Rekindling Democracy: A Professional's Guide to Working in Citizen Space by Cormac Russell

Author:Cormac Russell [Russell, Cormac]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Civics & Citizenship
ISBN: 9781725253636
Google: lgLtDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 53820032
Publisher: Wipf and Stock
Published: 2020-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part Four: Deepening Community

Local democracy is not a product to be consumed but a way of living that must be cocreated by citizens.

Chapter 11

Generating Change and Innovation

The Leadership Question

The best and the most beautiful things in the world cannot be

seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

—Helen Keller

Does great social change always require a great leader or innovator? Most assume that having the right leader or innovator critically determines whether change happens or not. And so, we spend time waiting or searching for the next great leader to galvanize our response to some dire event or crisis.

Moments of great social leadership, while important in their own right, exist on a continuum of social change; they are often emblematic of the efforts that they manage to convert or precipitate into more widespread change. Sometimes these moments of leadership conceal what comes behind to fuel and sustain enduring change.

At the front end of this continuum for social change is a significant but seemingly invisible buildup of energy through the work of community connectors in the process of community building. Chapters 15 to 18 share lessons learned about this community-building process from across the world. It is the energy of community connectors that provides the necessary momentum to precipitate sustainable change.

Social change does not launch itself from a standing start; it does not hatch itself fully formed from the “I Have a Dream” podium. Its wellspring is much closer to home; its nest is associational life in local neighborhoods. Behind iconic leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are millions of so-called ordinary folks, in thousands of neighborhoods, who are invisible to the unintentional eye.

Still the supposition that leaders lead, some with great vision or innovation, people follow with great energy, and change comes out the other side, remains axiomatic. That’s what we have been brought up to believe—that parents make their children, teachers make their pupils, bosses make their employees, and so on. Asset-based community building reverses those equations and argues that the opposite is the case.

People who organized and engaged in community building in their neighborhoods, towns, and villages were the “cause,” and the “I Have a Dream” speech was their “effect.” The speech that was dramatically and ceremoniously foregrounded was in part a precipitous act, but the most precipitous acts were those that happened in the background: they were small, local, and disaggregated. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, was a revelatory act, a speech act that demonstrated the collective power and voice of millions of back-home conversations, meetings, actions, and sacrifices. Of the millions of people who made up the membership of the civil rights movement, 250,000 stood shoulder to shoulder as the summer of 1963 drew to a close; one in four among them were white people, and they stood in solidarity with their fellow citizens of color. The senior leaderships of the civil rights movement understood that words don’t make meaning; people do. This is why still to

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