 I'm Stephen Murphy, member of Woodbury Community Library Board of Trustees. On behalf of the trustees, I'm pleased to introduce our event tonight, presentation by Middlesex Vermont resident and author, Susan Clark, titled, Rediscovering the Secrets of Town Meeting and Community. This presentation is one of several initiatives by the library in cooperation with volunteers, town officials, and Woodbury Elementary School to provide information and activities promoting town meeting and citizen engagement in town government. We wish to thank for organizing and promoting this event, Library Director, Myrna Miranda O'Neill, and Orca. Thank you. The setting for our talk tonight, Woodbury Elementary School, is fitting. Built in 1914, this school is a sturdy, beautiful, and special place where we educate our children, where we gather for community events such as talent shows and fundraisers, and where we assemble for our town meetings. Tonight, we will learn about and discuss town meeting, and we will exercise our rights, freedom to assemble, freedom to speak, and freedom to exchange information and ideas which are so fundamental to our democracy. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1932 described the states of our nation as laboratories of democracy. If that is so, then Woodbury is Vermont's laboratory workbench. Here, on gray granite slabs drawn from our quarry on the hill and on the pillars of folding tables and chairs, folded neatly in the corners of our public buildings, we tinker and toil, trying always to perfect this glorious small-town government of, by, and for ourselves. And we succeed. Here in Woodbury, we are generous enough to give respect to our neighbor despite disagreement. We are strong enough to withstand differences without breaking into division and wise enough to understand that civility in our town hall and public places leads to peace in our homes and private spaces. So, onward to our discussion about our featured speaker. Susan lives with her family in Middlesex, Vermont, where she serves as town moderator and Chair of Town Meeting Solutions Committee. Susan is a writer, teacher, award-winning radio commentator, and former talk show co-host. She co-authored the books, All Those in Favor, rediscovering the secrets of town meeting in community with Frank Bryan, and the book, Slow Democracy, rediscovering community, bringing decision-making back home with co-author Woden Teichel. And recently, she collaborated on the comic book, Freedom and Unity, a graphic guide to civics and democracy in Vermont. In recognition of her work, Susan received the 2010 Vermont Secretary of State Enduring Democracy Award. So, please join us in welcoming Susan to Woodbury. Together, we'll learn about our democratic traditions, current practices, and potential steps to keeping our town governments and communities strong. I'm pleased to introduce Susan as well. Thank you so much for inviting me here. Thanks to the Woodbury Community Library for inviting me and the Woodbury Town Meeting Committee for putting many hours already of time and effort into studying how to improve Woodbury's democracy. Can everybody hear me okay? I know we've got a lot of refrigeration going on here, so. And I especially want to thank you for being here and for caring about your community. So, the organizers have asked me to speak a little about Vermont's town meeting, its tradition, its history, what the process does, and those who participate and for our communities its role in the state today, which is a lot to pack into 35 or 40 minutes. So, I'm going to try, but we will definitely leave time for questions and discussion at the end. So, let's see, without further ado, here we go. So, it's hard to know where to begin to list all the factors that have informed. You could actually go back to the Ice Age. You literally could because glaciers shaped our landscape into the hills and valleys that have had such an impact on our compact village and town settlement pattern. I don't know, I just drove here in the snow. Especially the short grain season, the brutal winters, they have encouraged us to meet our needs collectively. So, if you fast forward to the colonial era, it is actually hard to imagine Vermont without town meetings. And there is a reason for that. We were in fact holding town meetings here in Vermont for a decade and a half before Vermont was even officially a state. So, here we go. This is, I love this. So, Bennington held its first town meeting in 1762. If you think about life back in 1762, town meeting was the most important political power operating in Vermont because New York and New Hampshire were still arguing over who was in charge, right? So, neither had any real control over our daily life. Settlers had really no government to rely on except the one that they formed at town meetings. So, the first order of business in Bennington in 1762 was to elect town officers and a town moderator. They were all men, of course. Women didn't get the right to vote in municipal elections until 1917. Once they got it, though, their participation in town meetings is impressive. We'll get to that in a few minutes. So, throughout New England, town meetings historically had jurisdiction over a lot of things that have since been handed to the state and federal governments. The first town meeting in Bennington allocated $40 and five acres to allow anyone willing to set up a grist mill by August got to claim that $40 and five acres. So, economic development happening right there at our town meeting. Other town meetings voted to meet other community needs from establishing schools requiring every man to pitch in a day's labor to clear land for a town cemetery. This is where communities made commitments to care for their poor or destitute neighbors, right? Social services and defense. That's where this comes in, don't forget. It was at a town meeting in Boston that Samuel Adams gave the signal to begin the Boston Tea Party. This is what comes of their wretched town meetings. The proceedings of a tumultuous and riotous rabble said the English governor at the time. So, a lot has changed. We're not raising a lot of militia at our town meetings, but some crucial things have stayed the same, and especially the main thing that makes town meeting really stand out as a government structure. This hasn't changed. You've all heard this before, but it bears repeating. The New England town meeting is really unusual because it's direct deliberative democracy. So, what does that mean? Direct? It means town meeting, you, are the legislative arm of town government on issues of finance and governance. This is a policy-making institution. So, town meeting is very different from the town hall meetings that you hear about, right? Where politicians give speeches. We see these on TV in other states. Town meeting is not one of those town hall meetings, and it's very different from a public hearing where voters come to voice their opinions or advise their elected officials. So, town meeting is a deliberative body. At a traditional town meeting on issues of finance and governance, every registered voter is a legislator. We're making binding decisions about spending, making amendments, otherwise taking direct action in our government. So, government's not a they. Like, why don't they do this? Government is a we. We are the government at town meeting. Now, of course, we only have power over very local issues. Our local budget, our roads, a certain amount of discretionary funding, nonprofits. So, our jurisdiction is limited, but the power is real, and the decisions are binding. And