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Oct. 25, 2025 02:31-03:34 - CSPAN
01:02:56
Policy Advocates Discuss Local Governance
Participants
Clips
b
barry diller
00:21
d
david rubenstein
00:02
g
greta brawner
cspan 00:12
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justice amy coney barrett
scotus 00:12
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
Q ⁇ A. In his memoir, Who Knew? Mr. Diller speaks about his career in Hollywood and his longtime relationship with fashion designer Dion von Furstenberg.
He is also responsible for creating the movie of the week and television miniseries, including Roots.
barry diller ▲ ● ▼
For 11 nights, 100 million people watched Roots and almost the entire U.S. population.
And that's binding.
Values get inculcated there.
All sorts of shared experience takes place.
unidentified
Barry Diller with his memoir, Who Knew?
Sunday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q ⁇ A and all our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app.
Next, policy advocates discuss local governance and strategies to build civic trust between residents and government.
It's hosted by New America and is about an hour.
Wonderful.
Well, thank you all so much.
We are going to get panel number two up and here.
Come on up, panel number two.
Just another quick round of applause.
I mean, that was extraordinary.
And I want to give a big thank you.
We have so many partners for this event.
Campus Compact and Bobby has been amazing.
Democracy Notes, Pace, the Ed program.
You know, as Mark mentioned, this event is part of New America's 25th anniversary.
And so as we were scheming about what to do, how to do it, I think the most fun about being here is to create a platform for all of you.
I'm looking in the audience.
There is so much knowledge and talent right here.
And we have people coming from Michigan, Colorado, Kentucky.
Richard, what time did you wake up today?
4 a.m.
You flew in this morning.
And so we were really intentional with how we did the program to really try to bring you all innovative leaders who are on the ground.
And so you just heard, you know, part of the work we're doing right now is community colleges as hubs.
How do we reimagine civic life?
All of this work is about strengthening those civic muscles in between elections, right?
Democracy is more than just every two and four years.
That's actually a very anemic, shallow way to think about civic life.
And so today's conversation, and we're so glad there's so much interest.
We even have C-SPAN here.
Like there's a lot of demand for this, I think.
And so what we're going to talk about on this panel is leaders on the ground inside and outside of government.
How do you build what I call hooks and levers between those inside government and outside?
And how do you build that connective tissue?
And thank you, Kim.
That was just such an extraordinary panel.
And there's so many talented people here.
We'll try to open it up a little bit earlier for Q ⁇ A.
And then we have a fun reception with cookies after.
So, you know, this is just an extraordinary group.
And we're really lucky to have you all come here, share your expertise, and talk about some of the models that we're doing.
We've heard some specific models mentioned, like participatory budgeting, earlier today.
And one of the models that we'll talk about, in addition to others, is civic assemblies or citizen assemblies.
And, you know, hearing about what excites people about this model, how they're thinking about it.
This model was brought from Europe.
I'm looking at Marjon and Kevin and other experts in the room here and has really begun galvanizing the U.S.
It's a model that leverages sortition.
So think about almost like jury duty for democracy.
So you're doing a randomized control representative sample, bring people in, build that legitimacy and trust, and really give people agency over a specific topic.
And that's a theme that we're going to hear from all three of these amazing panelists.
How do you build that agency?
How do you build that sense of belonging, connecting it to the first one, but also excitement and energy, right?
How do you make democracy fun?
How do you get people to feel like they can see themselves as a part of it?
I think that's a big one when you think about inclusion and belonging and agency and feeling a part of it.
And then what are the feedback loops, right?
Okay, you participate.
And if nothing happens, sometimes I joke, that's worse than doing anything at all.
So, how do you reinsure that you're engaging people and there are feedback loops back to the things that they care about?
It doesn't mean everything is on the table, but it means there's some give and take.
There are those hooks and levers, feedback loops, insert your metaphor that you like.
But the idea is you're building that connective tissue, and that's what we're going to really deep dive in today.
