 My name is Drew Galloway. I'm with the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life. We're an organized research unit at UT Austin. We really kind of study research, civic health here in Texas and we also kind of, you know, from what we find we do education and outreach based on, you know, on how to kind of tackle some of these issues that we have specifically here in Texas. So today our presentation is going to be based on our Texas Civic Health Index, which we completed a couple years back in 2013. This is sort of an interactive presentation, so we're going to talk a little bit about myself and Annette Strauss and that kind of thing, but then it's also interactive we're going to do some bad exercises and that kind of stuff. So thank you so much to UTSA and the Center for Civic Engagement for having us here today for this really important dialogue. We're really glad to be here from Austin. So again today we're going to talk a little bit about how Texans compare to the nation on civic life and obstacles to civic engagement and then sort of hopefully crowd source some new ideas and some existing ideas of how of solutions to tackle that here at the local level. So again we're going to talk a little bit about me and my work at Annette Strauss Institute. We're also going to talk a little bit about us and why we're gathered here today and then finally we're going to talk about now and why it's really important for us to take action on some of the civic health indicators here in Texas. So a little bit about me. I grew up in a little small town in Georgia outside of Augusta, Georgia and so I think when I was very young, when I was about six years old, I told my mom that I wanted to be a butler and so I think she was excited about that. But you know I think throughout my entire adult life I really like serving others and so when I graduated high school at 17 I left the United States, went to Europe for a couple years and studied in Europe. I studied Hawaiian spirits. I came back to the United States two years later and enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America and Hyde Park New York and so I worked in the hospitality and beverage industry for about 10 years up and down the east coast and in this highly regulated government you know our industry I interacted with government from the private sector and as I you know I worked in New York, North Carolina, Florida and other states throughout the east coast and I always noticed that we would have a lot of civic engagement or more civic engagement whatever I would go in front of a zoning commission panel or that kind of thing. I came to Texas about four or five years ago and also working from the private sector I noticed that like nobody showed up for zoning commission nobody you know the turnout was really really low so I started to kind of look at this from you know the private sector and you know ask myself why was this happening that kind of thing. I got involved at the local politics level specifically with then County Commissioner Tommy Adkinson and really decided to kind of go back school and start studying public policy. I was extremely lucky to attend UTSA and the College of Public Policy downtown and it was a really great opportunity I got to do some really incredible things like attend the Clinton Global Initiative University in Phoenix and I was a member of the Irish College and I was about last fall I was chosen as a UT system archer fellow and so part of that was I had to find an internship and so ultimately I was really really lucky to intern at the White House Domestic Policy Council and so I spent about four months of my fall semester and then at the Domestic Policy Council in the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation and I was very very fortunate to be asked to stay on an additional month or so to train new interns and help out and then when I came back to Texas ultimately I found my way to the Annette Strauss Institute and so I have the new politics form program coordinator there so I work mostly with millennials for young college age students on civic engagement. So at Annette Strauss we our mission is to understand and overcome obstacles to civic engagement we were founded in 2000 at the University of Texas at Austin and ultimately we research educate and outreach to communities to help kind of understand and overcome these obstacles. We were named after Annette Greenfield Strauss who served at Dallas City Council and the mayor from 1987 to 91. Mayor Strauss ultimately over her entire career had 40 years worth of community participation underneath her belt so we're really happy to be kind of named after her and kind of hold her namesake and so ultimately we have a research unit side that does a lot of data a lot of polling and writing on civic engagement here in Texas and then we have an outreach side that does educational outreach and community outreach on how we can make those changes and implement that research and make that happen. So we are based out of the at UT Austin's Moody College of Communication and from that from from this body we run multiple programs on the outreach side one is Speak Up Speak Out and so this is our middle school and high school range programs so we try you know grab students when they're young kind of coming through grade school and engage them in civics through a civic science fair basically they get to choose their own policy issue crowdsourced solutions and then compete in like a civics fair at UT Austin and UT Dallas and then ultimately we award