 Last scramble. Hi, good afternoon. Welcome to New America. I'm Mark Schmidt. I run the political reform program here at New America. And it's really a huge honor to have you all as part of this event to discuss and celebrate the new book, Civic Power, by Sebel Rahman and Holly Russon Gilman, who have been integral partners of our work over many years. Holly is a fellow in the political reform program. Sebel is the president and CEO of Demos. But before that, among other things, he was a New America fellow and worked with our program. And this book is many years in the making, in their lives both here and in their academic careers before that. So really, I think the magnitude of this book, I've been kind of hearing about it for years. These are the first copies. I think yesterday was the first time anybody's actually seen a copy of it. So you're all off the hook for not having read it yet. Although special prizes, if you have, figured out a way to read it. But really, the scale of this book is really important because I think there are a lot of discussions about civic engagement and participation that focus on either government's role in bringing people in or community organizing as a kind of adversarial activity or experiments and deliberative democracy and different kinds of approaches. And what I think that Holly and Sebel's work in many ways kind of brings all those together into one conversation and looks at both the challenges and the new ways of doing work that can strengthen our democracy and the scope of the examples that they're using and the theory that they're bringing to it is really unprecedented to me. So we're just gonna, they'll talk about the book a little bit, I'll push them and challenge them a little bit and then we'll open it up. I know from looking at the list that there are a lot of people in this room who I'm interested to hear your ideas to and so we'll make sure we take some time for that and then try to wrap up in time to spend a little time together afterwards in the reception. So again, thank you all for coming and let me turn it over to our authors. Thank you, Mark. Thanks everybody for coming. I'll kick us off and toss to Holly in just a moment but first just an extra thank you to the Demos team, the New America team for putting this together. New America for having us in this amazing space. It's always nice to be back here in DC and in the space here with old friends and meeting new friends who are here tonight. So thank you all. I wanna open by just laying out a couple of kind of highlights about what we're trying to get at with the book and where we are in this moment and then Holly and I will sort of ping-pong back and forth just lay out some of the more specific examples but just to zoom out for a second, right? I think when we first started working on this book we were thinking about the crisis of democracy but this was actually even well before the 16 election and a lot of the concerns that we face now feel very sharp and magnified but one of the starting points for us in this project is that they were kind of here all along, right? That the crisis of democracy is not just a product of, excuse me, it's not just a product of the 2016 election or the particular occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue but it's really a deeper chronic and systemic one that has to do with how our larger civic infrastructure and democratic infrastructure has eroded or been dismantled over time and how political power has systematically been concentrated along lines of race, along lines of income level and that's really a lot of what we're trying to unpack in the book and so a few kind of points to just start us off with one the first just to put on the table, we'll unpack this in a moment is, I think as we put this project together we can realize that one of the big fights to fight here is actually within the democracy reform community writ large itself, that too much of what passes for democracy reform is not particularly democratic actually and it's not especially good at empowering we the people at building durable forms of voice in our communities at actually transforming our political institutions in the way that they need to be transformed so that's the first provocation. The second is that if we're serious about democracy and about power what that actually means that we have to look much more expansively beyond the sort of familiar list of democracy reform topics so we actually don't spend very much time in the book talking about things like campaign finance reform or voting rights and rights restoration even though those are critical fights which we kind of elsewhere in our other work and certainly in both of our day to day work are very much deeply involved in but we really deliberately wanted to focus this book on the kind of larger ecosystem of what it takes for democracy to actually work what's happening in communities on the ground that are trying to build the kind of durable organization needed to create real lasting civic power what's happening within bureaucracies and cities and states where the actual business of governing happens and who is actually in the room and who actually has part of influence those decisions so it's this whole range of stuff that often gets overlooked I think in our kind of more familiar conversations about democracy so let me pause there and talk a little bit about some of the specific pieces and then I'll come back. That's awesome, well just to echo thank you all so much it's so nice to see so many great experts we admire and friends and family and big thank you to the Demos New America team and a big shout out to Mark and Elena for all their hard work and I think we're really excited to have this be an interesting conversation with all of you because for us this project is about how do we really elevate some of these ideas and make sure it's a value to all of the different communities I think on a meta level this is a desiloing project across a few different silos and I think one of those big silos is between sort of civil society organizing and government bureaucracy so I'll talk a little bit about that and you know I think as Seville mentioned part of what we realized in doing this project was way before Trump was even a thought we were doing a lot of work on the ground with organizers and realizing that the sort of thin mobilization between elections was sort of problematic in terms of really building longer term civic voice and civic power and so I think the question for us is well so what are some of the underlying hypotheses that the traditional democracy reform or good government movement where are they breaking down so I'll share with you here in a nice think tank setting four of the hypotheses that we sort of go through in the book and sort of demonstrate why each of them have their own validity but they're not getting to the whole picture and part of what we do in the book is create sort of an infrastructure approach and offer an infrastructure theory of civic power that really connects new models of organizing with new forms of policy making so sort of in this good governance camp one of the big theories is sort of the civility hypothesis if we could all just be more civil to one another we would fix our democracy this is where you get sort of third party candidates or centrist candidates, okay another one is the transparency hypothesis and a lot of us including myself we worked on open government and we believed sort of sharing more information sunlight is the best disinfectant and that would sort of solve some of the challenges of democracy and there's a lot of things that are compelling there whether it's open data or freedom of information but there are limits