Rekindling Democracy

A Professional's Guide to Working in Citizen Space

Cormac Russell

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725253650
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Finally, a book that offers a practical yet well-researched guide for practitioners seeking to hone the way they show up in citizen space.At a time when public trust in institutions is at its lowest, expectations of those institutions to make people well, knowledgeable, and secure are rapidly increasing. These expectations are unrealistic, causing disenchantment and disengagement among citizens and increasing levels of burnout among many professionals. Rekindling Democracy is not just a practical guide; it goes further in setting out a manifesto for a more equitable social contract to address these issues. Rekindling Democracy argues convincingly that industrialized countries are suffering through a democratic inversion, where the doctor is assumed to be the primary producer of health, the teacher of education, the police officer of safety, and the politician of democracy. Through just the right blend of storytelling, research, and original ideas, Russell argues instead that in a functioning democracy the role of the professionals ought to be defined as that which happens after the important work of citizens is done. The primary role of the twenty-first-century practitioner therefore is not a deliverer of top-down services, but a precipitator of more active citizenship and community building.

Part One: Rekindling Society

Communities are all around us, close at hand, awaiting the community building that will make the invisible assets within them visible in all their abundance.

Chapter 1

“Discoverables,” Not Deliverables

The World of Asset-Based Community Development

The world is full of magic things, patiently
waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

—W. B. Yeats

Asset-based community development (ABCD) is about people living in local places and taking responsibility for each other and their local resources. It is a description, not a model, of how local residents grow collective efficacy (Sampson et al., 1999) and what they use to do so (McKnight, 2009). The work of ABCD involves paying attention to what is already present in a local place, not what we think should be there, or what isn’t there. What can be found in a local place are called its assets; they include

• the gifts, skills, knowledge, and passions of local residents;
• the power of local social networks/associations;
• the resources of public, private, and nonprofit institutions;
• the physical resources of the place;
• the economic resources of the place; and
• the stories of its residents’ shared lives.

Setting aside our preconceived maps and genuinely coming alongside a given local community (assuming that there is an invitation to do so) demands an act of radical humility on the part of helping agencies. It’s the opposite of diagnosing, fixing, or prescribing. It means our attention shifts from “deliverables” to “discoverables.”

The logic of shifting the focus from deliverables to discoverables is grounded in four simple but inalienable truths:

1. People can’t know what they need until they first know what they have.
2. An outside agency’s map of the community will never be the same as the territory.
3. If you don’t know the territory, you can’t support the community and you run the risk of causing harm.
4. Communities do not work in silos or in tune with institutional targets or their predefined outcomes. Take health as a case in point: most of the activity that is health-producing is done by people who do not think or realize that what they are doing is health-producing.

The majority of sociopolitical challenges are three dimensional: they are personal, environmental/social, and institutional. The challenge that democratic societies face is in trying to address three-dimensional socioeconomic and political issues using a two-dimensional framework consisting of:

• institutional interventions (services, programs, policies, legislation); and
• individual behavior change.

In the pursuit of more sustainable and enduring change that is ecologically and socially sound we need to attend more to the third dimension: environmental/social. Environmental and social change is not the result of behavioral change, nor does it come about as a consequence of institutional reform. It happens as a consequence of effective grassroots community building at the neighborhood level (Monbiot, 2016).

Doing community building this way calls on all of us as citizens to start seeing our neighborhoods as the primary unit of change. Making the neighborhood the primary unit of change enables the discovery, connection, and mobilization of individuals, associations, and cultural, environmental, and economic assets. The magic is in the connections between all these domains, not in any particular technique, model, or siloed approach. This is why working within small places is so pivotal to more citizen-led action and ultimately to deeper democracy and environmental sustainability.

ABCD Principles and Practices

Identifying, connecting, and mobilizing a neighborhood’s assets is a messy and complex endeavor, one that does not come with an instruction booklet. The ABCD approach does, however, come with a set of principles and practices that act like a compass in community-building work. Those principles and practices fall into five categories:

1. Citizen-led
2. Relationship-oriented
3. Asset-based
4. Place-based
5. Inclusion-focused

Citizen-led

There are certain things that only citizens, in association with one another, do best. ABCD is focused on this domain of change. From this perspective, sociopolitical, cultural, environmental, and economic change efforts are viewed through the lens of the following questions:

• What is it that residents in communities are best placed to do together?
• What is it that residents can best do with some outside help?
• What is it that communities need outside institutions to do for them?

Relationship-oriented

ABCD goes beyond individuals and their capacities to tap into relational power. Sadly, the power of relationships tends to be undervalued in industrialized societies. Notwithstanding, relational power, outside of hierarchical structures such as the workplace, presents a powerful and often untapped force for good. It enables consensual grouping behaviors to amplify and multiply the capacities of individuals, ensuring the societal whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts. Relational power, also referred to as associational life, is a key determinant of individual well-being, public safety, response to natural disasters, and vocational opportunities.

Asset-based

The starting point for ABCD is what’s strong, not what’s wrong. Some misunderstand this catchphrase as an attempt to minimize life’s challenges or normalize injustices; nothing could be further from the truth. ABCD is the process by which relational power is mobilized to produce sustainable and satisfying change. With that in mind, it starts with what’s strong and enables local people to get organized to address what’s wrong and make what’s strong even stronger. It also asks searching questions of those who seek to define certain neighborhoods by the sum of their deficits.

Place-based

Small local places are the stage on which a good, sustainable, and satisfying life unfolds. Seeing the neighborhood as the primary unit of change is a powerful strategy for addressing some of our most intractable sociopolitical challenges. It is, however, a strategy that is countercultural, in that it seems to contradict the vast majority of helping strategies, which see individuals or institutions as the most legitimate domains for change. While personal transformation and institutional interventions have their place, we have seen that by intentionally organizing relational power at the neighborhood level, local residents can connect local human, associational, environmental, economic, and cultural resources and, by aggregating them at a hyper-local level, come up with solutions that escape the reach of top-down institutions.

In more than thirty-five countries around the world I have witnessed the power of collective efficacy trump the capacities of innovative individuals and even the collective impact of institutional partnerships that purport to address “wicked issues,” such as child poverty, obesity, and dementia. I have also come to recognize that true partnerships between citizens and institutional systems will emerge only when institutions begin organizing in the way people organize their lives—and by that I mean humbly localizing and offering their human and other resources to grow community, after first appreciating what is there already, instead of expecting people to organize their lives in the way institutions have traditionally organized their services and functions.

Neighborhoods and small towns are the scale at which local residents come to believe they can make an impact. This neighbor-to-neighbor impact is not about service provision; it is about neighborliness. A small local place also provides the context within which the multiplicity of helping agencies (each currently working within its own silo) can agree on common ground that automatically takes them beyond their administrative boundaries, to work across silos. “Neighborhood” is the potential context within which everything can come together, where relational civic power, when needed, can join with the power of civic professionals and their institutional resources. In sum, places can exist and thrive without people, but people cannot exist and thrive without places.

Inclusion-focused

Communities have imperceptible perimeters inside which are those deemed to belong and outside which are those considered to be strangers. ABCD principles and practices direct our attention toward working with local people to support them...