From: Steven L. Clift <clif0005@student.tc.umn.edu>
Subject: The New Citizenship - A Partnership between Citizens and Gov't
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Date: Fri, 1 Jan 1993 23:01:40 GMT

This is my first posting to a newsgroup.  We are trying to electronically
post this article in places where it might be useful for people in their
work and political lives.  If you know of other places to post it go
ahead, let me know where it is, or just send me your suggestions at
clif0005@student.tc.umn.edu.  Thanks, Steve 


THE NEW CITIZENSHIP               
A Partnership between Citizens and Government             
White Paper

By Harry C. Boyte, Benjamin R. Barber, Dorothy Cotton, Hal Saunders, and 
Suzanne Morse, with the assistance of New Citizenship Working Group.

President-elect Clintons proposal for a partnership with the American
people warrants responses from citizens commensurate with the dignity and
substance of the concept of citizenship itself. The New Citizenship is
based  on this premise.  It aims at generating serious national
discussion, beginning with this White Paper, on the meaning of
citizenship and civic education in our time.  It includes a National
Conference and Citizens Inaugural on the New Citizenship to be held on
February 8 at the National Press Club, organized in association with the
Council for the Advancement of Citizenship and others.  Finally, it
begins a long-term effort to strengthen citizen education and public
problem-solving within Americas civic infrastructure -- that network of
civic, service, voluntary and educational organizations and institutions
through which the public does its work.

*************************************************************
Please forward any e-mail comments to Steven Clift, Graduate Assistant,
Center for Citizenship and Democracy, Humphrey Institute of Public
Affairs, University of Minnesota at clif0005@student.tc.umn.edu.  This is
our first experiment with electronic posting, advice and suggestions on
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article.
*************************************************************

The White Paper is authored by Harry C. Boyte, Co-Director of the Center
for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey
Institute of Public Affairs;  Benjamin R. Barber, Director of the Walt
Whitman Center at Rutgers University;  Dorothy Cotton, former Director,
Citizenship Education Program, Southern Christian Leadership Conference; 
Hal Saunders, Director, International Affairs, Kettering Foundation; and
Suzanne Morse, Director, Pew Partnership for Civic Change.  The Center
for Democracy and Citizenship and the Walt Whitman Center are the two
initiating institutions.

It draws on the work and research of a New Citizenship Working Group
dedicated to reinvigorating citizenship education and public spaces in a
variety of educational, service, and other settings.  The Working Group
is co-chaired by Peg Michels, Co-Director of Project Public Life, at the
Humphrey Institute, and Richard Battistoni, Director of the Center for
Civic Education and Community Service at Rutgers, and includes Rebecca
Breuer, Katrina Browne Steven Clift, Kathryn Hogg, Pam Hayle, James Farr,
John Kari, Nan Kari, Paul Light, John Lund, Tony Massengale, Miaisha
Mitchell, Carol Shields.  

*The New Citizenship does not involve exclusive emphasis on those with
formal legal standing as citizens in this country of immigrants,
sometimes temporary.  Rather, it views "citizenship" as the capacity
developed by real-world public work that creates a stake and standing in
society through contribution.




THE CURRENT SITUATION

	The Clinton administration comes into office after a remarkable
political year in which millions of Americans became seriously engaged in
the nations public life.  Last July Bill Clinton spoke to this
engagement in an eloquent speech to the National Bar Association:

America needs to restore the old spirit of partnership, of optimism, of
renewed dedication to common efforts.  We need an array of devoted,
visionary, healing leaders throughout this nation, willing to work in
their communities to end the long years of denial and neglect and
divisiveness and blame, to give the American people their country back.

	Clintons vision of partnership can advance the nation.  Yet the 1992
election generated two powerful currents which, if they clash, will
undermine this possibility. First, the campaign promised an
administration dedicated to decisive government action. Second, Bill
Clinton called for people to take back government.

	The first theme, taken by itself, could return us to the myth of a man
on a white horse
for us.   If we, as citizens, look to the administration to meet a long
list of unmet economic, social, and foreign policy needs that government
cannot alone resolve, we will end up disillusioned, opening the way for
demagogic outsider appeals in the name of the aggrieved people, its voice
magnified through electronic media which offer little opportunity for
deliberation or popular empowerment.  

	The second theme, proposing that all Americans participate in
self-government, promises to energize the vast creativity that lies
buried in our country and to address our nations problems from the
bottom up.  Instead of looking to Washington for answers 
accompanying rush for jobs and insider connections 
vigorous partnership.  It points toward an alliance between an activist
administration of the people and citizens joined in reinvigorated civil
institutions.  It is in support of this prospect that we have authored
this White Paper; we address ourselves to citizens and to the new
administration. 