third one is the rationality hypothesis right, there you go and I think you know I look at it in part sort of the right wage a really successful assault on government for a long time and so the response was okay we're just gonna make it really rational we're gonna show you how rational government is with evidence and with really rational decision making and then you'll all be convinced and sort of a final hypothesis is what we call the hijacking hypothesis which is this idea that if we could get money out of politics if we could fix the corruption then things will go back to their normal democratic functioning sort of the snapback quality of American democracy and I think part of this project really thinks that you know what, that's not gonna be enough there are systemic challenges to our democracy systemic racism, systemic inequality there are big problems from climate change to urban housing that really require building more long term durable power so in the book we sort of challenge that good governance ethos head on and then we say well so what happens in its wake and I think part of the book the more we're sort of talking about it and again this is our first public book event so we need all of your feedback if this sort of resonates and makes sense but it's sort of thinking about a new model for the administrative state you know there was a reason the 20th century administrative state worked really well this idea of sort of insulated technocratic expertise and there were reasons for that but the question is you know today where we find ourselves does that model work and I think a challenge with that model is that it makes individuals feel powerless it doesn't enable people to be agents in their communities and yet there are people every day in their communities coming together and organizing around issues that really resonate with them and so one of the sites we look at in the book is sort of urban power and what's happening in cities but also how you connect the issues that really affect people such as public housing and affordable housing with broader issues like data governance and who owns your information and that's some of the work that one of the groups the partnership for working families is really thinking about in our book and so how you sort of take these new models and think about building more long-term durable power and then how you work to create those models inside governance and we look a lot on the local level because that's where a lot of the innovations are occurring in the US and we think about you know how can we have more collaborative models of governance how can we have co-creation and really put pressure create hooks and levers to those inside city halls so that they're held accountable and they find ways to engage people and engage their communities and so we look at a lot of new offices and policies that are happening in cities and think about where are their opportunities for sort of embedding them inside city hall and scaling them. Great. So a couple of other examples to add. So if you think about what Holly just walked through these sort of these four hypotheses of kind of conventional democracy reform you know it's not that they have nothing to offer for the idea of democracy but it's a really thin idea of democracy and so compare two models of governance of policy making one is you know you're familiar town hall style mode of civic engagement government is making a policy we put out a notice in common or we have a town hall we've now gathered public input and then we're good to go. Now setting aside for a moment this kind of parks and rec style like what actually happens in a town hall think about what that way of doing policy actually looks like in practice it's who is gonna be most likely to show up whose voices are most likely to be heard and it's going to be wealthier and predominantly wider communities that are able to do that and then even if they're heard the policy makers are ultimately not required to respond in any meaningful way right the notice and comment can be taken as an advisement but it's not actually directly shaping the decision making. By contrast some of the examples we lift up in the book are examples of really exciting powerful organizers on the ground who like Holly was mentioning where part of the ask part of the thing that folks are campaigning for is actually a shift to how policy is made so it's not just about giving input to the zoning board it's actually having communities of color working families having a seat on the board that makes the decision about where the development goes in the first place or it's having those communities actually part of the enforcement and monitoring of wage standards or of kind of public safety requirements and these are kind of new models of direct community control where it's not just input to the decision maker but actually a share of governing power. The other example I want to put on the table shifting up to the side of organizing and civic engagement is that you know we especially after the 2008 election that give rise to the Obama administration there was a lot of interest and excitement which Holly did a lot of work on too going into this book around data and civic organizing that you know we've got these new platforms that allow us to quickly mobilize lots of people and get folks out either onto the streets or into a campaign and that's all fine and good but there's a big difference between the sort of like flash in the pan boom and bust cyclical turning out of folks and the actual building of long term muscle on the ground that empowers people to push for their views and push for their ideas in between elections and in a sustained way and so in the book we talk about some of the contrasting examples for example we talk about how kind of new models of labor organizing both in traditional labor unions but in sort of alt-labors forms of worker organizing that have tried to build more of sustained power among workers we talk about in the book some examples of groups that are operating at the city level or even in the rural level where the focus is less on individual issues and more on building that infrastructure that allows communities to have voice and have power over the long haul and we can talk more about both of those examples or any of those examples in a moment but I think the bottom line for us is that whether it's in policymaking or in kind of traditional civic engagement that conventional notion of thin democracy, right? Consult folks in the town hall or just mobilize folks around an election that that's an illusion it's not what real democracy requires and so to get to the level of transformative change we actually need a much deeper investment in different institutions, different infrastructures I don't know if you want to say anything Yeah and I think just the compliment to that is thinking beyond sort of you know the elections on the policy front to governance and that's why we focus on governance as sort of the second part of this story of building civic power that what happens on the ground and how policies are made and who is a part of that co-creation is really important and it requires a fundamental shift in this sort of you know we're just delivering better services to you model it requires we're gonna be sort of working together with many more opportunities for feedback and engagement in sort of a it's not just about this transactional relationship it's really about building deeper levels of trust and communication while also making good on the promise of what I've been calling a public public sector One last thing I know we should open it up we also in the closing parts of the book we also actually talk a fair bit about the