone happy,’ and that they may cut short the potential of citizens
and organizations to contribute their own time and energy to public problem-solving. But
there were limitations too with these more diffuse, citizen-driven action efforts – they
required too much capacity to monitor and support, and they were too difficult to sustain.
So while the meeting participants were convinced that public involvement can, and often
does, result in action and change, this belief came with a number of caveats and
frustrations.
The greatest frustrations, however, seemed to focus on our collective
inability to ‘embed’ public involvement strategies and principles more
effectively in the way that institutions and communities function.
Ultimately, “our purpose is to transform systems,” argued Everette Hill.
Periodic efforts to engage people in key decisions may be laudable and
productive, but some of the meeting participants wanted to make this
Everette Hill
work more accessible and helpful to people on an everyday basis. Ron
Koehler, for example, said he wouldn’t be satisfied
until “every student in my district is engaged in a dialogue about the
goals and direction of their own education.”
Some participants felt that the best way forward was
simply to make current involvement efforts more
common and easier to organize. In this view, episodic
participation was sufficient; one participant wondered Ron Koehler
if expecting citizens to do more might mean “asking more of people than
they can give.” Others felt we needed to go beyond the current practices
of public involvement – and rather than asking citizens to participate in
more involver-led initiatives, design projects and structures that meet
Terry Amsler citizen goals as well as those of local leaders. As Terry Amsler put it,
“we need to narrow the gap between the ‘involvers’ and the involved.’”
Democracy’s nagging little question: What do citizens want, anyway?
Having examined local democracy from the involvers’ point of view, the meeting
participants then turned things around and began to focus on the citizens’ perspective.
After all, it is hard to imagine how a community could sustain any system or pattern of
public participation that does not meet the needs and goals of ordinary people. In their
report on Sustaining Public Engagement, Archon Fung and Elena Fagotto argue that the

9. 9
best examples of sustained, embedded engagement are in communities with “a popular
constituency that is disposed to press for public deliberation and to defend its practice
when such engagement becomes inconvenient to local elites and authorities.”
To provide one set of answers to the question of what people want, Katherine Loflin
presented the latest findings from the Knight Foundations’ “Soul of the Community”
study, a multi-year 26-community survey research project led by the Gallup Corporation.
Soul of the Community has shown a positive correlation between
citizens’ sense of attachment to their community and the economic
growth of that community. And the main drivers of attachment seem to
be:
 Openness – The perception that the community is a “good
place” for different kinds of people (the survey questions asked
about several specific groups: older people, racial and ethnic
minorities, families with kids, gays and lesbians, talented
college graduates, and immigrants). Katherine Loflin
 Social offerings – Respondents’ sense that their community had a “vibrant night
life,” was a “good place to meet people,” and was a place where “people care
about each other.”
 Aesthetics – How people rate “the area’s parks, playgrounds and trails,” and how
they rated its “overall beauty and physical setting.”
(For a closer look at the “Soul of the Community” results for all 26 of the communities
surveyed, use the map below.)
One “Soul of the Community” finding that
challenges traditional perceptions of
democracy is that traditional civic
measures, such as voter registration,
volunteerism, and membership in local
associations, do not correlate with
community attachment. In other words,
people who regularly vote, volunteer, and
join groups are not more likely to feel a
sense of belonging to their community –
and places with high scores for those civic measures are not more likely to have high
levels of economic vitality. Or as Loflin put it, whether or not you are “engaged” may be
more of a function of “who you are than where you live.”
Some of the meeting participants were optimistic that the type of public involvement
work they support might have a greater effect on community attachment and economic
growth. Others felt that current involvement is too temporary, episodic, and limited to
have that kind of impact across an entire community. This question seemed to be a
promising avenue for future research, either through “Soul of a Community” or other
knowledge-building efforts.