THE NEW CITIZENSHIP:
A Partnership Between Citizens and Government 

	America needs its people engaged in solving our nations social and
economic problems.  We must pool private effort into public force so that
the thousand points of light are concentrated in a great beacon to light
our nations future.  Citizen efforts need to be framed in terms larger
than individual volunteering.

	This means a partnership between citizens and government.  Such a
partnership is based on the concept of active citizenship as the
foundation of politics, itself broadly conceived as public
problem-solving.  We call this partnership, the New Citizenship.  The New
Citizenship will enhance citizen responsibility and political skill, and
can help us in working through the divisions that stymie efforts at
productive common work in America today.  It involves stronger commitment
to civic education from our voluntary and educational organizations and a
reassertion of their mission as public problem-solvers.  It requires a
renewal of popular government led by public servants who see themselves
as citizens first: representative agents of the people, rather than the
purveyors of goods to a population of clients.  

 	The New Citizenship also means an enlarged citizen perspective in which
the individuals sphere of concern becomes transnational, even global.  
As citizens topple dictatorial systems from Russia to South Africa, they
also seek to build democratic civic institutions, responsive governments,
and market economies.  We, as a nation, will not provide the leadership
of which we are capable unless we conceive a foreign policy that
constructively relates to the challenges of governance, civil society,
and deep-rooted ethnic and cultural conflicts which others face.  In this
foreign policy task, too, we the people must work with the administration
in fresh partnership.

	President-elect Bill Clinton has offered to renegotiate the relationship
between government and citizens.  I accept the responsibility that you
have given me to be the leader of this, the greatest country in human
history,
theme.  But I ask you to be Americans again, too. To be interested not
just in getting, but in giving, not just in placing blame but now in
assuming responsibility, not just in looking out for yourselves, but in
looking out for others, too.

	Yet political leadership, however articulate, cannot bring forth
citizenship.  For this promise to be realized will require a
public-spirited response from citizens, from our voluntary, service, and
educational institutions, and from government itself.  This response
means a shift from the current pattern of government seen as
service-provider to Lincolns government of the people, by the people,
and for the people.
  

What the New Citizenship Means for Citizens

	The politics of serious democracy is public work, the give and take,
messy, everyday activity in which diverse groups of citizens set about
dealing with the problems of our common existence.  Public work is a
crucial way in which we become citizens: public-spirited, effective
contributors to the country.  Yet today, most people put themselves
outside of politics.  They have relegated politics, the public work of
problem solving, to professional politicians.  Thus, the New Citizenship
reclaims politics
public work of citizens.  

	Throughout American history, the work of public problem-solving occurred
in a variety of institutions that extended from the local community to
large-scale civic organizations; it has been the way that millions of
citizens developed a sense of their stake in the nation and their
capacity to act as citizens.  Similarly, during the civil rights movement
in the 1950s and 1960s, Citizenship Schools and Freedom Schools were the
way that southern African-Americans excluded from public life developed
public capacities and voices. 
	These mediating institutions persist.   But they have frequently been
recast in a professional-client pattern that separates Americans and our
political agents into an us
simply adversarial and crudely manipulative.  We
sending them a message
allows us to be heard and to receive things from government, but we, as
citizens, rarely imagine ourselves as producers of politics.

	Yet redefined, politics becomes something that we as citizens do to
address our problems.   And though this process will not be easy or
simple, we can revitalize the public dimensions of the organizations in
which we are involved, from our religious congregations, neighborhood
groups, union locals, the full range of civic and service organizations,
schools and colleges, business and professional associations to political
parties.  We can make government an instrument to which we delegate
responsibilities and which we hold accountable for the directions we have
set, once we as citizens have discussed and debated how problems are
defined and how they might best be addressed.

	Through active citizenship, we can address our nations divisions of
race, culture, and gender.  Racial conflicts, patterns of discrimination,
and controversies over womens public roles and the definition of our
families are often dismissed as irksome diversions, on the one hand, or
used to divide and fragment us into different camps, on the other.
Appeals for good will and even the most eloquent political leadership are
insufficient.  In contrast, reinvigorated public institutions can serve
as meeting grounds for citizens to work together in practical fashion on
common issues, from crime to housing to improved education.