So, this is an amazing group of people.
We have Rupa Venkatesh, Assistant City Manager from the City of Fort Collins, Colorado.
Why don't you kick it off?
Great, thanks, Holly.
So, good morning, everyone.
So, a little bit about Fort Collins.
So, the city of Fort Collins is an hour north of Denver.
We're a city of about 170,000.
We are home to Colorado State University, and our city council is a makeup of seven, so one mayor and six council members that represent six different districts.
And so, like many local governments across the nation, we struggle with community engagement.
Yes, in Fort Collins, we have a lot of people that engage with our government, but we found that it's usually the same people, it's the loudest voices, it's the people that know how to access government.
And so, what we're also finding is that a lot of people have huge distrust in government and sure, some folks may have provided feedback to government, but if we didn't do anything with it or we didn't agree with their feedback, then they feel pretty disillusioned from wanting to get involved.
So, the particular case that I'm here today to talk about started, well, started before 2021, but we'll pick up in 2021.
We had a citizen ballot measure that passed and it allowed the city the opportunity to purchase a former football stadium from Colorado State University.
The ballot measure that passed also rezoned the 164 acres to public open lands.
So, that would include anything with parks, recreation, wildlife, natural areas.
But it specifically prohibited housing, which is something that Colorado State University had wanted to do, but this ballot measure prohibited that.
So, then our council was faced with the decision of, well, okay, what do we do with the 164-acre site?
So, for a couple of years, we did our traditional methods of community engagement.
We did open houses, we put up surveys on our website, and we were just hearing from, again, a lot of the same people, but a lot of different special interest groups.
And council was really curious in hearing what the majority of folks, what the everyday resident wanted to see with the site.
And interestingly enough, this past council priority setting process.
So, in 2024, one of their council priorities, they had 11, one of them was to make government more fun and accessible.
And then another one of their priorities was to figure out what to do with the Hughes site.
So, we learned about the civic assembly process, and council, and one of the reasons why council really liked the process was because it brought together a group of delegates or members of the civic assembly that represented who the demographics were in the community.
So, we specifically stratified across our demographics in order to make sure that anybody that was looking at the assembly could see themselves in it.
So in August of 2024, Council appropriated $150,000.
We convened the Assembly over a course of two weekends.
So it was four sessions in April and May of 2025.
The delegates presented their recommendations to council at the end of May of 2025.
Council approved the recommendations by resolution.
And then, and I can get into this a little bit later, but there was a competing ballot measure petition that was also successful.
So that measure was or is going to be on the ballot in November.
And so because of that, because it was competing directly with the Civic Assembly recommendations, Council decided to also put the Civic Assembly recommendations on the ballot.
So there'll be these two questions, democracy in action.
That's very interesting.
Yeah, so November 2025, we'll have two measures, one specifically for civic assembly recommendations and the other one for this competing measure.
And so like Holly mentioned, it was really important for the Civic Assembly to know going into it, well, what's Council going to do?
Do they even care?
Are we wasting our time here?
And so we were very specific to say, well, council was the one that appropriated this money.
So yes, they have a huge stake in it and they will hear you and then they will act on it.
And if they do not agree with your recommendations, they'll provide you with feedback.
And for this process, they did agree with the recommendations.
Some of the feedback that we heard from the delegates is that this is the first time that they've ever been involved with anything with government.
And they really felt like they were part of the decision-making process.
And I'll just conclude by giving a shout out to Colorado State University, their Center for Public Deliberation.
Those students were involved in this process, and they actually moderated some of our small group discussions.
So it was awesome that we had a lot of different partners, including our university.
That's awesome.
And I think you can already see this is going to be very interesting.
We're all very excited to see how this shakes out.
Do you feel like you've really changed your relationship with people post-participating?
And then I'll bring Richard in after.
Yeah, I think I'll say one of the lessons learned is that I wish we had more time to socialize it a little bit more.
But for those that were skeptical of the process, I will say in the beginning because it was probably government that was convening it, we did make sure that the process was very open to the public.