when I said, I said direct deliberative democracy. So, not only do we have power, the direct power. You walk in and you are empowered, we're not elected. But the process, when I say deliberation, it allows us to chew on issues together as part of the decision-making. We're a town parliament. Anybody take French? Parler? It means to talk, right? We come together, weigh the pros and cons. We see and hear each other and potentially change each other's minds, potentially change our own mind. So, in the U.S., town meetings only occur in New England. When America moved west, town meetings did not go with them. And partly, again, because of the landscape. The landscape here lends itself to such community-based government. And I'm told there is something like a town meeting in the Israeli Kibbutz system. And I can tell you that Switzerland has a robust town meeting system. I had a lot of fun visiting Switzerland to tour their town meetings a few years ago. And sometime I'll come back and give a great slideshow on that. Nowhere else that I'm aware of besides New England uses this town meeting system. So, town meeting is special. And one of the things, one of the ways we know the most about town meeting today is the recognized expert on town meetings, Frank Ryan, who is a retired UVM political science professor, my co-author, on all those in favor. Now, Professor Brian spent 30 years sending students, sending students like me, as a matter of fact, and thousands of others to literally attend thousands of town meetings across the state during those 30 years of data collection. So, students would come to a town meeting, count attendance four times during that meeting. How many men? How many women? Who spoke? How many times? How long did they speak? What was the weather? Was there a meal? Was there childcare? Amazingly rich data that he collected in this book, Real Democracy. And he had some important findings, many of which surprised the world of political science. Can I just say, just like at any good town meeting, you guys should totally access the cookies, okay? What's a little spoiled food, right? Anything that's possible? Wonderful. Thank you. Okay, well, I'll just, oh, this is so much better. Oh my gosh, thank you. Okay. So, Frank Ryan's data. He found, he had some important findings, and interestingly, because town meeting is unique, many of them correlated with political science findings across the nation, and some of them did not. Some of them, he found there were some things that were quite interesting about town meeting that political science was fascinated by. So, I'll just run through some of the basics. The, here's just basics, attendance, no real surprises here. You probably know that town meetings are struggling. In 2005, the 30-year average attendance was 20.5%, but attendance has been declining. And Brian's most recent average was down to 11%. Significantly higher in smaller towns than bigger ones, which we will discuss in a minute. So attendance is crucial, and it's important that we talk about ways to improve it. And I do have some suggestions about that that have been proven, so we'll talk about that. But that said, perspective is important. We might think, oh my gosh, 11% of the voters deciding for 100% of the town, this is terrible. But comparing town meeting attendance to 100% of the checklist just isn't realistic, because you have to remember, these are very local issues. Now across the country, turnout for ballot box voting on local issues is rarely higher than 25%. And often it can even struggle to get into the single digits. Just last spring, May of 2022, Barrie Town had its annual vote all by ballot, passed a $4.4 million general fund budget, 13.6% of the registered voters taking part. That's not uncommon. So we have to remember that what we're comparing things with isn't, you know, some kind of 100% ideal. What's realistic? So back to town meeting, why is attendance going down? Brian identified three key factors. And the first one I mentioned already is the size of the town. Small towns get much bigger per capita attendance in larger towns. This was the case in Frank Bryan's 30-year analysis and it still holds up. In 2019, towns of under 2,500 got more than twice the per capita attendance of larger towns. So those averages that I mentioned were all towns mixed together, which brings the average town. It doesn't mean large towns can't have town meetings. This is just an average. Many large towns do have successful town meetings. But it does tell us that structuring decision-making on that human scale where people can feel their impact most authentically does improve participation. And that's a key finding from Frank Bryan's research. Another one, issues matter. Big surprise, right? Anyone who's ever been to a town meeting knows this. After town size, the single strongest predictor of attendance is whether there's hot issues on the warning, right? So the thing that's surprising to me is that this finding surprised political science. They had long believed that Americans hate controversy, but his research proved that controversy actually draws participation to town meeting. So what's the difference between town meeting and all of those other places in America where people are repelled by controversy? The difference is power. Voters don't want to go to a town hall meeting where they all yell at each other but have no power. But if they know that they can make a difference, if they know that their vote matters, if they know that they are coming as part of a collective that is going to make a binding decision, they come. What are you doing? How's that thing coming up? Some other refrigerator. So the point is town meeting might be sleepy for a few years. You might see, it must be the other fridge. Town meeting might have sleepy attendance for a few years and then suddenly you're looking at the, thank you, looking at the attendance and you see a spike. And so the attendance might go from 15% up to 65% suddenly and you investigate inevitably what you find is that something has come up. That town is citing windmills or whatever it is and citizens use this powerful tool of town meeting to come and make their voice heard. So it's a reminder that town meeting as a structure waits for us. If we invest in it, then it's there when we need it. And the third key factor that Frank Ryan found was Australian ballot, especially when it's used to decide the budget. So in recent years, more towns have switched from the traditional floor meeting to Australian ballot and what they have is a so-called informational meeting a few days before and I don't know if you've ever lived in a town or been to a town that uses this system but the informational meeting, it maybe looks like a town meeting. You've got the select board up in the front and the people in the chairs but by statute it is actually a public hearing. So voters can speak and listen but no decisions are made here. The town meeting where the actual power is is the ballot. The thing is that voters know the difference. If you could like invent a heat sensor that could feel where the power was and you put the heat sensor over an informational meeting and you put it over a town meeting, the lights would light up completely differently. At a town meeting the power is in the body. So ballot box voting, it's quicker, it's easier than going to a meeting. Australian ballot does result, generally speaking, in more voting and we saw this during COVID when towns switched temporarily to Australian ballot but it usually also results in a much less robust turnout for the informational