the top winners money to help get their project started so we had lots of different things like solar panels on libraries and then even bigger issues like pre-plies brutality and that kind of thing come up in these science fair or civics fairs and it's really really amazing. The New Politics Forum is the program that I run this is basically a program that links millennials with political active political professionals and active elected officials we do mostly in order to kind of build their network and encourage them to get involved and elected politics that kind of be one-state graduate from college. We have the I'm a 24 citizen campaign which revolves around a lot of our conferences one of them this past summer was breaking through with the Knight Foundation. The engaging news project is a research project that we have in a net stress that deals with looking at news and how news is phrased and how that impacts how that impacts the community and civic engagement. UT Votes and Texas Votes is a program that we have that encourages voter turnout and voter registration and then finally we house the Texas branch of Project Votesmart which is actually based out of Montana but we do a lot of or are the people that work there do a lot of legislative research and kind of taking the legalese out of out of bills and turning them into common you know so that common people can understand them. So in 2013 we published the Texas Civic Health Index it provides a comprehensive first-time look at civic and political engagement in Texas who engages in their community in politics and how. We ran the numbers in 2012 published in 2013 in partnership with the National Conference on Citizenship and ultimately you know this is to educate Americans about how civic life about our civic life and how to motivate citizens at the local level leaders and policymakers to strengthen this. So there's really three branches that we looked at in the Texas Civic Health Index and that's what we came up with that defines civic health. Texas's dynamic growth is bringing lots of challenges not only in infrastructure and water and education and immigration but there's you know we have different ways of meeting these challenges but they all require the public's involvement. It's absolutely paramount that we get more voices to the table. So the first one is political participation and so this involves you know actually getting people to register to vote actually getting them to turn out and interact with parties and interact with council members that kind of thing. So this is a very very kind of key aspect and what most people think of when they think civic life they think you know you know political participation. Civic involvement is the other kind of big bucket for this and so civic involvement involved is like how do you interact with your community as a whole? Do you volunteer? Do you donate to film profit organizations? And do you show up for school board meetings and do you contact your elected officials that kind of thing? And then finally the third bucket is social connectedness. So this involves do you contact your neighbors? How well do you know your community? How you know often do you talk with other people outside of your kind of demographic neighborhood? And so these are sort of the three buckets and the three major kind of pillars that you're going to see whenever we're talking about civic life. So we come to like the we part of our presentation which is is Texas living in an undiagnosed crisis of civic health? What is our current you know you know health here in Texas and we believe that there's lots and lots of challenges and you know ultimately we believe that us that Texas does have some areas that we really really need to improve on. So one of the things that when we think of civic health you know everybody in this room is very very engaged you know I'm sure that we all show up to you know things at city council many of us vote a lot of us contact our elected officials when things come up that we have issues that we're passionate about but I think that you know as we move forward and begin to kind of look at the data from the Texas Civic Health Index let's put ourselves into perspective of average citizens. So we came up with a short little two minute video that kind of shows when asked about civic life what you know the average person sort of says. In big terms, civic life means sort of anything. It makes me apologetic especially when it comes to civic life that sounds like life in the city. I guess like a community and so like how you're reaching out to them. What's your responsibility to mankind? I don't know, probably for theory and so probably in contrast to the state having a commercial life. Just people functioning in normal society as mature adults and they're doing their best to get along. Civic life to me means being a citizen being actively engaged in the school I run around to you. Trying to be decent about things in this world which some people don't seem to do. I think in civic life as your involvement with your local community and local politics statewide and national politics and the level of engagement that you have with what's going on in your community and how you connect with it and keep it warm. I mean I don't live up to words to make this. Probably government's health programs? For a civilian population being fully healthy it includes a lot more than just actual health care and stuff like that. It just sort of means the health of the government and the people of our relationship between