And so those skeptics were, they could either live stream it or they can come in person.
And I do think that they could see that it was something that we were truly not trying to be biased about and we truly wanted to hear from residents.
And also because we're putting it back to the voters, I do think it's starting to, people are starting to be more excited about potentially getting involved in government.
And I think our elections, we're doing ranked choice voting for the first time in November on this ballot as well.
And we have a lot of people that are running.
I'm not going to say it's because of this process, but I do think people are getting excited about government, which is awesome.
I think it really might be.
One more question.
I'm going to turn it over to Richard.
How did you get the air cover and buy-in to do this?
I mean, I know you were at the Arendt Center BARD meeting and you learned about this.
You sort of got excited.
How did you convince others?
I mean, I think you've been really instrumental in kind of just getting this done inside city government, which is not easy.
I think it's just my wit, Holly.
That's why you're here on the panel.
Yeah, so I do.
So I learned about the civic assembly process at that meeting in November of 2023.
And really lucky to have a mayor, Samara Jenny Arndt.
She is always interested in democratic innovations.
And one of the things we talk about all the time is how to have civic dialogue.
Sure, we're going to disagree, but how do we do that civilly?
And so having, I went to her first, having her support was key.
And then I just think just the timing worked out well with this council and their priority setting process.
And I do think that we were also spending a lot of money on our traditional methods of community engagement without having an answer.
And so by having this process, we knew, okay, going into this, we're going to be, well, we're still not done yet, but we're going to get closer to an answer so we can move on with actually implementing whatever the site plan is going to look like.
So I think because we're spending so much time and not really getting anywhere from when we started really helped convince people, okay, let's try this out, see how it goes, and maybe conclude this once and for all.
And I think that's very powerful as we think about sort of those hooks and levers that inside local government piece where there is more trust with constituents, but then how do you get it over the finish line?
And I think, you know, Rupa, in addition to your wit, you've had extraordinary leadership and you really have been a leader.
And as, you know, going back to the opening, like part of what we are trying to do here is create a platform where you can feel supported and we do have folks in the room.
And I think creating that, whether it's funding or just that air cover, that these innovations really matter.
They matter for the engagement.
This local election is going to be really interesting.
I've been tracking it closely.
This is one of the first times you've seen this kind of ballot initiative put on from an assembly.
It has a competing one.
It's very interesting to kind of deep dive.
And that's what we need, right?
We need that energy in local democracy.
So I want to turn over to Richard, who leads an extraordinary organization called Civic Lex.
Someone earlier today, I'm looking at Sterling, said we just need Civic Lexes everywhere.
And I could not agree more.
I think this is really one of the most innovative organizations building co-governance on the ground, engaging people, serving as trust intermediaries.
I mean, you all do so many fun things.
I'm thinking of like, you know, redistricting over wine and, you know, all of these fun things that you do where you also just build the trust with the community.
So we'd love to hear a little bit about the origins and what you're finding.
And spoiler alert, they're also doing a citizen assembly.
Thanks so much, Holly.
I'm really happy to be here.
My name is Richard Young, as Holly said.
I'm the founder and executive director of Civic Lex in Lexington, Kentucky.
For those of y'all that don't know Lexington, we're the second largest city in the state of Kentucky, about 330,000 people.
Also home to University of the University of Kentucky, the largest university in the state of Kentucky.
So Civic Lex's work is really about strengthening civic health.
That's sort of how we frame it to our community.
And we do that through sort of three big bodies of work.
One, we help residents in our community understand and get involved in local civic issues.
We help people connect with their neighbors.
And we work to make decisions happen in a better way in our community.
That work looks like a lot of different things.
So we have a local newsroom.
We cover City Hall through free reporting that we put out every week about decisions local government is making.
We have a K-12 civics program that is in every single high school in Fayette County, the county, Lexington and Fayette County, the same thing, in Fayette County, that helps young people understand their role that they can play in getting involved with local government, helps connect them with community organizations and different divisions and departments.