meeting and at that informational meeting the discussion is often quite limited but more important than that might be the invisible effect that these types of informational hearings have over time. They change the nature of local democracy. So rather than that direct deliberative democracy that we were talking about they're much closer to what political scientists call conventional participation. So to be clear the majority of America's formal participation across the U.S. it's defined as conventional participation. This means most of the meetings are public hearings held by school boards, city councils, state and federal agencies where everybody gets two minutes at the microphone at a public hearing participants they have no power to decide, no power to amend. And social scientists have been collecting information on conventional participation since they were enshrined in law in the 1950s. I mean public hearings have been around for a while. And so they interview people before the hearings and afterwards they watch policy as it evolves, a policy that's made through public hearings and according to their research many conventional participation tools like public hearings are worse than just ineffective. Here are some quotes from this recent public participation. This is a public administration textbook. I'm just going to quote here. Conventional participation can be harmful to citizens. So it tends to increase our feelings of powerlessness. It tends to decrease our political interest, decrease our trust in government. Decrease our sense of public spiritedness. And it can actually damage perceptions of governmental legitimacy and credibility. It can actually even increase polarization as people shift toward more extreme positions. It's not what we want, but it gets worse. Because it is also, what about the leaders who are running these meetings? It's frustrating, it's discouraging, it's sometimes even dangerous to deal with these hostile, uninformed citizens at public hearings. And the outcomes also take a hit. Because the relationship tends to deteriorate between the people and their institutions. All of a sudden we have this sense that government is a they and they are not doing what we want. The legitimacy and financial stability of governments can actually decline. So it kind of comes down to what kind of communities we want when we're considering, yeah, actual picture, right? When we're considering public engagement we need to realize that the structure of the meetings, the structure of how we bring people together and where that power resides, it can have lasting consequences on how we perceive our role in democracy. So let's talk a little bit about inclusion. Because inclusion is one of the reasons that rightly so people say, well gosh, maybe we should be using a ballot, we will get more inclusion, more people. And I get it, in favor of inclusion too. So as I'm sure you're aware, ballot box voting in the United States is notoriously skewed. We've been hearing a lot about this. To our great shame as Americans, factors like race, income, educational level help predict Americans' likelihood to vote and access to voting. So what about town meeting? What's its record for inclusion? Well we have to start with the fact that Vermont is among the whiteest states in the United States. So it goes without saying that our town meetings are overwhelmingly white. But Vermont is quite socioeconomically diverse. And town meeting observations can shine some light on groups that are typically underrepresented in our democracy. And it's interesting. Professor Bryan assumed that town meetings would behave like the rest of our political structures. And that they might exclude certain classes of people. But try as he might, with the 30 years of data, he could find no link between any of a town's socioeconomic factors. So it's indicators like people's occupation level or levels of education. And that town's attendance at town meeting. Or their verbal participation at town meeting. Because like I said, he has people actually counting how many people talked for how long. Likewise, he found no link between whether a town is socioeconomically diverse and whether people attend town meeting. And in fact, socioeconomic diversity increases the amount that people actually speak at a town meeting. Which is political science considered to be a really good thing. So this data suggests that town meetings are actually more welcoming than America's ballot system. Which is something that we can be proud of, but it's something we can learn from. There are elements of that face-to-face democracy that actually often invite marginalized populations. What's the story with that? Actually, I'll show you another thing. Yeah. Town meeting, it offers different ways of knowing. This is a quality, it's not a quantity, it's a quality of town meetings. It incorporates a variety of backgrounds and wisdom. So yes, there are people giving speeches. There are people quoting data, sounding educated. There are also people who are just telling the stories. They're telling the stories about, well, this is what happened when my car got stuck on that road. This is what happened when I used home health in hospice. It's a place where we humanize and we've all seen it. Town meeting is a place where a story from a neighbor can shed a whole new light and often even carry the day. So we have to ask ourselves not just about the quantity of democracy, but the quality. So I do want to move on to women. It's another measure of inclusivity. Now you have to keep in mind that town meeting is a legislature. So we're creating and setting the tax rate. We are amending and passing budgets. In Washington D.C., in Montpelier, and in Vermont City Councils and Select Boards, our policies are almost always crafted disproportionately by men. In 2021, we celebrated the highest percentage of women in Congress in U.S. history. Woo-hoo! 25%. But in Vermont's town meetings, women regularly make up nearly 50% of the attendees and are often in the majority. So a majority of legislators are female. That's an extraordinary statement to be able to make in the United States and we can make it about Vermont's town meetings. So it's a crucial moment, I think, in American democracy. We kind of have to ask ourselves not only what town meeting can teach us, but maybe what lessons can town meeting offer the rest of the country. I think one of the most heartbreaking changes that we're witnessing today is that many Americans are showing signs of having forgotten the basics of democracy. How to speak civilly, how to listen respectfully to people that we disagree with, how to identify things we do have in common, how to move forward together. Americans are really out of practice. It's this regular, empowered community deliberation that is the oxygen of a healthy democracy. Hearing our neighbors' values, publicly deliberating about our own, it hones our most critical democratic skills of all the things democracy needs right now. I have to think one of the most important ones is remembering how to listen to each other, seeing each other, understanding that we are in this together. We may not like each other, but we need to respect each other. Vermont's town meeting tradition has been going on since 1762, but it can also help us explore our unique political situation today. So Stephen mentioned that in addition to all those in favor, I co-authored a book about all different kinds of local decision-making processes across the U.S. called our book Slow Democracy. When we advocate for slow, we are taking inspiration from the