Back to Launching the VisionFrom Measures and Milestones: The Conference Proceedings
pp. 33-40, published 1997
Dr. Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer
I am absolutely delighted to be with you. It’s great to be here, to see some old friends, such as Paul Cook and Mike Childress, people who I saw when America Speaks held a conference at Wing Spread. Your state was extraordinarily well represented. America Speaks did a year-long process of evaluating citizen engagement projects across the United States against a set of clear criteria and at the end of that process chose to invite three of those communities to be test beds for a process that will go on for several years around integrating face-to-face citizen participation with the use of new technologies, interactive television, and the computer networking process. Kentucky was one of the projects chosen. One of the things I know from a local perspective is it is very difficult to keep a contextual perspective around what you are doing at home and if it’s being noticed anyplace in the world. The answer is yes.
You clearly have an extraordinary commitment in this state to citizen engagement. I am going to take speaker’s prerogative and spend all my time only on citizen engagement today, and I will be very up front with you why. I had the privilege the last 25 years of working always on issues of democratization, first in the workplace in the corporate world for 13 years, and then in government, first as Chief of Staff to Dick Celeste in Ohio and then with an extraordinarily dedicated team around Vice President Gore at the national level. And the result of virtually 25 years of work in the public and private sectors is relative to issues of equitable equability; whether that’s access, opportunity, the issue of access to vote, or taking the responsibility to vote.
Where we are in this country today, we need to be paying very close attention, whatever your job or role is, to how democratic our process is. We are the oldest, most mature democracy on the face of the earth that has an individual Bill of Rights, along with a Constitution for our collective good. Let me call the country an organization. There are many, many benefits to working in a mature organization, a lot of standards, principles, and protocols in place that make it work, no matter who takes over.
But what also happens on the other end of that maturity? Unfortunately, in a mature organization, you start to take things for granted. You close down new ideas. If you move into the corporate world, in this country it’s about 20 years ahead of the public sector in understanding that there was an absolute necessity to change how the bureaucracy really operated. We went from being noncompetitive in major world industries to almost losing position, and on a 15-year cycle, coming back in almost every single one of those industries because the bureaucracies were blown apart and redesigned.
That process is now beginning to occur in government as well. From my experience with Governor Celeste in Ohio, which I will always count as an extraordinary gift, and what I have experienced in Washington, DC, one thing that anybody who is straight with you in the world of politics and government will acknowledge is that no leader in that arena can change the institution of government unless the will and voice of the people is walking hand in hand with them. Those places where real institutional change occurred in the State of Ohio that have gone on through a different Governor of a different party, and they are very dramatic examples, occurred because there was an educated population who had voice on those issues that was consistent through the change in government.
Now, we still have an extraordinarily large number of examples of that working at the local level, sometimes at the regional level, and at the state level. We in current political economic history have no examples of that working at the national level. Based on what has been said about my background, you may assume that my bias about this is Democratic, but if you do, it is a wrong assumption. I got into the game clearly out of the issue of democracy building in public policy.
Set aside your feelings about President Clinton as a leader, and he is the only sitting President in this century that walked into office where there was a clear national mandate on a national issue and nothing happened. What was the issue? For 10 years, a majority perspective on the issue of health care was building in this country and by the time he got elected, it was above 65 percent. He didn’t even have a mandate in terms of a majority vote in his own election, but that mandate was there in terms of national health care reform.
Now, we can all do our Monday-morning quarterbacking about the mistakes the Clinton team made in their attempts to reform health care. They made a lot of mistakes, but the fact that no reform occurred can be laid solely at the desk of the ineffectiveness of the Clinton team. I will leave you with one statistic in terms of what it takes. Remember our nation is about collective voice, majority opinion, and needs to go somewhere. Between May and September 1994, more dollars were spent on the national advertising campaign by the coalition of interests that would lose something significant if national health care reform passed than was spent by George Bush and William Clinton together to run for the office of the President in 1992. So, not just the political arena in this country has learned how to use advertising in the national media to influence majority perspective but all the other segments of our society have equally learned that.
Now somebody at this moment may be asking why I am talking to you about this, why am I pushing this issue at this level? I sat in your auditorium and I heard extraordinary stories. I heard the beginning of the fabric that I’ve seen all over the United States of America where citizens in their local communities across all their individual differences are able to tell you stories just like Jeanne and Nancy were telling you. They have said, "The future of our community in terms of our quality of life, education, environment, health, etc., is more important to us than partisan politics, than liberal conservative ideologies, than differences on any of the spectrums that divide us when we are thinking about voting politically. If we want our life in our community to be different, we are going to have to create the mechanisms that allow us to set in motion a process."