kind of different communities of practice that are involved in making this kind of democracy real and we can talk more about that in the Q&A but just to kind of put a flag in the ground around that part of our punchline for the book is if we are serious about building power in the ways that we're talking about that means that all the different communities that are involved in doing the day-to-day work of democracy whether it's policymakers whether it's funders whether it's organizers that we're actually gonna have to all do our work a little bit differently right policymakers have to approach the idea of policy not as being about getting the right answer but actually as being about serving the right people and organizing has to be not about that flash in the pan getting kind of folks out on the street but actually building the deep relationships and associations and organizations that can outlast anyone election and then for those of us in the think tank space or in the civic engagement space or in the funder space that actually means we have to resource folks on the ground totally differently if we actually want this to happen in the real world. So then they will possibly- And totally differently means? Means, it's a long-term patient we can get into that but I think for example when we're talking about organizing actually resourcing groups on the ground for the long-term to do base building work to do power building work that isn't about a particular issue and isn't about a particular election when it comes to policy making it means actually changing who occupies these different offices at the staff level and in the bureaucracy not just in terms of electives changing the pipeline of where we recruit government and government officials from what their orientation is that it's not just about kind of expertise from the Kennedy School but it's actually about actually being from and responsive to and accountable to communities on the ground. And I think we could structure things any way we want. We just take for granted the way things are currently structured but in our conclusion section we talk about this sort of civic fellowship model which is about could we really be intentional with how we train people in a pipeline approach and offer rotational opportunities to be an organizer, to be in state and local government, to be in the philanthropic nonprofit sector. We can invest in sort of leadership and think about really building a more inclusive diverse pipeline and what this looks like at multiple stages and in multiple types of communities. I think multiple types of communities is kind of my question. Get in there, Martin. I mean it's easy to imagine the kind of co-governance you're talking about as a Tacoma Park, Brooklyn, Alameda County kind of thing. How does this look in a rural area, an area or areas where elected officials have kind of rigged a lot of things? I mean there is something to the hijacking hypothesis and part of the hijacking hypothesis is creating situations where elected officials in particular and then the people they appoint are really isolated from the feedback of large parts of their community by the way they've constructed districts or the way they're able to hoard money or a whole set of power relationships that have to be broken down first. So what do those different stories look like in different types of places? Yeah, I mean. Okay, great, great. I mean we'll open it up. I mean I think that would be my only question and then we'll open it up. So yeah, so just a quick thought on that too. I think one of the starting points for us in the book just to like, so first just to name for a second, right? The idea of community control and civic participation evokes very different images depending on where you sit, right? And you know, I live in Brooklyn and from New York and one of the things I often think about is like the difference between, is the community board hearing when the city is trying to build affordable housing is one experience of local democracy that is actually really problematic, right? Because that's a form of community engagement that actually serves to defend a set of elite interests or a set of, an existing set of economic inequalities when it's wealthier communities trying to squash the attempt to build new forms of housing that are trying to dismantle some of the systemic forms of racial and economic inequality in the city. But to me, I think the difference would be that model of the community board versus an example of like, what would it look like if the entire regional planning association or the entire zoning commission for the city were in fact composed of a truly inclusive set of voices from the city as a whole. Where you have working people, black and brown people on that board with power. And that's gonna look messy. It's not the idea of we get in a room and we have good, we have dialogue and we come to mutual understanding and then everybody gets along. I think our idea of democracy is actually pretty messy and conflictual, but our point is that that's how it should be. And when we try to sterilize democracy of those types of disagreements, what we end up doing is just reinscribing some of the existing hierarchies of privilege and power. And what we actually need to do is to build into our democratic institution the full range of diversity and disagreement and back and forth so that we can actually hash it out and so that everyone is part of the fight. I think when we talk about organizations in the book, the reason we talk about them is because they have infrastructure and power and we sort of take down a little bit the sort of idealized notion that technology is gonna hyper democratize the way people engage. And the here comes everybody model and just this concept that let 1,000 flowers bloom. Well, the challenge is, as Seville mentioned, then the usual suspects show up. And so part of why we have this sort of marriage between civil society and governance is to your question of who shows up. So participatory budgeting, right? Where it's been most successful, you see this all across the globe is where you have a strong civil society partner who is a genuine partner, not a lip service partner. And so in New York City, that's been community voices heard. A grassroots organizing group that works with low income women of color, primarily in public housing. And they've been able to say, this is a real thing and it's only going to be real if we're really serious about engaging and empowering people. But they also then work with people inside the city council who says, this is real dollars. This is real money that's being spent. And so when you come out, it's not just lip service. And I think that's where a partnership can enable people to really have voice and agency but it takes both of those because if it's just lip service, people know. If the rules are rigged, they're not going to engage. And there has to be some credibility behind that and that's why sort of the partnership is really powerful. So there are places where you sort of need to engage with the rules before you even have the possibility of the kind of civic engagement that you're thinking about. Is that up there? Yes, so if I'm hearing, if I think I'm hearing you right, Mark, it's sort of like, are you asking that it's about sort of remaking the political rules of the game first to make possible some of what we're talking about? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that, I mean, I fully appreciate all the hypotheses that Holly laid out and like set aside, not rejected. But I think there are points where those, and it is a narrow view to say, oh, it's all, it's just campaign fun. I mean, I spent a lot of my life on campaign finance reform. I fully aware, I'm fully aware of its limits, but there are structural and institutional, there are places where structures and institutions need to change before the kind of, people are kind of banging their heads against the wall. In a certain environment where it's like, come on in and that's great, but that's not always the norm. Yeah, and two things I would add to that, I think one is that, I don't think these necessarily are like temporally sequenced, right? So when we say we need to do some stuff before some other stuff, like, I think we should just be wary about that, right? Because I think it's one thing to say that, say, campaign finance reform or any one of the policy recommendations we might have by itself is not enough. I think that's true, but that's different from saying that things have to go in a particular order. So I do think it's notable, right, that a lot of the groups that we talk about in the book, and in fact, you know, in my own day to day work now through our work at Demos, we do a lot of work with movement leaders on the ground working in communities of color. And one thing that's really striking is that democracy reform doesn't happen in a sequence. It's for real communities and real people, all the issues are happening at the same time, right? The crisis of affordable housing and the crisis of mass incarceration and the crisis of climate justice are all happening simultaneous to the crisis of money and politics and the crisis of an unresponsive government. And that's actually where the power comes from, where the ideas like democracy reform become real. And I think we're often used to thinking about them as a separate set of issues that has to come first and that's more sort of technical, like we have technical designs about, is it gonna be a six to one match or a seven to one match, and all that's important. But I think part of what we're doing is when you flip it around and start from the standpoint of people themselves who are not empowered and who need to be empowered in a real democracy, all the issues actually connect. And that's where the energy for organizing comes from and that's where as we think about how governance should look, we want democracy to be embedded in the housing authority, in the water utility, in civilian oversight of the police. That's where democracy becomes real, so it's not a separate set of issues. I mean, I think it implies that there's a kind of narrative around structural institutional reform where the story isn't just like, you fix these things and you'll get single payer healthcare. Right, right, right. Because government will just be different. It's really a matter of saying these institutional structural reforms can totally change your experience of democracy in your participation as a citizen, but that's a big story to tell. That's a very big story. Let's open it up, I think we raise your hand. I'll call on you and then please wait for the microphone and Elena will bring the microphone and just say your name and whatever your most relevant institutional affiliation is, if you can, I appreciate that. I think in back row here. So I get the part about participation, engaging, people who would historically sort of outside the system, making sure they're inside the need for continuous funding, so it's not transactional, it's transformative. Demos has a set of guidelines on what's independent political power and we've been promoting that with the communities. But isn't that really the process? It's not the end, right? I mean, is democracy the end result that we're looking for or is it just a way of getting to things that we want? And how do you talk about the kind of... Democracy is really a means to an end and making sure we're focused on the end because there's probably lots of ways of getting there, right? So maybe democracy is useful and getting to some things and maybe not so useful to get to other things that we want. I'm appreciating the question. I'm also appreciating that Steve is on our board and for which we're grateful and we've been partying for a long time. So I think it's both, right? And I'll jump in here, but I think part of what got us interested in this set of questions in the first place and what animates so much of our work, both as individuals and in our institutional roles, right? Is that democracy is both an end and a process that we're so used to thinking about them as separate things that it can be easy to say, okay, our end is we want to solve the healthcare affordability crisis and that's a highly complicated issue we need. So to get there, we actually need a certain way of doing policy that kind of pulls together expertise and so on. And then pretty soon you start looking at a process of doing stuff that has certain features, right? That looks different. I think part of our starting point is that democracy is both critical to get to the end because without democracy you're missing so many of the voices that need to be part of the conversation, but it's also part of the practice of how we get to the end. And so it matters to us that we get there in a way that is about building long-term inclusive democratic voice, as opposed to just kind of cutting right to the, to what we might think is the right answer for the end but may not actually be the right answer for everybody. In the middle of the back row there. Sam Berger, Center for American Progress. Could you talk a little bit about the effect of feedback loops here? One of the things that I think would be really interesting about this is when people approach something, they look around the table and they're like, oh, whoever's at this table is important because they're at this table. And it was interesting, you know, Sebelius said, I think that this would be messy, right? That there are gonna be, not gonna be a bunch of people getting in a room just saying, Kumbaya, let's get out. And I think that's right at the beginning, but one of the ways that people exercise power is when they come in, everyone knows what they're gonna say. And everyone's sort of like, yeah, we gotta go along with this, right? Like there's a reason, like in the apropes fight right now, farmers need money and everyone's like, okay, farmers are gonna get money. Like what's the next thing we're gonna talk about? And there's not a big fight. And so can you talk a little bit about how if local communities have this representation, if they have a seat, if people have to keep coming to them every time they gotta get a vote from them, or you can't do anything, how that may legitimate certain points of views that right now aren't legitimated and how in fact that may lead to a less messy process over time as people sort of inculcate themselves and understand these viewpoints that right now they just don't have to deal with. It's a great point. And we have a lot of feedback experts here, so please jump in. I think it really requires, at least on the policy front, on the governance aspect, it requires opening up that aperture of who has a seat on the table, right? And so we've done a bunch of work here with Richmond's Office of Community Wealth Building and they sort of said, as we're making policy around poverty, why don't we have people who have experienced poverty serve and co-design the policy with us? And all of a sudden, that's who policy makers have become accountable to and that's where the feedback loop lies, the new urban mechanics in Boston. They're one of these innovation units, but they're also really committed to on the ground organizing and getting that feedback. So when they're building affordable housing units, they did a design charrette and they wheeled out sort of a 360 square foot little unit and had people walk through