slow food movement. It's a reminder of the need for place-based human-scale democracy, not that we think everything should move more slowly. More time between decisions, longer meetings. So as my co-author and I collected success stories from across the U.S., that local decision-making that's inclusive and deliberative and empowered help us actually become less polarized and more productive. And so because of this slow democracy is ironically often the fastest method. So why is this? Why does slow help? I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Whether we are talking about local or national issues, human beings have a problem. And the problem is that sometimes it is hard to listen to people that we don't agree with. Does anybody else have this problem? So brain science shows us that we all suffer from this problem. And there is some remarkable science. Here's the local inclusive, deliberative and empowered. My jargon slide. So there was a well-known study in 2006, but it had been replicated many times since then. So researchers wired up some voters to explore what exactly happens inside the brain when we receive new information, especially if we perceive that that information doesn't fit our worldview. So they took a group of self-described Republicans and Democrats and they subjected them to unflattering information about their own party's candidates. Now, according to their MRIs, when subjects were confronted with information that contradicted their biases, their brains actually under-processed the information. The prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for conscious reasoning, hardly even fired. Are these some movement activated? Yeah. I told you we needed cookies. Motion activated. All right. So their brains were actually, they were taking this information and the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for conscious reasoning, it didn't even light up. And instead, it was the emotional circuits of the brain that lit up. When they were hearing things, Republicans were hearing bad things about Republicans or Democrats were hearing bad things about Democrats. Basically, participants' brains used emotion to ignore the information that they didn't want to hear but that they couldn't discount intellectually. So remember, this is a physiological reaction and it happens to all of us. Jonathan Haidt is a, this is a great book, by the way, that I just mined. He explains, he's a social scientist and explains that this idea of us them, that us them mentality, it actually is innate. Identifying who is on my team and who isn't. It gave us a survival advantage, right, back when we were banding together, you know, in tribes for protection, thank you very much, evolution. So Haidt explains that in the case of many of our polarizing values, so liberal conservative, rural urban, we aren't just talking about opinions. We're talking about worldviews, they're part of our identities and we are physiologically wired to defend them. So if we want to live in a world where we can take in new information, we need to frame the conversation in a way that doesn't challenge a person's identity. And that takes patience and a certain amount of big-heartedness. Catherine Schultz, who has a wonderful TED talk on this, by the way, she is the author of the book Being Wrong, she has comically pointed out that when we encounter someone we disagree with, we often react with a three-point scale. So the first thing, if you disagree with me, I think, oh, you just need more information. But what if I generously share my facts and you still disagree? I might move on to number two. Okay, the idiot assumption, because you have all the information, you're too moronic to see things my way. Now if that turns out not to be true, if the person we disagree with has all the information and they turn out to be pretty smart, we might move on to number three. You know perfectly, the truth perfectly well, you're distorting it for your own malevolence. Notice that this ladder leaves no room for the most common of human realities, which is that intelligent people of goodwill sometimes disagree and that in fact the only solution, uncomfortable as it may be, is to sit down and listen to each other. So it's especially important now at this moment in history because many of today's hot topics, affordable housing, setting wind turbines, school closures, they're so complex that they are what analysts call wicked problems. Wicked problems. Science can't give us one right answer, partly because of those competing identities and those underlying values. And it sounds so hard, but here's the thing, the world is full of what they call polarities, two crucial interdependent but contradictory variables that have to coexist. It's not easy, but we manage them every day. Parents have to be firm and flexible. A good boss is both grounded and visionary. Organizations have to embrace continuity and change here in Vermont since 1788, right? We somehow functioned under the paradoxical motto, freedom and unity, contradictory, right? I can't be completely free if I'm going to be unified with everyone. I can't be unified with you if we also want complete freedom and yet we manage. We manage because we navigate, we navigate each decision. Issues become wicked when we're managing multiple polarities at once. So you've got a town planner who has to consider one group's interest in, say, open space and wildlife, but another's interest in economic vitality and another's in affordable housing. There's no single solution that's going to please everyone. The trick is that rather than thinking about solving wicked problems, we need to think about managing them, naming the competing values, exploring the trade-offs, doing that hard work that we do at town meeting, of finding the best balance in each case. There's a great professor in Colorado, Colorado State University professor Martin Carcasson, and he explains that most of the time when we problem solve, we use one of two models, either expertise, bring in the experts, right? They'll tell us what to do, or advocacy, right? Organizing campaign, one side's going to win and that'll solve everything. Wicked problems are inherently different. They don't respond to technical solutions. They don't respond to advocacy, but they do respond to the slow, trusting, face-to-face communication. And as Carcasson has noted, the solutions begin when we recognize that with wicked problems, it's the problem that's wicked and not the people. By focusing on our communities of place with slow democracy in our town meetings, we are focusing on what we share. Our community is literally our commons, and this focus helps us find that common ground. So I have a few quick tips on what we can do to get the best out of our town meetings, but first I'll just quickly point out three surprise dividends that researchers have found about deliberative engagement. And the first one is civic health and citizen responsibility. So there's some great research on this. We find that when communities deliberate, or for example, juries, when people have participated in a jury, that measurably increases their voting rates for the rest of their lives. When we have made a binding decision, we have become part of government, it changes us. Deliberation also has proven to help us become more informed about public issues and solutions. We are more likely to want to pursue more information after we've deliberated or more likely to trust public institutions or more likely to volunteer. Deliberation can strengthen that sense of community that we've talked about, that sense