	A revitalized citizenship can prepare citizens to work creatively across
international boundaries to solve problems that no one government or
nation can solve alone.  Citizens in our interdependent world are already
heavily involved in international relationships in concert with those of
other nations.  Individually, in small groups, and through large public
organizations, citizens work to prevent nuclear war, to relieve hunger,
to aid victims of violence, to protect human rights, to stem
environmental degradation, to promote commerce, to enlarge human
understanding, and now to share experience in building civil societies
and free markets.  The issue is not whether citizens will be involved but
how citizens can learn to work more effectively and strategically. Just
as government officials over the years have learned the arts of
diplomacy, citizens can learn  how best to affect the course of events. 
Our shared task with citizens of other nations is to build polities
around democratic principles through which all of us learn, while leaving
room for each nation to interpret democracy in light of its own
distinctive political genius.	

	Both domestically and internationally, this shift to the New Citizenship
involves a government which once again sees itself as of
not simply acting for

What the New Citizenship Means for Government	

	The New Citizenship calls for a revitalized government that is open,
accountable, responsive, and led by public servants who see themselves as
part of the citizenry, not outside or distant from us.   Government
spokespeople at every level, from the President to county clerks, need to
acknowledge candidly the need for Clintons spirit of partnership,
within our communities and also in our infrastructure of civic
organizations that are state-wide, national and international in scope.

	Government can build bridges, tame interest rates, issue environmental
and health and safety regulations, dispense justice, and provide a social
safety net.  But political leaders need to acknowledge that government
cannot resolve most of our complex problems by itself.  Overpromising
only leads to cynicism.

	Issues such as school reform, community and economic development, racial
conflict, public health, crime, homelessness, and protection of the
environment all require that citizens act as deliberators and
problem-solvers.  Schools and businesses, as well as individual citizens,
make recycling work.  School reform requires that schools reconnect with
the life of communities and forge relationships with other institutions
and that parents become powerful stakeholders, acting with imagination on
the entire range of school issues, not simply their individual interests.
  Only strong neighborhoods and renewed community institutions like small
business can reduce crime, through partnership with police departments.  
Creating a healthy nation is the work of providers and advocacy
organizations that open themselves up as public institutions, welcoming
public deliberation on how health problems are best defined and how to
decide difficult trade off issues such as treatment priorities,
technology purchase, care before death, and prolongation of life. 

The New Citizenship and the Issues: An Agenda for Discussion 

	The New Citizenship can be best illustrated through a sketch of priority
arenas for public problem-solving, reconceived as a partnership of
citizens within and outside of government agencies.  We suggest the
following in order to prompt public discussion. Unanimity here is not our
goal; we, the authors and endorsers, do not all agree with every clause
of these specific proposals.  Rather, these are advanced as illustrations
of ways to reframe approaches to public problems based on the concept of
a citizen government partnership; and as examples of ways to conceive of
policy approaches that develop the public capacities of citizens and our
civic institutions for responsible action. In each case, discussions
need to address the appropriate roles of both government and civic
institutions.

Community Service
 President-elect Clinton, building on the successful precedents like
VISTA and ACTION, and the mushrooming community service efforts of recent
years, has proposed a program in which students will be able to pay for
college education in return for agreement to serve the nation as police
officers, teachers, and community workers in a variety of other roles. 
This idea highlights the importance of service, but service by itself
does not generate strong, active citizenship.  Service can easily succumb
to a singular emphasis on individual good deeds that sentimentalizes
service and erodes the citizen role in cooperative public action. 
Service initiatives also need to avoid a troublesome division based on
need 
discussion:

Priority Action:  A cabinet-level national service initiative that is
undertaken as a major, primary priority of the new administration.

Participants:  A national service initiative that is designed to include
a panorama of participants that looks like America,
racial, economic, cultural, and religious groupings.

Benefits:  Benefit options that encourage participation by a wide range
of young people and others, including living stipends during service and
post-service benefits flexible enough to meet the needs of diverse groups
of participants. 

Citizenship Education: A national service intiative that integrally
involves civic learning, including systematic attention to civic and
political skills and concepts, critical thinking, and self-evaluation.

Decentralized Design:  A national service initiative that builds upon
and expands the wide array of decentralized service program approaches
now in place, including youth and conservation corps, community-based
groups, K-12 and higher education institutions.