10. 10
From the ensuing conversation (facilitated by Carolyne Abdullah) about what citizens
want, a number of key points emerged:
 Community attachment is a “good thing” in its own right, both because it may be
linked to economic growth and because we care about what
people think of their communities – and yet public involvement
leaders and practitioners usually don’t list it as one of the goals
for their efforts, and seldom focus explicitly on trying to
strengthen it.
 “Place matters,” but residents’ relationship to place is more
complicated than ever before. Some participants argued that
online “places” were just as significant as physical ones. Others
Carolyne Abdullah
claimed that online technologies often reinforced citizens’
sense of attachment to physical place, pointing to examples such as the online
neighborhood forums supported by e-democracy.org.
 Some participants went even further in their analysis of how new technologies,
could extend this work. Reporting on a recent meeting with
experts in online engagement, Chris Gates said “embedded in the
DNA of these tools are two principles: transparency and
democracy. The problem is that everyone wants to use the tools,
but they’re not comfortable with the DNA that comes along with
them. As soon as you start using these tools, your organization
has to become more transparent and small ‘d’ democratic. If you
want to use these tools, you have to be comfortable with
volunteers, taxpayers, etc., setting the priorities of the Chris Gates
institution.”
 The “need to meet people where they are,” no matter if that place is an online or
physical space, is an essential principle in public involvement and a key direction
for future innovation. “We were trying to reach out to younger people in our
community, and we decided to do some outreach during happy hour at local
bars,” reported Ron Carlee. “That was out of the box for a local government to do,
but we connected with people we wouldn’t otherwise have connected with. Some
of those people have since been engaged in a wide variety of things that they
never would’ve been involved in – but if we hadn’t been willing to go to the bar
at happy hour, we never would’ve had the conversation.”
 Providing young people with “prominent roles in authentic
public engagement” is also an essential ingredient for current
best practices and future innovations.
 Giving people social and cultural reasons to take part, as well
as the political incentives of solving problems and making
decisions, is a promising pathway for experimentation – and
one that reflected both the lessons learned from involvement Gloria Rubio-Cortes
efforts and the findings of “Soul of the Community.”
“Sometimes you need a party rather than a meeting,” said Gloria Rubio-Cortes.
“And sometimes you need a combination of a party and a meeting.”
 The power of public institutions to provide people with a sense of legitimacy is
critical. “People get activated by hope,” Jeri Williams argued, and that hope often

11. 11
springs from the sense that “public officials and employees seem
willing to listen.”
Despite this last point about public institutions, there was also some
recognition that local governments and school systems were only part of
the picture. The mission of recentering democracy seems to be a cross-
sector, collaborative endeavor, requiring the leadership and support of a
wide variety of organizations (and citizens themselves). “What do we Jeri Williams
need to do to build capacity for ‘institutional ad hoc-ism?’” wondered
John Dedrick.
The state of the (disconnected) art: Many kitchens and ingredients, not enough chefs
The “Recentering Democracy” participants also recognized the importance of local
factors, and realized that each community might have its own unique sense of whether
and how to recenter democracy. “Every community has a complex civic ecology,” said
one participant. “There are many civic models and systems, and they differ according to
communities and problems.” But there was a strong sense that this kind of thinking and
planning was not going on in many places. “How do we catalyze civic planning in these
different contexts?”
Cataloguing “civic ingredients” seemed critical to this kind of local civic planning.
Having discussed the principles and strategies emerging from successful public
involvement efforts, the group turned to other civic ingredients. Some of the participants
brought with them special expertise with one of those potential assets, such as
neighborhood councils, civic grantmaking, local online forums, public libraries, and
youth engagement. They described the lessons they had learned about these ingredients in
a poster session; the following slides capture their key points:
Civic ingredients
When thinking about ‘recentered’ local
democracy, what kinds of assets or
ingredients should we consider?
[double-click to view slides]
While the meeting participants felt this discussion of civic ingredients was interesting and
exciting – it reminded us of what Carmen Sirianni called the “civic abundance” that
democracy reformers have to build upon – it was difficult to talk about how those