of respect in helping us look beyond stereotypes. And it actually can open our minds to new information, which means that new solutions can emerge. So it changes us individually. There's a lot of research that's shown a link between citizen involvement and the local economy. For instance, there was a study that showed a correlation between engagement and community resilience against unemployment. So that's a plus as well. And then this one, of course, makes sense. Civically engaged communities are more resilient in times of emergency. And you know, Tropical Storm Irene or Sandy, we realized very quickly that Vermont was full of citizen leaders. People who are accustomed to taking responsibility, not waiting for government to come and rescue them. We rescued each other. And this is one of the most low-cost ways to protect ourselves against problems by taking on those leadership roles, whether the problems are meteorological or social or even political. Strengthening community engagement helps us solve them. So our town meeting is kind of like our historic buildings. It can always be updated. It can always be improved. New insulation, new solar panels. But it's not a tear down. The bones are strong. So I'll move really quickly through some tips on town meeting. And I'm especially going to move quickly because the Woodbury Town Meeting Committee has been doing a lot of this work. So this is, I really want to applaud and reinforce what folks are already doing here. But if there are any ideas here, we can come back to any of them if you want more information. If you see any that inspire you, you can get involved too. And a lot of these are good throughout the year. So town meeting is one day a year, but there's 364 other days we can beef up democracy as well. So first one, childcare. We have statistics very clearly showing that this can increase participation, measurably especially among women. Boom, childcare. Do it. Highlight the issues. You know, there's always something interesting on a town meeting warning, but we frequently maybe accidentally hide it, oftentimes in the budget. So maybe select boards, you know, would just like not necessarily to attract attention to things, or sometimes it's just a matter of efficiency. But you know, if you've increased the amount you're paying the sheriff to address speeding or if you've decreased the road salt, that's the kind of stuff people are interested in. And you can publicize it. You know, here's what's interesting about the budget this year. You can use front porch form. If you're really brave, and I've seen select boards do this, you can separate those articles out as a separate article. They disembed them from the budget. And just say, hey, look at this one. What do you think? Timing is important. Vermont town meetings by law can happen. They happen the first Tuesday in March or any of the three days proceeding. So Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. This is a town by town decision. It very much depends on the demographics of your community. How many commuters do you have? How far do they travel? Definitely factor in school break. If you switch to a Saturday and that Saturday is embedded within school break, that can be problematic. I know they found that in Jericho. I'm not sure what to think about. Sometimes think that they think maybe Saturday could work. Others think that maybe a weeknight can work. They discover that people really guard their free time. So maybe not a Saturday, maybe an evening. You could start your time meeting at 4 or 4.30. And then finish up in time for a community supper. So there are a lot of different options. And you can experiment with this over time. And see which ones. I would really urge you to literally count the number of people who come and see if you can find some solution that actually improves things. This is a picture of the Bethel's operators manual. I've got a couple of Middlesex operators manuals as here. And these are, you know, hey, your town, your car comes with an operators manual. Your blender comes with one. Why not your town, right? And it can be printed. It can also be something that's on a website. And I was excited to hear that the Woodbury town meeting committee is considering creating an operators manual. What does the planning commission do? What's the difference between planning and zoning? What's the deal with dog licenses? You know, put it all in there. And what it means to live in this town sometimes doesn't always have to do with the municipal, things the municipal does. So it could be recreation. A top recommendation is to create a committee that focuses on democratic engagement. And Woodbury has created one, so congratulations. This is great. These are committees, they're not intended to advocate for, you know, vote yes on the town plan. The idea is to support good process. And the Vermont Institute for Government has a bunch of resources that can be useful to committees like that. Let's see here. I definitely want to welcome newcomers. Let's see here. I'm going to go to technology. In the age of Zoom, a lot of people are asking, can we offer remote town meeting participation? And the simple answer is yes. As long as you offer an in-person meeting, you can have a camera at your town meeting. People can watch from home. It could be a simpler Zoom, more formal, like involving local cable TV station. The thing is that people cannot vote if they're from home. And that's because as we discussed earlier, town meeting is not just a public hearing, it's a legislature making binding decisions. And so voter identification is crucial. And the state has not yet determined a system that they're confident in. I suspect that this is something that will change. The technology exists so it's just a matter of the law catching up. Let's see. I wanted to do, oh yeah, this is a beautiful one. This is an antique ballot box from Peacham. It's so pretty. People in order for democracy to thrive, folks need multiple points of entry. So before anyone is going to go to a community meeting, they need to love the community. I love that Woodbury has a pie breakfast, other annual traditions. These things are crucial in welcoming people. So it's really important. The conservation commission might organize trail building where families can bring their kids, and maybe some shovels. The historical society hosts a festival where they hear the stories, tour historic buildings, artifacts. All of those kinds of things make people confident that they live in a place. I mentioned eating. Is that going to have a nice picture? Yes. Eating. Yes. I'm for it. Town meetings are a great time to honor volunteers, enjoy, celebrate, give awards, food, the meal afterwards, coffee breaks, whatever it takes. Breaking bread together helps people see each other as individuals. And I do want to, we want to actively welcome everyone, young and old, newcomers, old timers, all abilities. There are lots of ways to do this. So East Montpelier instituted a welcome new voter letter. Every year they request the list of new additions to the checklist from the town clerk, and they send out a letter explaining how town meeting works. It's really crucial to recognizing welcome immigrants and refugees, new Americans, consider whether you may have translation needs in your materials or at the meeting. Keep in mind Vermont's population is aging. Consider whether physical accessibility to the meeting space and the sound system, what we were just talking about, whether it meets everyone's needs. And of course I did mention this graphic guide. I'm excited about this. This