material. Maybe communities or people collaborate together and just work as a team and work on solving problems and solving solutions. Being optimistic and thinking that we do have representation and that people are going to listen to us and there's not going to be these stalemates of government. People having like a solid say just informed mostly. Like no one's going on and no like, so they don't like something, no like what are the channels that they can do to try and then just like complain on the internet? Communities that are happy. So the health is just communities that are happy with what they get and what they're receiving from the government and what they're giving back to the government. My grandma from the World War II, as she told me, she's like, you have nothing to do with the war. Sometimes it's tough to get it. You know you're not going to do that. Civic health requires that a lot of people engage within the community or else society doesn't really prosper or even happen. Lots of different kind of understandings of what civic health is and that kind of turn. Anything from one gentleman talked about like civility and like how we act to each other versus like how we interact with government versus how government interacts with us. So we use civic health as a metaphor, sort of like how healthy as a person. Like when climbing stairs or running, you have your heart system and your neuro system and lungs, muscles, that kind of thing. They all kind of work together to kind of keep you moving and that kind of thing. One of these can be weakened. Maybe you might have a bad knee. You might not run as fast but you still can run. But society needs healthy systems as well. So political, civic, and social, again our three kind of points in part of civic health, do the heavy lifting of democratic self-government. And so if these systems deteriorate too poorly, then ultimately we believe that democracy begins to suffer because of that. And so that includes decreased government accountability and increased citizens' satisfaction. So again, this is going to be sort of an interactive presentation. So what we're going to do is we've got charts from our civic health index all across the room. We want you to kind of pair up in the groups of three or four and then we're going to answer some three questions on each one of these charts and then kind of come back together and talk about what they show us in that kind of thing. So if you guys want to just kind of move towards one of the charts, we'll pass around markers and then we'll go over these three questions with them. Are the charts all different? They're all different, that's correct. This is chart A. So this is age and political participation in Texas. So what did you guys find with, you know, what's the graph telling you? The graph says that involvement in political life is defined in multiple ways. And in particular, the biggest age gap that you see is that when, I mean obviously young people don't register in the same proportion or numbers as older people, but even when they do they're then considerably almost half as likely to vote even when they're registered. So what it says is that young people don't believe in the political process. I mean yeah, the only place where they exceed is they're more likely to express political opinions on the internet, but we think that only has to do with the fact that they're on the internet and older people are less on the internet. Obstacles, opportunities? I think the biggest obstacle is that young people do not believe that their vote matters. Okay. So there's no point in voting in most elections. And then what can we do about it? I mean opportunities is that there is, you know, I mean there are some who are still interested enough to vote. I don't know what we can do about it. That was the key is we had no idea, you know, it said hire people, get people who are passionate about young people and can really talk to young people and show them that their vote could matter, at least at the local level. Great, great. Any other input on this chart real quick before we move to the next one? Yes. For the obstacles, maybe one solution or step towards that would be organizing conversations with council people. Like Ron Merberg is making presentations. They have so many things matter at the local level. Yeah. And some of the research that is showing that like because there's sort of a public distrust in Congress and dissatisfaction in Congress, that's sort of trickling down. And so like people like Hiddings and Bullock, like they're studying like this trickle down effect and how it's impacting local politicians who were, they were never really impacted by this distrust level unless they did something wrong and that kind of thing. So you really trusted your city council person or your mayor that they were doing the right thing unless they ran a file on one of the issues to you. But there is some evidence that, you know, I think they call it the cranky age of like the politician or the press yells at people and politicians, the public yell at politicians and then the politicians yell at the press. And so, you know, that's been sort of like mid-90s to now. And so there's a lot of research on that as well. Thank you so much. Next chart is education levels and political participation in Texas. So what did the data tell you? It seems, okay. Sorry about that. Go ahead. Okay, so yes, we had, I was entitled differently, but a civic involvement by education levels in Texas. So I just wanted to know definitely, but