The A Spot

(Or, the story of how one activist motivated an apathetic, apolitical citizen (me!) ) by A Spot Guest Blogger Gretchen Elias

My roommate, Jess, works for Toxics Action Center, a nonprofit spin-off of the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). The PIRG is a nationwide advocacy organization with a network of affiliated nonprofits in nearly every state. Jess has been working there for the past two years as a community organizer, providing coaching, mentoring, and advice to citizens fighting toxic pollution in their communities.

Right now, Jess is working with a Vermont-wide campaign, Safe Power VT , to shut down Vermont Yankee (pictured above, during a cooling tower collapse in 2007), a decades-old nuclear power plant in southern Vermont. It’s going to be a tough battle. The nuke plant has a powerful lobby on its side, along with some effective media coverage portraying the plant as a cost-effective and environmentally-friendly way to produce energy. Of course, the citizens groups that Jess advises feel differently—and in my opinion, the facts are in their favor. But to beat the nuke lobbyists and convince the legislature to move forward with shutting down Vermont Yankee, they will first have to convince a heck of a lot of ordinary citizens across Vermont.

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So along with the blogs and e-mail newsletters which flood my in box every day I am also subscribed to updates from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. They have a great project on leadership and building state capacity which has had a number of interesting meetings over the years and whose staff conduct trainings and programs around the world. Recently the Dir of the project - Howard Wolpe - former Congressman and expert on Africa co wrote an article called Democracy and Peace-building: Rethinking the Conventional Wisdom. The lessons he and Steve McDonald cite underpin much of the work I have been doing with ISC. Working in communities which have been divided by ethnic, religious, political, cultural issues requires a focus on building trust, collaborative capacity and a focus on consensus building not political competition. I think we take on one particular piece of the puzzle - helping divided communities achieve results on issues of shared mutual interest in a collaborative way builds their capacity to work together on other more intractable issues.

Unfortunately it is in a Journal which is only available for purchase so I cannot cite the entire article. I have written Mr. Wolpe and asked for permission to post in its entirety. Click here for an excerpt from the paper. Read the rest of this entry »

Hat tip to Michael Gilbert for alerting me to this 2007 report from the Health Communication Partnership called Taking Community Empowerment to Scale. I am currently working on a few pilot projects as part of our work in Ukraine under the Ukraine Citizen Action Network. Perfect timing to read this report as I am thinking about how to set these pilots up to easily scale if they prove useful and relevant to citizens in Ukraine. I was struck by the 14 recommendations…these are integral to how ISC does its programming and crucial when working to mainstream advocacy and citizen engagement into every day life.
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Idealware has come up with another good article on - A Few Good Tools for Sharing Files with Distributed Groups. I was happy to help Laura out with this article and provide some examples from my experience working with coalitions and geographically distant teams of consultants. We are often faced with how to collaborate effectively over long distances and produce a high quality product with input from the widest range of participants possible. The technology we use is just one variable in the equation but getting it right can help get us over big social and cultural collaboration hurdles.

Read the full text here. A key excerpt appears after the jump…
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April 4th, as you all know, marked the 40th anniversary of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, assassination. Taylor Branch’s April 6th NYT editorial “The Last Wish of Martin Luther King” offers up some interesting insights and lessons we can learn from one of the greatest advocates of the 20th Century. There’s little I can add.