it and they did one-on-one interviews with people to understand what are their needs in their community. So suddenly people inside City Hall are accountable to people all over Boston, not just the squeakiest wheel, not just special interests. And I think over time that's how you build the feedback loops. And I think on the governance specifically, we have such a challenge of trust, we have such a deficit of trust and legitimacy and how people view the state for good reason, especially for extremely vulnerable populations, but then the opportunity is there to say that we need to be much more creative. So the New York Office of Public Engagement, when they're trying to get the word out, they're going door to door and they employ canvassers and field organizers and they go door to door to immigrants to say, here's what you're eligible to sign up for. Here's your appointment. I'm gonna remind you when your appointment is and I'm gonna make sure you get the benefits you need and that's a new feedback mechanism and a new way that people can engage with the state. Now of course it takes a lot of time, but I think we don't really have a choice. And if you talk to policymakers, they understand that this can help them do their job better and more effectively. Now probably not more efficiently and I think we just need to be honest about that and we just need to talk about some of these tensions and some of these trade-offs and some of the ways it's gonna be messy. I think time and time again, and when I'm sort of thinking about civic engagement, it is about process and it's about investing in those processes, especially so that new voices can come to the table, but that's not gonna be such a simple streamlined process, but ultimately it can help create better feedback loops that are more representative of our democracy and kind of have a positive reinforcing cycle. Just to draw out, I think, an important aspect of what you're saying is that I think we sometimes draw that distinction between the sort of decision-making element of government, the legislative side of government and the service delivery side. And I think one of the things that we've really begun to explore is the ways in which the service delivery side in people's everyday experience is actually part of their experience with democracy. So we had a year or so ago with Jamila Michener about her book about the ways in which people's experience of Medicaid affects their citizenship and of course there's a lot of other literatures and Metler and so forth about what when people aren't aware of that when benefits are too subtle that they don't kind of give people that engagement. And I think too often the service delivery conversation doesn't focus on feedback to your question. There hasn't been this circle around, you look at all the great work the Obama administration did, USDS, 18S, but then you talk to a veteran, we had a great USDS Department of Veteran Affairs, does a veteran know that this was how their benefits got changed? So we haven't invested in the feedback and we haven't really opened up that process to people and that has always felt like a really big missed opportunity to me. And just the service delivery aspect is important to kind of highlight, because I think there's there are two versions of, there are two versions of the feedback story, and I think we're drawing on one to tell the other. So one version of the feedback story is the thing that's missing is information about services or about communities and if we get the information flowing then we can get the policy right and then we can serve people properly. Another version of the story is the thing that's missing, which I think implicit in the way you frame the question, Sam, is that the thing that's missing isn't information, although it's that too, but the real thing that's missing is power, as in who do you actually have to engage? Because without their engagement, you cannot proceed. And those are two very different things. And I think part of what fascinated us in the book, we talk about this, Holly mentioned we talk about some of the Obama era experiments with service delivery and user interface kind of experiments and groups like the New Urban Mechanics Group in Boston. Part of what's fascinating about those groups that we pulled out in our case studies in the book is that many of them actually started as like we're gonna become more efficient by improving the flow of information, but what made it stick was that they actually became levers of power for the communities that were initially being reached out to in a service delivery mindset because of the center of gravity accumulation of some gravitational political pull that you were talking about. And so when Holly's talking about the difference between the kind of just efficiency and effectiveness, I think for us it's like set aside the efficiency point we're much more interested in, is this process of policymaking actually effective from the standpoint of inclusion and from the standpoint of who actually has voice? Heather. Thanks, I'm Heather Hurlbert here at New America and I'm so struck last week sitting where you are sitting of one of our new fellows described the efforts of the Chinese government to basically create service feedback loops that in the view of the Chinese government substitute for democracy that their hope is you can satisfy your citizens as consumers in a way that you don't need to satisfy them as democratic citizens. So, Sebel, you just made a comment about the moment where this kind of inclusion lever turns into a political power level and I'd love to hear you both generalize more from your cases about how that happens, how the kind of customer service initiative turns into a building political power initiative. It's a great question and so two things I'd say to that. One is that there's part of this has to do with what this organizing infrastructure is independent of the state, right? Which is why a big part of our kind of half of the book is about sort of this idea of an organizing infrastructure that exists independent of government and independent of any one electoral cycle that can be a base of political power and a way to project political power. The other side of the equation I think has to do with the governing institutions themselves and so when Holly was talking a minute ago about hooks and levers, part of what the metaphors to conjure for us is this idea that you would actually I think for us we'd wanna build into government actual points of literal leverage that whether we think of them as veto points or as gating points where they're actually folks from the communities affected who have us, who are in government in some form and so one of the examples that we use is with the Community Reinvestment Act from in the late 80s, early 80s, late 80s that part of that, that was a part of the anti-red lining sort of set of policies that the government had developed coming out of the Fair Housing Act but there was a often overlooked piece of that policy which was about who gets to trigger an enforcement action against a bank and there was a provision that allowed community groups to force an inspection. And not that many people knew about it but where you had groups on the ground that had enough capacity to be organized in their communities, they could then pull that lever as a way to force their demands to be taken more seriously both by banks and by the agency. Now that lever was read out of the law by the courts and that's another story which we can talk about but I think it goes to your question Heather that it's not just the policy blueprint and it's not just the organizing on the ground but it's the combination of those two things that can