nevertheless, essentially what this graph was informing us was that as education levels increase, engagement across volunteering donations, group associations and public meetings also increase. Okay. My second question was over some obstacles and more opportunities. We discussed that, some opportunities that we have or that we've identified where redefining what the engagement process looks like and I don't know if you wanted to speak to that a little bit more. Oh, well, I was referencing actually the earlier session that was held here, the two presenters were here, but we were talking a little bit about how just rethinking how we do civic engagement to begin with. So I think that there's a great opportunity to start thinking about it in that way rather than trying to fit like a circle in a box. We could start just, there's a lot of room for treativities. Now, one of the key questions around this is, do you think that the reason you have a higher political participation rate in education levels is because of college campuses, they kind of get them together and that kind of thing, or do you think that it's just because they graduated? Not necessarily. I think Lior made a great point when we were discussing in our group. There's probably another story here that could be told because these percentages weren't broken down into even, I guess, more detailed categories. So we're all kind of blumping things into categories. We're not looking at the details associated with each percentage point. Furthermore, Lior also raised a good point about our group association and our public meetings, particularly for the years 2009 to 2011. Lior had stated that these were also time periods when the United States were looking at an economic recession, the Great Recession. So could that have had a play on some of the turnout with respect to these categories? Okay. I want to show you this data. This is, again, from the Texas Civic Health Index. But this gives us the rankings of how Texas sits with other states. So we're 42nd in voter registration, even though we have a very, what we think is a very high voter registration rate of 61%. Voting, we are absolutely dead last for voter participation. For contacted or visited public official, we are near last at 49th. And then talked about politics with friends and family frequency. We're a little bit better at 44th. But if you look, particularly at voting and contacted a public official, we're pretty far down on the scale there. So those are, I think, areas that we can make significant strides on. One place I do think, one thing that hurts Texas overall and probably number of other states is we're not what's considered general. It is the presidential elections where you tend to get higher voting rates. We're not a swing state. We don't get political advertising to the same degree that other states do. And people know that regardless of whether how many company votes this is going to be, our electoral votes are all going to go Republican anyway. So what's the point in showing up? Because it's going to happen whether I vote or not. And I do think, and I've heard others say, that that whole electoral college idea depresses voting at least at the level of presidential elections in states where your one vote doesn't count. Great. Sure. Just to follow up to that response, just out of curiosity to the group, do you think that's because there's far too much emphasis on national politics that that sentiment is shared throughout the public, whereas the sentiment should be, I guess, more in line with local and state elected officials. But we have a legislature that's in office twice, I mean once every two years, and then municipalities, they don't get the same limelight that the national government does. So should the focus be tailored to the legislative process at the state and local level as opposed to the national, and furthermore, if we focus on the national, we give so much power and emphasis to the president, the executive branch, whereas that power and emphasis should be focused on the legislature, where policy is created at an active end, in addition to that they can veto the president, or they can enact laws that the Supreme Court has ruled as unconstitutional. Legislature has far more power than both the judicial branch and the executive branch. Yeah, we focus all our time and energy on the executive. I think we're also getting into a question that you have brought up earlier in terms of norms. You know, what is the expectation in terms of being a good citizen? And, you know, years ago, the good citizen was the voter. You just went and voted. So when you have, when you're feeling your vote is not making any impact, you don't do it. But there's been a trend, I think, in changing what a good citizen is, to being more engaged and questioning how is the civic system set out. So when I heard your question, I went more towards, well, what can we do to change the system? What can we do to change the, how the electoral functions so that more people will vote? Great. You had one? I have two short ones. The Trump that she made of the electoral college, I think the apathy really was created from Corby Bush, because they saw that this was a popular electoral vote. And then the numbers that you have over here about how we rank, those are all so identical in how we rank education boards. That's a great question. Two comments. I mean, there's also, you know, laws that make it harder for people to vote. They are being processed or being introduced to bills, etc. So how do you change that narrative