We have a big part of our work focuses on improving public spaces in Lexington because we know that public spaces are where people are most likely to connect with someone that's different from them on an organic basis.
But then we also have programs that are really intentional about relationship building in our community.
So we just wrapped up a round of mini grants to neighborhoods to throw block parties and to start new community newsletters.
We're about to start a new mini grant program focused on cross-club convenings, getting birding groups and rotary clubs to host joint birding rotary parties.
And then the last part of our work is really focused on, yeah, how can we as a community make decisions in a better way?
And we do that work largely through partnerships with local government.
We've run a number of different programs that have looked at how public meetings work.
We've implemented 13 different changes to our city's public meeting structures, including creating a new public information officer position inside local government, to creating new types of meeting that happen pre-legislatively to gather input before the legislative process begins, to having greeters in City Hall that aren't armed security, like different mechanisms to make government a little bit more friendly.
We've worked on reimagining our city's boards and commissions.
We've worked on gathering public input for our city's comprehensive land use plan.
And all of this we try and do with a sense of fun and joy and really trying to do something that people actually want to be a part of.
I think too often work around civic engagement is really boring and drab and people speak in multi-syllabic words and it's very off-putting to folks that are really busy and don't necessarily have the time to commit to it.
And so we've tried to make it something fun and enjoyable.
Just last night we hosted a scavenger hunt in downtown Lexington to help folks plan the future of our downtown.
And we had a number of students from the local universities and community college show up in crazy costumes and win prizes for doing a scavenger hunt and discovering downtown, trying to work on that town-gown relationship there.
So all of this brings me to the Civic Assembly.
So a few years ago, a couple council members approached Civic Lex and our city's Chamber of Commerce about what it would look like to look at a charter review, a review of our city charter.
And anyone that has ever worked for local government can like, your hair is standing on end thinking about charter review.
The last time our city charter was reviewed was in 1998, and our Chamber of Commerce led an external process where they formed a blue ribbon task force filled with the city's most powerful and influential people.
They came out with a series of recommendations.
One of those recommendations made it onto the ballot, and it just got annihilated at the ballot box, just like 65-35.
And going back and reading articles from 1998, I think it's because it was this process that was done by the most powerful people in town, right?
The most powerful people in town.
Making decisions about the structure of local government doesn't exactly appeal to people's interests necessarily.
And so when we were approached about this, we were like, you know, this is such a pardon the term, it's like kind of a dorky topic, right?
Like it's not like something really big and meaty like land use, which is like actually a really big and meaty topic that's tangible.
Yeah.
This is about like, shh, how many council members should we have?
Like, how should we do redistricting?
Yeah, I mean, it is about power, but it's like, you know, to the point where I think it's not something that people immediately grab onto.
And so we've done very large-scale engagement processes in Lexington.
You know, when we ran the public input process for our city's comprehensive land use plan, you know, we had 509 conversations across our city in one week about land use policy.
And, you know, we got 15,000 public comments through that process.
That is a process that a lot of people can line up behind.
City charter reform, not so much.
And so we knew that we had to think of like what could be a process that is targeted for this topic.
That is something that is like where we need not the usual people in the room, where we need people to really think a lot about power and really deliberate on a topic, but it's also a topic that's like kind of abstract to people.
And so it requires some time to get immersed in.
And we have been hearing a lot of conversations about citizens' assemblies picking up in the field.
And we were like, you know, this could be a really interesting opportunity.
What if we actually just invited random people from across our city to weigh in on what the future of our government should look like?
How does the average everyday person, what do they think would make our local government more representative?
What would give them more trust in it?
And so that's what we're doing.
Our Civic Assembly is going to be happening in March.
I'm screaming on the inside.
That's only five months away somehow.
And we're going to be focusing on what one or two topics in our city charter could make our government more representative and trustworthy and accessible to our community.
We actually have a process launching next week where we're asking our community to identify what of the various nine topics that we've identified and then propose their own, what topics our assembly should focus on.