get you a bit further down the line of something that it's actually power and not just sort of a nice consultation because the policymaker deans to do so. That's a great question and I think one of the things we're gonna have to really grapple with I think sort of as American democracy is sort of this idea, the rationality hypothesis sort of taken to its limit sort of is this what the role of the state is? Is it just to be providing really great services like the private sector? I think it's just a question that I think we really do need to think about and what that sort of hollowness is both from a democratic standpoint and also just from what I sort of say the mouthfeel like it just leaves people deeply unsatisfied even if everything were equal even if distribution were the same across communities which it's definitely not it's not a real way to make people feel empowered so that's sort of just a very high level thing so you can think about that before you go to bed tonight and then I think I love what Sebel was saying about sort of where you see that countervailing pressure externally in the hooks and levers and I think in the book what we also see internally how there is that it really does require a sort of culture shift inside the bureaucracies on the ground and there's a few ways that I think maybe all of us in this room, I don't know everyone but that we can sort of create the sort of service champions of this work when you see it and I think funders have a big role to play I think you've seen funders put catalytic dollars and put new kinds of people inside City Hall who really wanna take experimentation and take new approaches, Boston New Urban Mechanics often cite themselves as the risk aggregators so they can take the risks and so other people across the government in agencies can be more open to experimentation but I think how do we support and champion those people? That I think is a very big question Sebel and I wrote a white paper at New America on rebuilding civic capacity, many of you were there and some of the groups have said you're the only people who have ever written about us I use this when I go talk about the work I do and I try to get funds and fundraise about it and those are the kinds of opportunities that I think that we have but we need to do more to lift up those champions because to do this work beyond efficiency in incredibly resource constrained environments requires dedication when I talk about the participatory budgeting model where you're seeing people from the agencies working with their community members that's on their volunteer time and so when you asked their question earlier sort of how do you change what this looks like? Like how do we reward and really empower people who wanna do this work and really wanna empower the community but if they themselves are not empowered and they're not compensated, what does it look like? Ann Marie So this question actually builds directly on the last one Ann Marie, we have a requirement to identify you I'm sorry I'm sorry We have only one rule here Okay, Ann Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America and very, very proud of this book it's a wonderful book So this follows on the last question and maybe puts the courts in a different light but so you've been talking about engagement and power and the way that can actually give people levers of power but I wanna ask about something considerably less but that may still be important in a democracy So when I was a law professor I was very struck by research that showed that when you sent people, people in small claims court would go to mediation and the mediator would say you're gonna lose, right? This is your claim against the cleaners they lost your jacket or whatever and the mediator would say, you know if you go before the judge you're almost certain to lose take a settlement, here it is and some number of people, a not insubstantial number would say I wanna go before the court anyway and they would lose but what they wanted was the opportunity to be heard they wanted just to be seen and heard as a citizen even knowing that they wouldn't have the power so I wonder to what extent you see that that's much less than what you've been talking about but I do, I think it's important that a government say I see you I recognize you, I hear you even if you're gonna lose They don't have to go on Judge Judy to have that Yeah, just to riff off of that, and I think an extra thank you of course for both it's so much of this project originated in early days when we were sort of rubbing the halls around here I think that's totally right and, right? So, being heard and being seen and being visible is a big part of being an actual like co-equal member of the democracy that's true and that doesn't require you to win every fight but it does require you to win enough that you are in fact seen and heard, right? Cause if you're nominally seen and heard but you never win, are you really seen and heard? And so, but I think your example is a really good one because I think that speaks to sort of like the bootstrapping that we have to do to get to kind of claw and chip our way towards a more inclusive democracy so by that what I mean is a lot of the examples in the book we sometimes get pushed back about like well the vision of democracy is expansive but the examples are very like micro, right? Like what's happening in Boston what's happening in New York City Hall, right? And this is something we get pushed on a lot but I think part of it is that there's so much ground we have to cover in terms of actually getting to a real democracy that it's not gonna happen wholesale and I think we feel like there's more upside more like the ripple effects that are possible from some of these experiments and moments of transformation are have greater possibility right than I think they're often given credit for and so this idea that okay even just being literally seen and heard can have a transformative effect in how particularly marginalized communities feel about the democracy that's really important then the next question would be how do we build on that? Channel that into a more sustained form of civic organization of public pressure of then gradual shift in how policy making happens in round two and round three and round four. They're sort of we're kind of bootstrapping our way towards a real democracy. Yeah that's a great question and Emery thank you for all your leadership and inspiration and support of this project on every phase of it including on the book, Blare of Itself so we are grateful and happy to be here. I think it's a great example because what we've seen time and time again is that people if they feel like they can be a part of a process are much more understanding if they don't get just what they wanted than I think public officials sometimes have tolerance for and I think what I hear in that example is the civic leadership opportunity when you're going and you're presenting in front of the judge and making your case and I think of one of the examples in the book which is co-worker.org which is a platform to empower workers and it is campaign agnostic and it doesn't seek out campaigns people come to the platform and they raise the issues that are important to them in their workplace and co-worker works with them to sort of mobilize and find other people around the globe and really does a lot of that important transformational organizing on the ground and they have had a lot of wins Starbucks barista campaign on sort of the algorithmic scheduling and enabling people to wear tattoos but they also have a lot of losses right and I think what that model tells me is that different kinds of people can be leaders in different kinds of ways