is a, the idea here is to welcome all Vermonters into participatory democracy. So even Vermonters who prefer to look at comics. And so it's great for middle school and up. This is what happens when you live in a state that is home for the Center for Cartoon Studies. And also it's a collaboration with the Humanities Council and Vermont Secretary of State's office. So I had so much fun working with this team. And a lot of adults have told me that they learned something from this. There was something in here that they didn't know. So bring it to your book group. And speaking of youth involvement in our town, in our town we recruit young people. We've got to move around again. We actually have six graders who run the microphones and they will trot around the room carrying those microphones. Awesome, yeah. And you know we just thank them with an ice cream cone gift certificate. But you know honestly I think they do it for the glory. And it's kind of like the Senate pages. I think that they actually keep everyone a little bit more civil. Because we know that we actually are the grownups in the room. We have had students start the meeting by singing the state song. And we always have a new voter read a loud, a civil invocation at the beginning of town meeting. And we have one, we have one here. Maverick Murphy is here. A brand new, going to be voter. You're 17, is that right? Yeah, so about to be voter who is going to share. Are you willing to come up? Share a civil invocation with us that could lead out a town meeting. Okay, welcome to town meeting. We have come together in civil assembly as a community in a tradition that is older than our state itself. We come together to make decisions about our community. As we deliberate, let us advocate for our positions but not at the expense of others. Let us remember that there is an immense gap between saying I am right and saying I believe I am right. And that our neighbors with whom we disagree are good people with hopes and dreams as true and as high as ours. And let us always remember that in the end, caring for each other in this community is of far greater importance than any difference we may have. Welcome. Thank you. That is a beautiful way to begin a meeting and it's a beautiful way to end this presentation. I think for Monarch know that we're in this together. We're in it for the long haul. So thank you for your work in keeping your community strong far into the future. Questions? Discussion? Our front porch forum is affecting this kind of environment because I know in Calis it has been blowing up over a couple specific things that are coming up at the town meeting and it's all been really civil and really interesting and I know it's not completely inclusive because it's internet and anything. Right. Has that been on your radar? Yeah. I personally and professionally am a huge fan of front porch forum and one of the big differences between front porch forum and other social media. If you think about Facebook or some of these other tools they are designed, the Facebook model is designed to keep you on Facebook. So it's designed to click and then click again and keep going and oh I found out this and oh here's a link and the next YouTube video, et cetera, et cetera. Front porch forum is specifically designed to get you out from your computer. You read from porch forum and you're like oh I need to go borrow that canoe or oh my gosh I need to go help bring that heifer that escaped or you know all of the different things that get you out into the community and it's also moderated. You know real live renters whose job it is to read all of those posts that go on make sure that they are you know as a moderator I can tell you you know it's like it's hard work. Make sure everybody stays civil doesn't do any personal attacks. They do occasionally have to you know return posts and tell folks here's our rules and please write back again when you're ready to follow the rules which is it creates it's a very it's a very different tool in that way. So the front porch forum has done research that definitely says that people who use front porch forum say that they are better informed than they were before. So I'm a huge fan with those qualifications. Fantastic. I think you explained to me that there's been a study conducted where the brain, working the brain, the mind when people come together maybe in a specific setting or in a group their mind seeks common ground does that sound familiar? I mean I think that there's I mean I mentioned some of the brain science that goes into the deliberative process and sort of what happens when we are just plain old given information and then what happens when we actually chew on it together and that there's a difference. You know human beings there's some very annoying habits of the human mind and the processes that we construct can exacerbate our least good qualities or they can bring out the better angels of our nature and the structures themselves can have a huge impact on that and we can sort of be cavalier about it and just say oh well people are just people are just crappy or some people are like that but in fact the structure matters a lot and structures that allow everybody to talk so small good processes which I would love to see us use and there's a lot of innovations we could do at town meeting and I would love to see us break into small groups for some of the naughtier issues and then come back again. We have to suspend the rules but I know we could do it but in any case when we're at a human scale like a small town level a lot of those conversations are happening they're happening at the post office they're happening at the store and the sidelines at the soccer game and the town meeting itself is the decision making point but it was never intended to be the only meeting that happens during the course of the year and so I think that is why town meeting works better in small towns than in larger ones. Large towns by the way we have some examples and all those in favor Burlington has wards and the wards have neighborhood planning assemblies and so there are ways that you can take a large political body break it down into town sized groups and take some of the lessons from town meeting and apply them. Is there data that shows how voting with ballots differs from voting in town meeting? Is there data that shows if maybe people change political orientation or is it that significant that people will change their minds about issues or is it more about debating and being together? That's a really great question I think that the main research that I'm aware of is research about what happens to us when we sit together and chew on issues together so the actual fact of whether I raised my hand to vote or put a piece of paper in I think is less crucial than what led up to it and in fact Massachusetts where Australian ballot doesn't exist I just want to say for town meetings they have a town meeting system and if your town is ready to move away from town meeting you can move to a representative town meeting like we have in Brattleboro where people are elected to attend town meeting and have that deliberation or you can change to a city but there is no Australian ballot there is no system in Massachusetts where people when you come into the meeting sometimes have these little they're handheld devices and when it's time to vote you use the handheld device so that they're you're not saying I or nay you're just pressing the button and the results show up which is a way to it's an electronic way to use the paper ballot which we have in Vermont any town meeting you