All three of the speakers I heard talked years, not days, weeks, or months, about what it takes to build an infrastructure in a community to come to a collective vision and then have the mechanisms in place to turn that vision into an implementable action plan over time. That’s a move from individual citizen concerns about the quality of life in a community, exactly like a majority of individual citizens’ concerns about the state of our health care system in our country, but we are finding and developing mechanisms on a local, regional, and state level, of how to take that individual concern, respect the individual differences, fashion a plan that keeps everybody inside, and commit resources over time for the long haul.
Let me have all of you in the room stand who either have participated in that citizen voice project, vision to action, and/or are helping run one. Right now in your life you are in some place a partner, participant, or person carrying responsibility in that kind of process at the community level. Would all of you stand up for whom that’s true? That’s extraordinary. Are you surprised at your number? In some way, that has become part of the fabric of how Kentucky is working at a local level.
The next question is how many of you are engaged now participating in, helping run, or having some responsibility for that kind of project at the whole Commonwealth of Kentucky level, where you know your voice is getting to influence vision and action consistently over time. It certainly looked to me like 60 or 65 percent of this audience at the local level. Stand if you are participating in that at the Commonwealth level. I would guess it is about one third of you. You should feel extraordinarily proud about that fact. That is a higher level than many of the states that I have been in in the last year and one half clearly working on exactly this issue.
And now the last question: How many of you today are engaged in work in some kind of process in which you feel an active participant, because you are doing or taking responsibility to help do it on some issue that would move from vision to implementable action on a national level? Terrific. That’s fantastic. It’s about 10 or 12 people.
I have stood in audiences larger than this one where no one in the audience stood, but it’s also important for us to take in the reality. We dropped from 65 percent to 30 percent to 12 individuals and the health of our community as a whole is directly connected and has been since the founding of this nation to the issue of how does individual voice develop to collective voice for committed action to become the nation, region, state, or community we want to become. I think you should feel tremendously excellent about the numbers of you who are engaged in this locally, at the Commonwealth level, and, frankly, at the national level.
But if we stay wholly committed to the ideals that formed our nation to begin with, what would be the actual number of people who would stand on each one of my questions? The answer is 100 percent of those who wanted to be standing. It’s a long step from 60 to 100, from 30 to 100, and from 2 or 3 percent to 100. That is the nature of the citizen engagement challenge facing the country.
It is an incredibly positive story that our national institutions have not yet been penetrated. You are 65 percent for the Commonwealth. I would be curious to know if you are a particular region in Kentucky. Would I see the same thing if I were in another region in Kentucky? Do you think that 65 percent is statewide? How many of you think it’s statewide? About half of you; that is fantastic. You should take great pride in that and you need to challenge yourselves to make sure it is not spotty, certain communities around the state, but that people actually know they have the potential and capacity for citizen participation when they want it.
I want to leave you with the key distinction that so much focus has been on relative to this reforming government, the kind of work I did with Vice President Gore in Washington. I have been involved in institutional change for 25 years and I cannot tell you how much more change in how the federal government operates has occurred as a result of this five years’ work than I would ever have believed could happen, even though I am basically an optimist.
So let’s do one other check. How many of you actually know a real story of significant institutional change in the federal government as a result of the reinvention work that has happened, where you could actually tell a story? For instance, you actually know what happened in customs, in the USDA extension service, or with the border guard? I see three. That’s also not atypical anywhere in the country. We have a media institution at the national level that is still spending way beyond 50 percent of the time telling us stories about what isn’t working in the government, in the country.
Now I don’t know the state of play in Kentucky, but I think it’s vitally important that you ask at the state level the media outlets if they tell the 65 percent story of how much is happening at the community level. In most states, the answer is no. The shift has begun to happen at the community level.
Nancy gave a great story there. Have the people, the reporters, and editors involved in this community project; they become real allies. There is a movement of civic journalism in the country at the local level. The problem is we haven’t cut through how national media outlets tell us our own stories as Americans, whether it’s change in the government or whether it’s citizen engagement and responsibility at the local level.
I actually find people more disempowered about the media. Go back to the phrase Jeanne used when she talked about every time you hear the phrase "we can’t" you change that to "how can we?" I find people at this stage much more experienced about changing "we can’t" to "how can we?" about government, but when we come to the area of media, there is a sense of helplessness. There is a sense of disempowerment around what tools an individual citizen or a group of citizens in a community can use to influence how the media tells us back our own story, and it’s profoundly important in terms of citizen engagement.
I want to give you two examples that I’ve seen be successful about how a community can do this. In the City of Cleveland, which has the same urban education problems as every major urban location in the country, there was a serious concern after Ohio went through its incredible recession with manufacturing jobs, about how the community would keep its economic base diverse and vital and continue to be growing new jobs. How many people in the audience do economic development? It’s the same story the country over, whether you are working on rural economic development or urban economic development.