and so when we talk about building civic infrastructure part of that is enabling people to have a voice to say the issues that really are impacting them but I think Isabel is saying so there's the idea of the ladder of engagement so here maybe it's the ladder of civic power so it's moving towards something so maybe you don't have the case win or win your campaign but you're building something and that if we think of and a common theme throughout this conversation is how do you democratize these processes if you're making these processes more democratic as you're simultaneously finding new entry points for engagement over time that builds civic power even if in every individual instant you don't get the outcome you wanted of course another aspect of this is aggregating those like individual actions are less effective than collective action right and part of changing power is enabling diffuse interests to become organized interests and that's an important, I mean I was really struck today I was trying to read every single aspect of Senator Warren's political reform or anti-corruption plan and all of a sudden in the middle of that is a ban on forced arbitration which is not in the political, that's not my ordinary political process thing but it's fundamental to people's ability to act together in cases like the small claimers. Good afternoon, my name's Calvin Harris I'm just a run of the mill democratic strategist in D.C. I do have a question about your book just in regards to the current democratic presidential primary. Obviously we understand people wanna feel as if they are part of the process folks wanna feel as if they're heard, seen, invisible but how can you do that in a way that moves beyond just being seen, heard, invisible as a voter? Like I've worked on several campaigns across the South and I would argue that as much work we've done to include folks in the electoral process to encourage them to get out and vote as you look up and down many of the policy platforms across the 20 some odd candidates, I'd argue that there's very few that speak directly to some of the low income black rural communities that I've come to know pretty well. So I'd love if you can just sort of speak on how to get from sort of changing the culture on the ground, allowing people to be sort of heard and feel visible to sort of transforming to bringing their issues and concerns that keep them up at night to national debates. Thanks so much Calvin. So there's a short piece in the book where we talk a little bit about organizing for America and that pivot point in 2008 going into 2009 when the grassroots sort of energy that Obama topped as a candidate and sort of built this as a story now goes is sort of like wildfire of mobilization and excitement and energy. And then what happened after January 20, 2009? And this being the room that it is, I know for a fact there are folks here who have more direct experience in that than either of us do, but we mentioned it specifically in the book to get to your question, which is one of the biggest losses for this idea of civic infrastructure and civic power was actually the transferring of that OFA list to the DNC. And the collapse down into a top down push out messaging fundraising machine which actually cut off at the knees what was in fact evolving into a vehicle, a space for a genuine bottom up organizing and association. And that just I think illustrates for us part of why we try really hard in the book to set aside and bracket the electoral and campaign piece of it because so much of this turns on what's left after the election. Like when the storm of ad buys and money and volunteer GO TV people is gone, what civic infrastructure is left in those communities, right? And that's a much better test I think for what you're talking about because if you do it right then it goes sort of to Sam's question earlier. If we can actually organize in black and brown communities and invest in the people who are doing that work day in and day out, then you create a center of political power, a center of gravity that sort of forces future campaigns to come to them as opposed to trying to squeeze in shoehorn views into a menu of choices that may or may not actually speak to what people need. I think it's a great question, Calvin. I love that answer and the only thing I would add to that is I was on the ground as an organizer in our way and I was there in the recession seeing people who would literally get fired and then come that night and just like spend the night making phone calls with us and that was our lives and it was a huge community and I remember the day we picked up, I mean we had, I was in New Hampshire, we had like 50 offices and there was one left for OFA, right? So when you talk about your first question of what would that look like when we talk about resources that's a resource question of how you would staff and how you would really invest in communities in between elections and I would love to see more of the candidates talk about governance in a realistic way and there's so much energy and creativity and technology that goes into campaigns. How do you put that energy and creativity into governance and I do think just sort of bringing it full circle when I talked about sort of the assault on the state that's happened from the right in the last 30, 40 years I think one response has been to make government small and make the state invisible and say we don't even need to worry about governance because like we don't even do that, like the private sector does that and like well that's not exactly right, right? And so if we had a more affirmative understanding, affirmative democracy agenda, I think it would really help build that connective tissue in between elections so that when you go back to communities they don't feel like you just knocked on their door and gave them nothing after two to four years which is what so many communities feel like in this country. This is a great question, I've always, I have real doubts that that can come out of an election structure. And the way it's structured now. It can turn into a non-election structure but anyway we have about 10 minutes left, I wanna go quickly. This gentleman in the back rows, how does he end up for a bit? My name is Mike Colash. I've often had a question of whether or not an economic system which allows some people to accumulate great wealth and other people to have essentially not any of their needs met, whether they can ever have a true democracy in that type of social system. And that's what we're confronted with you. You know, the people who make the money, they always feel they're better than the people that don't have it so therefore they're entitled to more and that keeps it, we've been through 200 years of this stuff and it seems we need to change the basic structure if we're going to make progress in equalizing things and having a real democracy. Yeah, maybe let's just get a few more questions on the table and then we can address them. I promise to make them answer it. Elena, the... Corker, okay, from Corker.org. Yay! Well, please join, please share anything. I hope we did you just. Yeah, no, no, that was great. I really appreciate it. You're modeling that, lifting up, experiments thing, so I appreciate that. My question is, in some experiments that I've observed that are democratic in workplaces and on tech platforms, people are also able to organize and build power who have a very different agenda of white supremacy and transphobia and misogyny. So I'm curious, in experiments that you've seen, has that come up and how have people baked in at the front end and built a culture that's like, this is a democratic experience that is explicitly anti-resist and how they