Education 
A chorus of voices in recent years has argued that the nation needs a
reconceived education system if we are to meet the challenges of the
rapidly changing global economic and civic environment.  As the National
Education Goals Report of 1990 expressed it, By the year 2000...every
adult American will possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete
in a global economy and to exercise the rights and responsibilities of
citizenship.
businesses to prosper in an environment where knowledge itself is the
central resource.  Moreover, we need a renewal of the founding vision of
education as aimed at teaching the liberal arts, that is the arts of
liberty, understood as the political, broad minded skills and
perspectives of public-spirited citizenship.  All of our educational
institutions need to be reconceived as continually constituting
citizenship through the culture, values, skills and concepts they promote
and practice.  In this spirit, we suggest for discussion:

Putting the Public Back in Schools:  Policies that encourage strong
parental and community participation in governance about staffing,
curriculum, and school programs through site-based management and other
measures.

Improved Public Education:  Measures and incentives to strengthen public
education through service learning that includes strong citizenship
education, through rewards for outstanding teaching and higher salaries
for teachers, and through smaller schools. 	
Schools as Public Spaces:  Incentives that encourage schools to become
locations for community deliberation and action beyond school hours, and
that strengthen community-school ties in other ways.

Civic Learning in Post-Secondary Education:  Policies that encourage two
and four year colleges and universities to take seriously a renewed
citizenship education mission.

Health
 The 1992 campaign drew important attention to the crisis in
accessibility of health care 
have no health coverage 
For the resolution of our health care crisis, however, health care
institutions, health care education, and consumers will have to
reconceptualize health care to emphasize the citizen dimension, inside
and outside institutions.  We propose for discussion the following
measures:

Preventative Medicine:  A strong emphasis on preventative medicine,
including measures to lessen the litigious nature of health interactions
today and to develop citizen responsibility and capacity for action on
health.

Decentralized Delivery: Measures that support community-based clinics
and other delivery approaches emphasizing primary and basic health care.

Public Spaces: Policies that encourage providers such as hospitals,
nursing homes, and others to become public spaces for civic learning, for
experimentation in development of innovative health policy, and for
deliberation about critical health issues.

Professional Training: Professional training innovations that emphasize
the skills and concepts of citizenship, broadly construed to include
collaborative problem solving, public deliberation, and strategic
planning.

Community Revitalization
The urban disturbances following the acquittal of officers who beat
Rodney King in Los Angeles and the acquittal of the youth accused of
killing Yankel Rosenbaum, the young Hasidic scholar in Brooklyn, exposed
problems that conventional politics cannot remedy. Neither traditional
liberalism, with singular emphasis on government action, nor traditional
conservatism, with its stress on individual responsibility, provides
adequate responses to our crises in communities today. The solution lies
in a politics where citizens take center stage as cooperative problem
solvers. The evidence of three decades is that citizens need particular
sorts of government aid: tools of self-help that they can use to rebuild
communities and create renewed linkages with the political system.  Many
local governments have already designed innovative and creative models
for such government aid on which to build. Thus, we suggest:

Community Self-help: Funding and renewal of programs like Headstart,
community policing, community-controlled job training, housing, tenant
management, and economic development, grounded in the concept that
community renewal must come from within communities.

Public Spaces: Programs to revitalize and create public spaces in
communities for deliberation and action, such as community parks,
gardens, recreational facilities, schools and libraries.

Public Information:  Policies to enable citizens to obtain access to a
range of data about governmental and economic policies through computer
linkages and other means in local schools, libraries, and other public
institutions.

Reinventing Government 
Bill Clinton made government reorganization a major theme of his
campaign. Such a focus forms an essential complement to a reworked
relation between citizens and public agencies: not only must government
agencies reconceive their appropriate function, emphasizing the ways in
which they can become catalysts for public problem-solving, but also they
need themselves to become more accessible and accountable.  For
government to undergo significant internal restructuring, it will require
that public servants 
once again as citizens first, part of the public, not outside the public.
 We propose for discussion:

Internal Restructuring:  Simplication of classification rules and
elimination of many middle and upper level supervisory jobs that
micromanage those on the front lines of government-public interaction.

Campaign Reform:  Measures to control campaign costs, support candidates
through public financing, provide free media access for political
campaigns.

Citizen-legislators:   New methods to insure accurate voter knowledge of
policy makers actions and other means of increasing officials
accountability; revamping of public hearings and other citizen
participation mechanisms to encourage serious public participation.


Strengthening Democracy Abroad
   
Citizenship  is critically important in other countries today, as well. 
People are attempting to find more effective and more democratic ways of
governing and of solving their problems.  Dealing with the states that
have emerged from the former Soviet Union and the newly emerging
democracies in Africa and Latin America requires new ways for the people
of the United States to relate to them in that effort.  In building that
new relationship, we begin with two propositions: first, our country, one
of the oldest experiments in government of the people, by the people and
for the people, has much to contribute to democratization around the
world.  Second, we ourselves have much to gain from a global conversation
and exchange on themes of democracy.  We need a new partnership with
peoples of emerging and established democracies, through which all of us
can learn. 	