can have that but this is a quicker way so that's a and I don't know if there have been studies on whether it affects people you still get the deliberation I think is the important piece of that something we could definitely look at in Vermont just to report back to my daughter about how I felt at town meeting in terms of like do I go in with certain things I'm going to vote on I'm not going to change my mind no matter what anyone says that's not the case for me even if it didn't change my vote that day I continue to think about what the people said and it informs a lot of conversations that we have at the house so I do feel like it does make a difference in terms of people's evolution of thinking that's something that I did a lot of interviews when I was in Switzerland looking at the way all Swiss towns they're called communes and every Swiss town is run by a town meeting even Zurich, 350,000 people has a representative town meeting at town parliament and one of the things that people said again and again in Switzerland was that the voice of the minority was really important in informing decisions even if technically these guys won and these guys lost there was always going to be a revisitation of policies throughout time and knowing that it wasn't just casting a ballot you actually heard the voices and understood the arguments of people who were in the minority helped inform policies going forward not to be a hard word it's a confusing question but I watched the town meeting here very last year and watched some of the discussion about whether we have it or not the reason is why people opting to not want to have a town meeting and those that did and I guess among this group probably I don't know for sure but it's likely that we can hear a supportive town meeting I don't know that to the face but but what's your compelling reasons for people who don't want to have a town meeting what do you find that this is that with the people and what I heard in some of the objections for things like all we do is vote to buy more things or spend more money and we can't afford it and the people who want to go to the town meeting can and we feel awkward about saying no I don't know if that picks exactly what you said but there seems to be a thread of that involved so what you're saying is there's a sense or there was a sense in that or discussion that folks who didn't want town meeting felt that if they switched to the ballot that they might be able to defeat some articles I know we didn't reject it just on Woodbury but in general I've definitely heard that argument before so I'm not saying anything about Woodbury and was there a moment in Woodbury during COVID when you used the Australian ballot during COVID yeah so one or two years and how did that go did everything pass did some things not pass I think the total is maybe 20 or 30% more than our average town meeting numbers so you mean more people voted yeah so more people voted which is not at all uncommon it's so much easier to cast a ballot than it is to sit in these folding chairs for hours so more people voted but what was the the outcomes you're saying didn't change in our town we had the same experience that we got more people voting but the outcomes didn't change so that's one piece it's like we accidentally experimented for two years with that argument if only I could cast a ballot things would be different in this town and we accidentally found out at least in I haven't heard of a lot of dramatic shifts in outcomes because of switching to Australian ballot so I think that's an important piece but the fairness piece really resonates for me there are people who say look we get more people when we vote with a ballot than we do when we have a meeting and more democracy is better and I get that and I think that what's valuable, and this is actually a workshop that I'm working on developing right now is having a discussion where we actually rather than meeting versus ballot let's talk about the merits of democratic quantity and the merits of democratic quality because I think this is a case of the good guys versus the good guys I think this is a case where we actually agree that we would really like more people involved and we also value hearing the minority we value seeing each other as people we value being able to change our own minds and when we have that conversation likewise we need to have the other two polls which are there's such a thing as the overuse of democratic quantity there's such a thing as the overuse of relying on equality and once we can actually parse out that those four polls we can start to talk about how can we get the benefits of this, the quantity that we want and equality and basically what we're trying to create together is a third way and that answer is going to be different for every town it's going to be different for your demographics and it's going to be different for any number of things and for some towns it might mean switching to Australian ballot but if it does we need to know what we are giving up in terms of that quality and how are we going to make up for it how are we going to make up for it if we're going to switch to ballot how are we going to get together in ways that are meaningful and empowered where we can hear each other's viewpoints not just social things which we all know human beings mostly only come to social things when we know people so it's less likely to be that population and there are answers to that but we need to craft them it's almost like a Jeffersonian moment if you can handle a reference to the founders how can we create a better town meeting of a better democracy or if we're going to stick with town meeting as Woodbury has so far decided then how can we make sure that people feel welcome how can we make sure that they have things like the operators manual what are some ways that we can enrich our democracy throughout the year so that we can hopefully even increase the number of folks who come to that meeting Berlin for years and I only had a missed one town meeting and that was the day my son was born until they changed to Australian ballot it changed the town completely and my sense of community totally changed and I found that I was a less informed voter because boy you could have those old people with their charts going after every single thing and you say oh well they ever end but you learned a lot and so I think it's a huge change if you lose that and once it's gone your community can change dramatically and that scares me thank you for sharing that that's a really important perspective that you've actually lived through then and I've heard folks tell that story in a sense we kind of know what a town looks like that doesn't have a town meeting because it looks like one of the rest of America and we saw that argument, that visual of people sort of yelling at each other human beings need ways to connect in place and town meeting is definitely not the only way that's where we wrote the book Slow Democracy but it is it's a remarkable way we need to know what we have thoughts or questions I'd just like to just state something you told me when we were talking about having this meeting you said that democracy is not something we have but something we do it's like gardening every year it's never ends, thankfully it never ends so I just wanted to thank you for that thought that's been with me now Francis Warlapay I think said democracy is not something we have it's something we do and it has really stuck with me and I do sometimes it feels we were kind of joking it's like oh my gosh it's relentless right it's like do we