The Cleveland organization like the Chamber of Commerce did a study. They picked every Rust Belt city in the Midwest that had a similar history to Cleveland’s in terms of a massive loss of manufacturing jobs in a short period of time. Ohio’s exact numbers were 300,000 jobs gone in 13 months. That would knock the socks out of the center of any urban community. What the Chamber found was that in the 10 Rust Belt cities of comparable size and comparable impact, the local newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, had 75 percent of the column inches on the front page telling negative stories about the city. I see a lot of heads, people who know about economic development. If a company is looking to invest in a community, what’s one of the first things they check? So no matter what good work was being done on a citizen level, locally face to face, as long as the media portrayal of Cleveland was negative, by a factor of three, what chance was there to win the battle for outside investment? A collective group of business, government, not-for-profits, and citizens who owned businesses in Cleveland presented that information to the Plain Dealer and worked out over time an agreement to shift the percentage of news coverage in that newspaper about the city itself. That is a way to influence the media.
A similar story is about a parent involvement program in another Midwestern city where 2,000 parents were engaged in a two-year period about a vision for the schools strategic plan, and yet most of what they saw on television and in the newspaper in the community was stories about guns and knives in the school or the percentage of kids not meeting the expected fourth-grade standard for reading. At the same time one of the schools had gotten school-level recognition for the most students to score on a science aptitude and performance test nationally. The good stories were out there, but the same phenomena was occurring in the community, even as the community was rallying with extraordinary citizen and parent participation, 2,000 parents involved for two and one half years in the development of a strategic vision for the school. Collectively, they had to also shift the balance in the institution of the media in terms of how they tell the story.
As you are more and more successful at the community and the Commonwealth levels, utilizing citizen engagement, be sure that you are clear about the institutional responsibility in the community for telling the story. Do business, the not-for-profits, the religious community, the media, or government tell the story? Have you tied into reinforcing, so you can have the kind of pride that can and should come out of your participation? That becomes embedded in how goes the storytelling about itself, to itself, and to the outside world, and that’s how an image changes over time. So challenge every institution to be part of how the story’s told in creating a different image in the future.
A second challenge I hope is embedded in what I have said to you. No matter how successful we are in citizen engagement at the community level, if we are unable to take this up every other level in our country, if we go for a decade in which we can tell positive stories at the city level and positive stories of even more than half of the states in the country, but we still have no demonstrated examples of where collective citizen voice changes the nature of the debate at the national level, what’s utterly predictable? We will have taken change as far as you can from putting it in an old paradigm, but it communicates from the bottom up, from the local level up, to hitting a barrier essentially unable to change from the top down.
So the strategies need to link with how you use every locally based representative of the federal government or of the multinational corporate investment in your community as a conduit to push the same issues, processes, commitment to citizen voice, to the national and, frankly, at this point, to the global level in terms of responsibility, particularly in the private sector and its impact on what we used to think of as the remote section of Iowa where I grew up.
There are no more remote sections of any place. The interdependency is totally real economically at this point, but we haven’t created in a similar capacity to make palpable and tangible the interdependence in the other arenas in our lives that determine the quality of our lives: education, health, citizen participation, and the environment. We know the facts, we know the stories, but we don’t have the mechanisms in place for it to make a direct link between being able to think local and act global or the reverse bumper sticker that we now need 20 years later which is to think global and act local. So, the interdependency and pushing the window about the link is my second message.
The third message is I’ve traveled to tons of communities around the country that were successful with their citizen engagement effort for the first two years. It was new, it was exciting, but then, how many of you have already hit that in your community in Kentucky? It worked Round One, but somehow Round One’s now done, so the real issue is sustainability and sustainability requires mechanisms that keep that voice in the decision process. I’m sure Nancy could tell you many more stories, but she talked about metro-government, which Simpson County is not quite ready to call metro-government, but the notion that in some place has to be lodged the decisionmaking power that the citizen voice is directly connected to. America Speaks, after traveling for eight months around the country finding successful sustainable efforts, developed a list of criteria, or as Jeanne called them, principles, for what it takes to sustain citizen involvement for the long haul.
Let me just close with two quotes that are favorites of mine in terms of the work that you are pioneers in, in terms of a new generation of what citizen activism is for general interest in the United States of America. It’s not just about how I get my issue on the table, it’s how do I ensure that the general interest of the community moves forward into the future. The first is an Einstein quote. "The problems facing the world today cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them." It’s just his wonderful way of saying what lots of us who come out of the education background call thinking out of the box, but when you are at that community table, when you are doing that work, some way keep yourself grounded: have we just recycled what we did before? "The problems facing the world cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them."