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ingredients could be assembled into new recipes for local democracy.
This would have to be a local discussion, the participants felt;
communities needed to take stock of the assets they already had,
consider ones they might add, and think through how they might use
these ingredients in concert.
To the extent that the meeting participants outlined a
direction for communities to follow in this planning, Carmen Sirianni
they seemed to embrace a number of ‘middle paths.’ For example, Joe
Peters argued that “The neighborhood thinks they know best – City
Hall thinks they know best – we need spaces in between where
everyone knows better.” Others pointed out the need to think ‘in
between’ a purely online approach to politics and one that considered
Joe Peters
only face-to-face meetings. Terry Amsler’s point about bridging the
gap between ‘involvers’ and involved, and Gloria Rubio-Cortes’ quest
for a ‘meeting that is also a party’ also fit into this category.
Action themes
Towards the end of the meeting, the participants compiled a list of ten action themes:
1. Connect the national associations – Create more opportunities for discussion and
collaboration on issues of democracy between the national associations that represent
and convene local leaders
2. Support work in 5-10 communities – Convene discussions in 5-10 communities,
involving a broad range of leaders, that will, at the least, improve engagement
practices and, potentially, catalyze the development of comprehensive citizen-
centered democracy strategies
3. Civic skills and connections for all – Develop model training programs that can be
implemented in communities, providing civic skills (recruitment, facilitation, issue
framing, action planning, others?) for citizens, public employees, youth leaders, and
leaders in ways that build connections between people in these different sectors
4. Develop better language – Find better ways of telling the story of local democratic
innovation…could be simplifying the message…could be telling a longer story that
incorporates the critical lessons…but above all, gets us away from the fuzzy, dreary
civic synonyms (engagement, involvement, participation, etc.)
5. Better official meetings – Develop new formats for public meetings (official public
hearings, meetings of school boards, city councils, zoning boards, etc.) that reflect
proven engagement principles, are supported by an ‘enabling’ legal framework, and
utilize online technologies as well as face-to-face techniques
6. Change the pre-professional programs – Strengthen (or in many cases, introduce)
the teaching of democratic principles and strategies within the graduate programs
(public administration, planning, etc.) that produce public managers
7. Help develop “Participation 3.0” – Develop a sequence, or menu, of engagement
strategies that fully integrate online and face-to-face tools and techniques

13. 13
8. Develop a political analysis of this work – Describe how the growth of small ‘p’
political engagement is coming up against the big ‘P’ Politics of partisanship, and
develop an analysis that helps communities and leaders deal with these tensions
9. Understand the necessary cultural shifts within institutions – Describe the
cultural shifts that need to take place within various kinds of local groups and
institutions in order to facilitate and support democratic work
10. Influence the federal advocacy agenda of the national associations – Develop a set
of recommendations about how federal policy can support local democracy, and
encourage the lobbyists for the national associations to advocate for them in a
concerted way
On the final morning, the participants discussed those themes and used a ‘dotmocracy’
process to rank them. This yielded five priorities.
Five priorities for recentering democracy around citizens
We, the participants in the “Recentering Democracy” meeting, found that we shared
many of the same ideas and assumptions about the future of local democracy. We used
terms like power, privilege, place, community, reciprocity, and infrastructure. We agreed
that communities need to close the gaps, or even blur the lines, between the “involvers”
and the “involved.” We felt that online tools would become increasingly important, but
that neighborhoods and other geographic ties would continue to matter. We embraced the
notion that questions of race, diversity, and equity must be explicitly named and brought
to the center of the discussion. We recognized that the shifts already occurring in local
politics, and many of the additional changes we seek, will require corresponding shifts in
our public institutions. Finally, we united around the belief that “What do citizens really
care about?” is a touchstone question that can inform current involvement practices and
guide our thinking about future innovations.
We were also impatient to move from abstract visions to concrete actions. The
development of public involvement has been driven by local leaders reacting to pressing
needs and conditions; we resolved to continue this tradition of practical innovation. The
group generated ten potential priorities, and voted these five to the top of the list:
1. Connect the national associations
The “Recentering Democracy” participants included members and staffers from some of
the main associations representing and convening local leaders. These associations have
encouraged, informed, and supported their members in their public involvement work,
but they have rarely worked together on these issues. We agreed on the need for more
discussion and collaboration between them.
Some of the specific ideas included:
 Convening informal conversations among the associational representatives that
were present at Cantigny, starting with the groups that are based in DC and can
come together face-to-face most easily.

