An excerpt of a webinar conversation held on May 6, 2010 between Jim Keene, City Manager of Palo Alto, CA and Peter Block, Best Selling
Author of Community the Structure of Belonging.

Is it an audacious idea to think that citizen accountability for community is possible?  If this isn’t a big and theoretical notion, than nothing is.    The question becomes how to we involve citizens in a more meaningful way.  Not just to advise us but also ask what contribution do citizens have to make to solve the issue.

In my opinion, whatever you think the problem is, it is a symptom of the breakdown of community, so in my work we are trying to restore the sense of community.  If the social fabric is decisive as it relates to such things as raising a child or caring about a neighborhood, government response has been to create more programs and services.  My belief is that our responsibility in government is to act as a convener for the community to solve the issue for themselves.

Take for instance safety.  Most police chiefs know that 80% of their calls for service don’t require a public safety professional but rather a neighbor.  

There is an organized, useful, knowable, learnable way of doing this that is not dependent on personal style.  In some ways, the task of leadership is to create structures where citizens will be confronted with their choices and get connected to one another.  Most leadership is about, “how am I doing as a leader,” and treats citizens as if they are consumers and we have to satisfy them.  As government leaders, we can bring citizens together differently to create a sense of belonging.  Belonging is what gets people mobilized.  It is emotional, and gives a call to action.

In practice, what is the importance of the language we use?  The system language (the language of organizations - business, government, schools) is designed to be impersonal, by design it is meant to be replicable and to take it to scale.  So we need to contrast system language with community language which is our every day language and has a level of intimacy to it based on the sharing of gifts.  Systems are based around the concept of deficiencies.  All transformation really is linguistic.  If we really want to build community then we have to show up in an every day way and build those things that create a sense of intimacy.  This happens when people get connected to one another.

In my opinion civic engagement and community building are not the same thing. Civic engagement is more concerned about government centric concepts like voting or informing citizens, which makes citizen engagement seem small.  Community building is concerned about the relational infrastructure of a neighborhood and getting citizens involved with one another around the issues they thought government was going to handle.  

In all of the areas that we care about like health, safety or education, civic engagement should not be held to have citizens learn more about what the professionals are doing but rather to solve for themselves those things they thought the professionals were going to manage.  The customer model corrupts the sense of community and undermines community connectedness which creates a sense of entitlement not relationships.

Community building is done by neighbors not by government.  Government is the convening agent that can bring citizens together but our charge is to allow them to connect with one another.  

In our role as civil servants we are fiber in the fabric of community, how do we assimilate our role as convener?  If civic engagement is just another effort, it can be exhausting.  Consider this, take the opportunity whenever you have two citizens in the room, to structure that conversation differently.  Remember, all transformation is linguistic, use these opportunities to infuse your conversation with a new approach to building connection.  

All transformation will come from citizens having a new conversation with each other that they are not used to having, especially if we can get citizens to talk who aren’t used to talking to one another.  As it is now, citizens have two minutes to talk at a microphone during a public meeting.  There is no chance for them to build connections to one another.  They may be at a meeting for hours and not make one connection to their neighbors.  Strangers never discover each other even though they have been together in a room on an issue related to their community.

The suggestion I have for you is to break them into small groups, which is the unit of transformation and give them some questions so the future is generated by questions rather than answers.  Ask them to act as owners of the future they wish to create.  

So how does it work, you ask them, “What is the cross-roads you are at in terms of what we are here to talk about (safety, education, etc)?”  Ask them questions of accountability and cross-roads, ask them what gifts they have to contribute and help us solve this issue.  Consider using your issues like strategic planning as a vehicle for bringing citizens together.

A parting thought is to consider the concept of the abundant community.  Everything we thought government and services were going to give us, we can do on our own if we can just figure who these people are that I call my neighbor.    So in a sense whatever your function is, your department or service, try and identify those assets that exist in the community and carve out a piece of the future that they can produce.
 
We recognize one of the challenges we have in government is making the time to issue an invitation and have these kinds of conversations.  To frame it as time makes it impossible, it is really about importance.  At some point we have to decide this is important.  In reality it really is quite simple.