And then finally, something that is hard to keep in your mind in the global context that we are living in (because oftentimes the issue of size, scale, and scope makes one feel like you really can’t do anything about global warming) is the fact that 30 percent of the youth in the United States of America either don’t graduate from high school or are functionally illiterate when they graduate. That’s a fact today in this country, and yet I’m sure everybody in this room would, like myself, say the only reason I am where I am is the quality of education that I received a long time ago. And, if, when I graduated from high school, someone would have said to me then that, less than 20 years later, we would have grown comfortable as a nation allowing 30 percent of the children of our future to not have a running start upon graduation from high school, or to allow 20 percent of our children to be born under the poverty line, it would have been unspeakable and unthinkable. But in 20 years we got there and have now been there for more than 15. So how do you keep the optimism up, keep the focus, plant your feet and say there is a relationship to what I am doing in Somerset to what’s happening with global warming or any other issue you want to pick? A real inspiration to me has always been Margaret Meade and her wonderful quote: "Never, never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world." Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Thank you. I sincerely hope that the link between what you are doing every day and my choice to take it much broader was valuable to you and felt like the context matters. I have time to take a couple of responses, more than delighted for someone just to stand up and say what you think yourself. You do not have to ask me a question, but just to put a little bit of voice from you back into the room. Does somebody have an idea or statement you would like to share, please?
Audience Member:
(Inaudible question.)
Dr. Lukensmeyer:
I stopped probably mostly out of time and maybe out of a little bit of anxiety that I was already going broader than some people might hear, but a worldwide phenomena is the creation of NGOs, nongovernmental organizations that are citizen-based groups all over the country. I had the privilege of being in Budapest, Hungary, in September where representatives from 82 nations, who are doing exactly what you are doing in communities in Kentucky, asked how to create engaged citizen participation. We spent five days together and it was extraordinary. It’s a wonderful way to use the Internet. Whatever your issue is, whatever your organization is, get on there and you’ll find somebody around the globe who is also doing it.
Audience Member:
I am very much concerned about what is going on in the whole world, in the United States, and in Kentucky. There are a lot of things I can’t do anything about and to me the most important thing that I can do is to help us have higher education available in the southern region of Kentucky, and that I am working on.
Dr. Lukensmeyer:
There is no one issue that is more important than any other one issue. The issue is every citizen finding your niche, planting your feet, and committing to make a difference on that issue, where you live, and its ramifications around the world.
Audience Member:
When you talk about education, do you mean formal education or just involved in communication about what’s going on?
Dr. Lukensmeyer:
It’s a wonderful question, and I think because I personally feel so much sadness and passion about the formal education part and where we are with it in the U.S., I may have mixed the message. On the issue of voice, I mean everyone. Some of the most compelling and important stories that I’ve heard in the last year have come from people who, if they finished high school, it wasn’t important to them, but the world’s changed, too. For my generation even and certainly my parents’ generation, the number of ways you could create for yourself an important comfortable life without a formal education was many, many more options than is true for people who are younger than we are. So, voices, it doesn’t matter what your formal education is, but if we care about our future, we had better be clear that we need to recommit to everyone ending up with significant enough educational experience to enter the world able to work.
Audience Member:
I would ask you to reconsider that there is a remote place. That’s in the halls and back wards of the mental hospitals, for when you enter one, your civil rights are canceled. To earn your citizenship is dependent on the health care system and we who are mental health consumers try to advocate for that, to experience a 51 percent on governing boards. The industry doesn’t want you on the governing boards and to experience that if only the "I" self can be validated to the "we" self, and that takes the conscious effort of a society to learn how to back away from the table and to afford social structure, social justice to people wanting to come to the table.
Dr. Lukensmeyer:
I very much applaud and appreciate your choice to share your voice, your principle is extraordinarily important for mental health in this country, and, once again, it’s an example where one in four people in this country are in some way personally engaged in the spectrum of mental health services. I don’t want to tell a long story, but if I were to personally pick the thing that I am most proud of that we accomplished in Ohio, it would be changing exactly what you just said. In the state of Ohio, there is a law that any community support group that is delivering services in mental health has to have the voice of clients, consumers on that board. So it has to be done. I also want to say to others of you in the audience, when I made the generalization, and I think you know how I meant it, but there is no place that is remote left. I am deeply appreciative of your having given the voice. There are also many places that are still remote. There are whole entire urban neighborhoods that are totally remote from the conversation that we are having in this room. It is the paradox of the time in which we are alive.
The best definition I know about paradox is two things that seem absolutely contradictory, are both absolutely true, and that happens to be the way of the world at the moment that we are alive and have some responsibility for sharing leadership. No matter what position you take, no matter what truth you speak about, whether it’s in the economy, in education, etc., the exact flip side of the negative part of the story exists someplace in this world. And every single one of us in some way has to keep the same commitment that you spoke about, while always acknowledging that there are places in our hometowns, in our own localities where people still do not have the voice. Thank you.
Mr. Childress:
Carolyn, thank you very much. You gave a very inspirational talk. Many of the themes that Carolyn talked about, we are going to carry forward in the afternoon sessions. Thank you.
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