14. 14
 Developing ways to share materials across associations online.
 Identifying other associations that are engaged in this work.
 Developing a one-stop easy-access point for sharing information and materials.
 Offering webinars that allow members of different associations to learn from one
another.
 Evaluating ways to use the Knight/Gallup “Soul of the Community” findings.
 Connecting across associations at the local level – finding places where active
members of different associations can begin working together on democracy
issues.
2. Support innovative work in 5-10 communities
By connecting local leaders and supporting local innovation, the “Recentering
Democracy” participants felt that we could help catalyze a number of pilot projects.
These efforts would help us understand how to combine various civic ingredients, give us
new examples of how local democracy can operate, and keep us focused on the central
question of what citizens want out of governance and community.
There were a number of suggestions for how to identify these communities, ranging from
a high-profile application program to working more quietly through national associations
and foundations. We agreed that the “Soul of the Community” research would be
instrumental in illustrating the larger potential of engagement. We also agreed that any
support we provide would have to be interactive rather than prescriptive. “We cannot go
in telling people what they are going to be doing,” as one participant put it. “True
engagement is listening.”
3. Civic skills and connections for all
As part of the work with 5-10 communities, and as a valuable activity in its own right, the
“Recentering Democracy” participants agreed on the need to develop model training
programs that can be implemented in communities. We recognized that there are a
number of existing training programs, and many case studies and tools, but there is no
mechanism to quickly sort through them and determine what is needed.
Some of the specific ideas included:
 Offering introductory training using case studies and different models.
 Developing a toolkit that collects the existing tools.
 Offering coaching, mentoring, and ongoing support for people doing this work.
 Focusing on libraries and other local institutions that can serve as hubs for these
resources.
 Supporting the development of Participedia, an online resource that includes case
studies, tools, and organizational resources.
4. Strengthen the pre-professional programs

15. 15
The “Recentering Democracy” participants felt that the pre-professional programs that
prepare students for roles in local democracy were not yet providing the skills and ideas
graduates need to excel in these jobs. Programs in public administration, public policy,
planning, social work, educational administration, and other disciplines must strengthen
(or in many cases, introduce) the teaching of democratic principles and strategies. In
many cases, this represents a major paradigm shift for the systems that are in place.
Some of the specific ideas included:
 Surveying the “consumers” who hire these graduates, and determine what they
need in the field. (Use the model of the survey of higher education done by the
American Medical Student Association that evaluated and graded universities.)
 Identify innovative existing syllabi, and develop new model curricula and syllabi
that are shared with schools of public
administrations. A few acknowledgements
 Open the lines of communication
between the accreditation The McCormick Foundation supported
institutions. this meeting and discussion in several
 Determine opportunities for critical ways. Their Cantigny Center is a
professional development within splendid physical facility for discussion
professional associations. and planning. John Sirek’s warmth, civic
engagement experience, and passion for
5. Understand the necessary cultural moving from ideas to action set an
shifts within institutions example for others to follow. Janice
Belzowski masterminded all of the many
Recentering local democracy will require logistical details that would have
significant cultural shifts within public otherwise made it impossible for me to
institutions. “When we started out, we focus on the content of the meeting.
thought this initiative was simply a way to Carolyne Abdullah, Gail Leftwitch Kitch,
interact differently with citizens,” says Mark Gloria Rubio-Cortes, Taylor Willingham,
Linder, former assistant city manager in San Chris Gates, and John Esterle all helped
Jose, California, and an architect of that with facilitation and design questions,
city’s Strong Neighborhoods Initiative. “We including many adjustments in the course
found out that in order to do it well, we had of the meeting. Taylor Willingham’s
to change how City Hall functioned.” notes were invaluable in compiling this
report.
The main action idea that emerged under – Matt Leighninger
this heading was a report that would
describe and explore 5-10 examples of situations where institutional changes are
occurring. The report would be framed in a way that speaks directly to people engaged in
change. It would also highlight the work of thinkers and practitioners who are
championing cultural change within institutions.