as well? And two, yeah, a lot of people don't vote also because they're disappointed on the electoral college vote, but because they don't understand how it works. If I ask my mom how it works, she'll give me an idea, but she's not going to understand how it fully works. And three, I think there's a lot of interest groups, and even super PACs at the national level, that have tremendous power over the political people, over the political system, and citizens are not engaging. I mean, you're working in the Hawaii House. I'm a former archer as well. And I never got calls asking you what was going on in your district. It was more calls complaining than I know. So how do you engage these people as well? Yeah, I would, I would say that there's a whole range of forces that lead people to the lead voting. It doesn't matter. Electoral college is one. You know, the other is the sense that money controls politics. So if I don't have it, you know, special, yeah, and then recent Supreme Court decisions that have reinforced that notion that money controls politics. The national will doesn't really matter. A poll can show we all, you know, 80% of us want acts, but that's not the people we've elected into office and we don't get the choice often to elect someone who does share our reviews on the things that matter because that person's not running, gerrymandering of districts, you know, where, you know, you water things, you know, water things down, making it harder. The whole voter ID thing, it's like, they don't want you to vote. You know what? I'm just not going to vote. We'll make six that it's a public education. Three things that we found... Texas still teaches government. It's different. Three things that we found sort of kind of, you know, explain some of these numbers were non-competitive elections here in Texas, inconvenience of voting, and shrinking, changing media coverage, which kind of alludes to everybody focusing on the presidential election and less at the local range, less on Congress, that kind of thing. So we've got about 10 minutes left, so we're going to kind of quickly move through a bunch of these. So let's see here. Us... Sorry, these... Let's see. Chart D back there didn't have anybody. Who's on Chart D? We have this one. Really, not surprisingly, folks age 30 and above were more civically involved across the board. You saw the least participation, the age was in public meetings, and folks were more likely to donate time for the money. In terms of what the opportunities are, increasing accessibility and awareness of public meetings, and then, I think, something Council Member Nerman talked about earlier, which was going, because there is higher participation in group association taking the questions to where people are and engaging them there. And then, we talked a little bit about using technology, designating representation from the group associations to get them to participate publicly, and then engaging college students in public meeting participation so that they get familiar with it and feel empowered to weigh in. Great. Next up is that back chart there. So since nobody was on that chart, this is civic involvement by education level. And so, as you can see, it's the same thing as political participation at education level. But as you can see, as you get a college degree or some college volunteering jumps up, donating partly jumps up as well because of probably increased... Make more money. But the things that, I think the two boxes that are most interesting are group association in public meetings. If you have a college degree, 17% of that population is involved in public meetings and then high school diploma is 2.8. So, you know, I guess we're teaching maybe in government class and college, that kind of thing, how to get involved. So that's kind of telling as well. Yes, sir. That was our chart right there. Sorry for the confusion. Sorry. But yeah, so ultimately volunteering, donation, group association, public meetings, these are the buckets that we used for civic involvement. So again, some numbers from the Civic Health Index. Volunteering, we are 42nd out of 51. Chair of the Giving, we are 43rd out of 51. Belongs to one or more groups, we're 37th. So we're getting a little higher there. And leadership role in our organization is 39. So we're going to take a look at the breakouts of where Texans volunteer. As you can see, a big chunk of that is in religious organizations, but also educational, social services have a fairly big chunk there as well. Okay, so the last two charts are trust people in your neighborhood. Anybody there? We talked about how there's a correlation between trust and level of income, average level of neighborhood income, the higher reported trust and conversely at the lowest level there was the lowest level of trust for your neighbors. The broader base of lower income citizens seem hamstrung or disinclined to participate civically if you take that as a indicator and then what to do was yeah, more education. It seems that also education has an impact on the level of trust and more educational and community engagement program to strengthen city life. Any quick comments on this chart? I think as you get higher up the scale and pay you can begin to choose your neighbors selectively sometimes so we're seeing some of that of moving further outside the city moving into suburbs or into like walled communities that kind of thing so maybe that has to do with some trust as well. And then the final chart is chart F which is talk with neighbors frequently by