	Conceiving of foreign policy in this way requires rethinking how nations
relate. For centuries, leaders have thought about questions of foreign
policy and international relations in terms of government-to-government
relations.  Now, we need to look at a larger range of problems in terms
of governance, civil society, and efforts to resolve bitter internal
conflicts.  We need to recognize that our relationships with other
countries also include relationships aamong citizens and their
organizations.  We suggest the following:

Building Civil Society:  Measures sensitive to local traditions to help
develop government-citizen partnership in citizenship education, the
political resolution of conflicts, and community and economic development.

Citizen Exchanges: Enhancement of programs for student, scholarly,
business, and nonprofit exchanges specifically designed to deepen
understanding of how international relationships work in an
interdependent, culturally diverse world. 

Citizen Self-help:  Strengthening of programs aimed at supporting
grassroots citizen capacities to deal with problems they face, such as
Peace Corps.

Citizenship Education: Strengthening language and other study programs
in U.S. schools, colleges, universities and the media through which young
Americans can come to see themselves as citizens of the world and prepare
themselves to act internationally.

          Such policy arenas illustrate the range of issues and questions
involved in the New Citizenship.
 
ACTION ON THE NEW CITIZENSHIP

	To address these questions, we call for a dialogue between the new
administration and the American people.  In order to undergird and make
real this partnership, we propose a widespread discussion of what
citizenship means in our age; for efforts to revitalize citizen education
in a variety of settings; work to renew the public spirit of our civic
institutions over the coming months; and several early initiatives from
the Clinton to illustrate dedication to such a partnership between
government and citizens. 
	
On February 8, 1993, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. a
Conference and Citizens Inaugural on the New Citizenship will help launch
national discussion about the meaning of citizenship in our age,
approaches for strengthening  citizen partnership with the new
administration,  and strategies for reinvigorating citizenship education.

Initiating Institutions:
Center for Democracy and Citizenship
Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
(612) 625-0142  Fax - 625-6351

Walt Whitman Center for the
Culture and Politics of Democracy
Department of Political Science
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903
(908) 932-6861/62  Fax - 932-7170

For more information please contact Harry Boyte, Project Coordinator of
the New Citizenship for the Center for Democracy and Citizenship.

Please feel free to reproduce this paper and distribute to others.

Addendum:

The New Citizenship Partnership 
Suggested Possible Reponses from the New Clinton Administration

We, the authors of The New Citizenship White Paper, invite the Clinton
administration to consider the following for its prompt action in order
to advance President-elect Clintons call for partnership with the
American people in addressing the nations problems.  Essential to such
response is enhancing government capacity to work with citizens in terms
much more multi-dimensional than normal policy and agency categories,
suggesting the richness of the concept of citizenship itself.

Citizen Liaison Office: Our leading proposal is for the creation of a
high-level Citizen Liaison Office established within the administration,
cutting across constituencies and policy arenas, charged with helping to
change the chemistry of the citizen-government relationship and with
helping to develop interdisciplinary experiments beyond normal policy
divisions.  Methods might include:
 
 Facilitation of cross-departmental and cross-agency teams 
	to develop new citizen-government initiatives.
 The education of government workers and civic organizations 
	about each others respective concerns. 
 Measures to free promising citizen-government policy experiments 
	of red tape and regulatory delay.

Recognition of models of citizen-government partnership: A national
awards ceremony in the spring or summer of 1993 to honor and make more
visible longstanding, successful examples of citizen-government
partnership such as VISTA and Headstart.

New Citizenship Work Group: Formation of a strategic work group, reaching
across agencies and policy arenas, to enact such initiatives and to
develop other strategies for strengthening citizen-government
partnership. These might include, for instance, ways to develop
integrated training meetings, with regional officials in federal agencies
and leaders in civic organizations, in key rules of thumb
collaborative work;  innovative approaches to public hearing design; and
ways to integrate substantial citizenship education into program arenas
associated with new Clinton initiatives such as community service.

For information: Harry C. Boyte, 
Project Coordinator, The New Citizenship
Center for Democracy and Citizenship 
Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
301 - 19th Ave. S.		(612) 625-6351 (fax)
Minneapolis, MN  55455	(612) 625-0142



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