prevented that from forming as a problem. That's a great question. These are just small questions you two are asking. Okay, great. Let's do one more and then we'll make them answer it. Rhett, Rebecca. Hi, I'm Rebecca Coakley from the Disability Justice Initiative at CAP. My question is, having worked in the Presidential Personnel Office at the White House in the last administration, several of us have a peer support group where we actively talk about, okay, day one, what does it look like? And while I think it's going to be a total cluster and we're gonna have to go around with sandblaster to pull down the gold spray paint on everything and whatever and it may end up looking like inside the building, I also think there's a huge opportunity to correct some real historic inequities that are inherent in our democracy. And how, my question is, how do we, I mean, I almost could have gotten people our policy tattooed on my forehead. I said it so much during the eight years of the Obama administration. But how do we take this energy from the grassroots? How do we take this feedback from the bottom up and really institutionalize it in a meaningful way to create a better actual tangible state going forward? Let's do three questions, let's have them. Oh boy, just those three questions. The underlying economic inequality. Yeah. The harder to sum up. Yeah, well, so the short answer is that no, we cannot have a democracy under conditions of deep economic inequality. I think it's a very, it's a great question. The one sentence version is easy. What that actually then implies though is like pretty dramatic, right? That actually building the kind of democracy one is gonna require pretty radical transformations to our economy as well. And one of the things that is a through line in the book is that a lot of the examples are actually not, there are examples of groups and policies and bureaucracies that are working on structural economic issues and we're looking at how we democratize those policymaking decisions, right? It's a reason why we keep gravitating in the book to examples around things like housing or things like worker justice where these are efforts to dismantle long term systemic economic inequalities through the building of grassroots power and through the transforming of our policymaking day to day. I think that connects a little bit to your question, Rebecca, about what do you do on day one, right? Or we're on day zero. I'm so glad you brought that into the conversation because one of the things where Ollie mentioned earlier sort of about pipelines and I think we're really, really interested both of us in just the human aspect of it that it matters who's in the seat and not just who's the elected official but actually who's in the cabinet, who's in the sub cabinet, who are the staffers and what are the lived experiences that they're bringing to those roles and in the kind of bureaucracy parts of the book, part of what we're trying to push against I think is the idea of like the craft of policymaking that it's not actually just about traditional forms of expertise, it's that too but it's much more critically about a wider notion of what counts as expertise, right? The lived experience that we want in the room is a different kind of expertise that we need to think about on the front end when we're sort of actually staffing these bureaucracies and then on the question of anti-racism and organizing it's such a great question and a much longer conversation but we talk a little bit in the book actually about how one of the preconditions for this crisis of democracy was in fact the sort of colonization of our information infrastructure and our media infrastructure and it's not a coincidence that we feel ourselves as fighting uphill against a surge of really terrifying and explicit forms of racial exclusion and racialized organization, racist organization and it's because it turns out that we have a media ecosystem that was basically optimized for that kind of organizing and so if you take this, if we turn our attention to the larger, we keep using the word infrastructure apart for this reason that there are all these other systems that need to be remade for democracy to survive and I think what you're pointing to about our media environment and our tech platforms is part of it and so it's one of the reasons why both of us are kind of pretty skeptical in the book about the kind of civic tech optimism of the pre-2016 era, there are pieces of that we wanna piggyback off of and one of the reasons why we're so interested in your work but it's not just like a silver bullet. Yeah and I think I'll add to these two since we've addressed your question, we solved that problem. I think it's a very hard challenge and I'd love to hear at the reception sort of how you guys at Coworker are thinking about this, I mean I think we just, we can't minimize it and we can't gloss over it. I think it's a real challenge and I think Seville's point is spot on about how do you democratize that media landscape when some, a lot of the organizations that we've been talking to Center for Rural Strategies, they're based in Appalachia and for them they're like we need to really have public control, we need to really reinvigorate rural media because otherwise it can become cannibalized and hyper-local podcasts that are occurring in communities I think there's going to and there has been a lot of things happening on WhatsApp. Again, everything cuts every which way but how can you sort of empower communities? I think one of the bright spots for me is where can you build more inclusive identities? So when we look at something like Faith in Texas where they're using the lens of faith to bring people to the table to have a new type of identity, long term how do we build bigger collective identities that get people out of some of these buckets of hate? But this is very hard, long term work and Rebecca I love your question and I think the resources, the relationships are really important and I think that is something where we really could really democratize them and think much more on how you invest in young leaders, young leaders of color, how you really mentor people, how you sort of move people through different phases of their life and their career, that's one part of it. The second part is from the vantage point of the federal government, how you can really tap into communities in a way that really like harnesses their expertise. One of the things I worked on was looking at community development block grants which is federal dollars already devolved to communities. So many community provisions were in it, could you use it for something like participatory budgeting? You know the concept of the Green New Deal is very compelling insofar as we are gonna have to have a hyper local solution involvement to an incredibly large systemic policy problem. However, when we have such low levels of trust, how can people trust that the government is going to be their ally and not do something harmful to them? And so that's another reason why having communities at the table is so important because if they're not really part of a real process to empower them, there's no way that they're gonna believe that these things are possible and I think it's really gonna take a combination of big forward bold policies to deal with challenges like inequality and it's gonna take real hands on every community needs to be involved. I don't really see another choice. I guess that leaves a lot of questions on the table but also ends us very eloquently. So I think we will take this opportunity to move to the reception. I wanna thank Subeo and Holly tremendously. Honor the book and thank all of you for your engagement with us. Thank you.