education level. Well we were left with lots of questions on this one and one is what are they talking about? You know is this hello, hi, are you? And we don't know anything else beyond their education, we don't know gender, we don't know economics, we don't know age, neighborhood setting, the culture and so it was difficult, it really formed. It's sort of a broad bucket and so we are beginning to break some of that out but it is a fairly broad bucket of like, you know mainly there's a lot of people over half the population that walk past their neighbors house every day and say absolutely nothing to them not like, hey your mailbox is down or your dog is out or like hey how's it going so they don't say anything whatsoever and so we think that there's the possibility that there's a correlation between trust in your neighborhood and how much you talk with your neighbors so yeah these are the Texas rankings for social connectedness, we're 41st and I see or hear from family or friends, 16th in exchange favors with neighbors so we're doing great work trust most are all people in your neighborhood and we're still 47 and talk with neighbors 30 second, okay you can go ahead and have a seat we're going to kind of wrap up, thank you so much for joining in on that so I guess the bigger question is how can we improve what kind of matters and what moves the needle and so a couple of the things that we kind of concluded in our in the Texas City Council Index is improving so well constructed well talked civics curriculum Texas is one of the nine states that both require course completion and assessments in civics and participate in hands on interactive learning experiences like get kids to city hall that kind of thing makes a huge huge impact the second thing is increasing access to higher education, obviously there's a correlation for the higher, the more educated you are, the more active you are in the community so educated Texans are more likely to vote, more likely to express views to families, friends and elected officials and more leisure time which means more opportunity to serve volunteer coming third, we've got increasing the supply and demand for public affairs information so citizens need accurate information to fulfill civic duties and so broadening the amount of different channels of information whether that's internet, whether that's via, you know, community television or that's the big news outlets, you know more information is better and non-profits like leader women voters Sunlight Foundation and Project VoteSmart are kind of fulfilling this gap and then finally embracing new platforms for engagement so 66% of social media users quote post their thoughts about civics and political issues, react to other postings, press friends to act on issues and vote and follow candidates so mobile and network communication eliminates barriers and innovative platforms like C-click fix help fix municipal issues like traffic lights, fire hazards that kind of thing for lower socioeconomic neighborhoods technologies like SMS like text messaging kind of helps out as well and provides instant feedback to elected officials so what can you do to encourage a healthier civic life in Texas this is where the now comes in so obviously we've kind of identified some obstacles and opportunities for us to do for us to tackle so it's ultimately up to the people that's in this room and our friends and our neighbors and our colleagues at work to go out and kind of tackle this issue really can't be necessarily like a top down strategy, it's got to be a bottom up strategy so things that we can do to encourage a healthier civic life in Texas are voting so you can host debate parties, election night parties you can get involved with get informed about candidates and talk to candidates and elections to other friends, remind your friends to vote the second bucket is engaging your elected officials to the phone and talk to your elected official call, write, visit join a nonprofit that advocates on issues that you're passionate about and then write letters to the editor or use social media to spread new ideas and then the third bucket is building social capital and civic involvement and so this involves like reaching out to neighbors, crossing lines of diversity, that can be geographical, age gender, race, ethnicity and educational levels which we've all measured in the Texas Civic Health Index talk with your family and friends about issues that you care about and address these in the community by bringing together neighbors so rather than tackling an issue by yourself or with a small nonprofit group bring your neighbors in together, it brings more voices than I kind of think so additional resources you can download the Texas Civic Health Index at TexasCivicHealth.org you can visit our website which is www.anettstrauss.org for more information on our programs, that kind of thing we do have an info graphic available that we've passed out but if I missed you please come snag one or grab a couple if you'd like to hand out to your friends www.anettstrauss.org there's a snapshot of everyday voices videos to help kind of guide this conversation of like the average citizen and everything and then also you can download civic life graphics that you can share on social media and kind of start the conversation with your friends and everything so my name is Drew Galloway thanks so much for coming today I really appreciate it, thanks for your interaction everybody was really great, are there any questions we've got like two minutes left thank you