Citizen Solution: How You Can Make A Difference

7. Everyday Politics

7Everyday Politics Youth organizing shows the importance of learning a citizen-owned politics of empowerment and public work. The talents and energies of young people and young adults are crucial to the emerging civic movement. T,       ’ happening in the larger world. People almost everywhere, from inner-city neighborhoods to suburbs and rural communities, feel powerless to do anything about problems in major institutions and the larger culture. For the last twenty years, the Humphrey Institute’s Center for Democracy and Citizenship () has worked with citizens and also with groups and institutions: schools, the state Extension service and community education, the Metropolitan Council, local governments, nursing homes, colleges, and others. Throughout, a central question has been how people shift from being spectators to being citizens. Such change in identity is the first key element in the shift from me to we. It involves identity change, in addition to new skills, knowledge, or values . Becoming a citizen means becoming a public person, an actor in the larger world. From the start, we knew that young people would play a central role in this shift. C H A P T E R T I T L E • 107 I learned this as a young man in the freedom movement of the s. I saw that when cultures have become full of fatalism and hopelessness, it is often only young people who break the cycle of despair. When black youth in the South developed courage and hopefulness about the possibility of change, they transformed adult cultures of defeatism and despair. Taylor Branch captures this in Pillar of Fire. In his account, the entire movement may well have turned on a fateful moment when Martin Luther King came around to accept the view of field staff members James Bevel and Diane Nash, who argued that allowing young people to march in Birmingham demonstrations in May  was crucial. The adult African American community opposed continued demonstrations for fear of retaliation, based on decades of repression, and the movement might well have collapsed. When King agreed, thousands of teenagers and children began to participate, with dramatic results. “On the first day, nearly a thousand marching children converted the Negro adults,” Branch writes. “The conflicting emotions of centuries played out on their faces until some finally gave way. One elderly woman ran alongside the arrest line, shouting, ‘Sing, children, sing!’” The fatalism in the community dissolved.1 The Politics of Empowerment Public Achievement has been the main vehicle that we developed at the Center for Democracy and Citizenship () to effect this change in identity from spectator to citizenship among young people. It involves teaching the skills and habits that accompany and sustain such identity change. Its core philosophy is captured in a song that Dorothy Cotton taught participants in the citizenship schools during the civil rights movement: “We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For.” Public Achievement is based on cooperative team action on realworld problems and issues. Young people themselves choose the issues they want to work on and design and implement strategies of action. They are coached by older people, in most places young adults, who 108 • T H E C I T I Z E N S O L U T I O N teach political and civic skills and concepts in teachable moments as the work progresses. Public Achievement was launched by Project Public Life (soon to be the Center for Democracy and Citizenship) on May , , at the Martin Luther King Center in St. Paul. About two hundred young people spent the day with teachers and community leaders. The launch was preceded by a series of twenty-one house meetings with teenagers, held in association with the newly elected mayor of St. Paul, Jim Scheibel. Although conventional wisdom in the United States held that youth were apathetic and unconcerned, it soon became clear that young people—every group we talked with—had major problems they worried about. These ranged from violence, teen pregnancy, drugs, gangs, and racism, to depression, lack of recreational opportunities, school reform , or lack of time with their families. Issues varied somewhat with area, class, and race. Concerns with gangs were much more common in inner cities, for instance. Yet many crossed geographic, racial, and income lines. Young people in every setting, for instance, expressed anger at school policies they felt were unfair, or at teaching approaches that failed to recognize and engage their interests and...