have to make another decision and didn't we already make that deal didn't we already dopped that plan five years ago and I have to dopped it again it's got these changes and it's like gardening right if we could just see it as oh we have tilled the soil and we are ready for new growth then we can feel hopefully more positive about it it was absolutely intended to be a cycle that we are constantly it's never done and that's a good I don't have it unless you practice it because it's a skill just like gardening you have to practice it and that's where classes like civets in high schools and things that they do in the elementary school are really important because it gives children and it gives young people the ability to practice that democracy otherwise like my husband it's important to say democracy means so many things to different people so you have to even have those discussions of what does democracy mean to you in a specific time in your life and how do you voice how do you practice yeah I interviewed people for all those in favor Professor Brian gave me high participation towns and I went and interviewed folks in those towns and sort of looking for what were some trends and one of the things that I kept hearing was people who had gone to town meetings when they were kids and they said I didn't understand what was going on but I thought it was you know people were you know grown ups were sassing each other and this is in their minds this is what democracy looks like it looks like people figuring stuff out together and I think that kind of modeling is super important which is one of the reasons I got so excited about working on the comic book because it could have been and there are comic books about the three branches of government but it's all about participation it's about all the different ways you can dig in so yeah last weekend with my picture on it to every voter somebody is doing that for me it makes me very uncomfortable but all my kids came in today and were like this teen we saw your picture in our mailbox and I had adults come to me and say yeah they asked me about what we were doing and then we had to tell them what a town clerk was and what an election was and I was like even if I don't win even if nothing goes right from this point on all these elementary kids would think that was really exciting yeah wow fantastic yes Craftsbury I know did a they used the comic book I think with the fifth graders and then they invited the town clerk and the town rep Catherine Sins to come in and talk with them and I think it was the town clerk oh it was a select board member and she was like yeah I got to sit and they asked me questions like cats but knowing that you can reach out and touch your democracy is a really really different feeling I think that but I mean when you talk with people who come from elsewhere even secretaries of state who visit Vermont and tour with the Vermont secretary of state Jim Douglas used to talk about this the other secretaries of state were just like oh my brain is exploding I don't understand there's so much democracy here I can't believe you give people all this power and Jim was like oh yeah this has been very inspiring for me and encouraging and what the young lady said here reminded me of when my wife and I arrived in Vermont you know the welcoming for a from the Bronx it was the town meeting you know what we referred to then is the native Vermonters who took the under the wing under their wing and one of the first ones that I met carried a little a copy of the US Constitution and would always say this is against the US Constitution of some policy being discussed in the newspapers but I wonder what's your opinion if you think that democracy in general not just in town meetings is under attack within the United States and I want to reference and I can't remember the document but it appeared in the US strategic defense plan back in the 70s I think and what the military was saying to the elected officials was that the question of the 21st century was not going to be there was too little democracy but that too much of a lot of people would become disenchanted unattached from their political leaders in their parties and that they would demand more democracy in the sense of more inclusion in decision making more sharing of the natural resources and I'm wondering if that control attack and I think the military took a certain effort on elements within the body politic and things like town meetings and they are I think the building block that's where we learn I think that they're the building block as well and it's one of the reasons that I put my energy as whatever I call myself social change practitioner at the local level because this is where I see islands of sanity and if we can connect those islands of sanity maybe we can create a continent my idea is that this is what this data is showing is that human beings know how to do this we certainly can be inspired to do it wrong to be inspired and led toward more their authoritarian and less democratic processes but we are innately social animals and we are innately empathic and so the better systems that we can create to engender those better qualities I mean frankly the more hope there is that this is a really scary time for democracy it's a really scary time for democracy and it's one of the reasons that I'm so passionate about local democracy I just have an observation having been in the Woodbury town for a while and I think that what I remember about those early early 70s when I first was a newcomer to town was that the descent was often against the newcomers in town and I don't feel that way anymore I think I've seen a lesson I've also really enjoyed getting to know people from year to year because you may not see those people but in a way you're building on their information their experience their positions and it doesn't always change my point of view but it certainly broadens it and it makes me respect them in a different way especially since we seem to be having a pretty civil conversation most of the time but yeah it is an evolution of a town if you that's very rich I think we should keep it going as it is so important well if you could bring a neighbor who hasn't been I mean I think that there is a generational passing of knowledge and passing of tradition and of really culture and Vermont has a town meeting culture even people in Burlington who have never been to a town meeting live in a state where the expectations are first Tuesday and March there will be decisions made at the local level and so there's a sense just like Colorado has a cowboy culture New England has a town meeting culture and the better we can model that and bring new people into it the stronger it will be these cookies are just like calling me how are you guys doing something to note is the last two counties when we had Australian ballots the state paid for those ballots to be mailed to everyone on the checklist and so you know there were like 400 out of the 700 people who had their ballots and their repaid envelopes and everything else they didn't bother to return we had less than half we mailed our ballots as well and we had some hot stuff on our warning too which tends to increase participation and so it's hard to know is that because everybody's just super happy and they're like I don't need to vote everything's going great or is it because they think they don't matter or is it just about lost it's hard to know but it's really not uncommon so ballots if we pick that as a solution we need to know it's not a solution to everything well thank you, thanks so much