We're looking at everything from how council members are compensated to how council is structured to how our city does redistricting to how often should our city review its charter.
Like I said, the last time we reviewed our charters in 1998, many communities review it every 10 years.
So we're really putting a variety of things on the table and asking our community, you know, what of these do you want to see?
And then whatever our community decides, that is what our community will then deliberate on through this assembly process.
And then in advance, we've worked really hard communicating with our council and communicating with our mayor's office to make sure that they will very thoughtfully consider and place onto the ballot in the November election next year whatever comes out of our assembly.
And asking council members, look, we don't know what the topic's going to be.
We don't know what the outcome of that topic is going to be, but we think you should put it on the ballot is kind of a big ask.
And it's kind of a lot for them to go out on a limb and say that.
But I think what we've found is that this process in particular, because of the demographic representation, because of the randomization, because it is insulated in theory and we hope in practice for us from some of the typical political pressures that would come around this, they're excited about it just like we're excited about it.
And I think our city has a long history of being innovative, I think.
One of the best, the absolute best thing about Lexington's government is that we are a merged city-county government that has a non-partisan government.
You can't put a DRR next to your name.
And I think that this is just like another step to me in trying to build a community in which people really do have trust.
But that trust is earned, right?
That trust is earned by meaningful representation.
And yeah, we're really excited to see what comes out in March.
That's great.
And Richard, I give you so much credit.
I remember maybe two years of scheming in DC about this assembly.
And to the point, you've built the trust, right?
You have that relationship with the community.
So now, and we talked about this on the earlier panel, right?
You can't just all of a sudden do it and hope you have the trust.
You have to really invest in it and have those meaningful relationships so they're not transactional.
So now when you say, come on a journey with me, where we're really opening up to the public to even pre-decisionally decide what we're going to put on the assembly, that's really a journey, you know.
I want to bring in Sam, who is an extraordinary leader.
He's a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
He also served as the associate administrator in OIRA in OMB, so right over there.
And we really want to hear from you on a couple of things.
And I think some of these threads on that accountability, that participation, the trust, you know, you were really instrumental in leading a lot of work that was really looking at how to reimagine participation.
And you're talking about it on a massive scale, right?
When you're on the OMB scale, it's just like a big spaceship or something, right?
And so I want to hear from you, you know, when you hear of these local innovations, if and how you think it can be scaled, and also just some of your reflections.
Like on the outside, it was always extraordinary working with you, and it was just, we really genuinely felt like you wanted to reimagine how to engage the public in these decision makings, and whether it's cost-benefit analysis or other questions.
So really going to turn the floor to you.
Thank you.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me here.
I mean, I think my first and most immediate thought is: how can we bring scavenger hunts to the Office of Management?
Oh, well, that's great.
That's already a great idea.
Yeah, I'll be noodling on that one, nuddling on that one for a while.
I mean, I think one of the things here is that at the federal level, we're just several steps behind you all, right?
The work that you're doing in terms of engaging with communities, building that trust, we're at a very basic level.
So when we, and here that we have, during the Biden administration, when we were trying to figure out how to improve public participation, you know, we looked at the regulatory space as one of the tips of the spear because it has a built-in process for public participation.
But it's not a very good process for public participation.
I'm sure that everyone in this room wakes up every morning and reads the Federal Register to determine what 300-page regulation has been put in, but surprisingly, not everyone does.
So the model was basically: hey, let's put out this very complex, very dense document in a place that no one is aware of and see what happens.
And you will all be shocked to know that the people that would comment are the folks that have enough money to pay folks to monitor the Federal Register and to understand what it says.
And so you have a system that does provide some useful comments.
I don't want to say that the notice and comment process for regulations doesn't, because there are folks with a lot of expertise that utilize it, but it is definitely a limited subset of the people that we want to hear from.
So what do we try to do?
Well, one of the things we try to do is to move this conversation up a lot earlier.
So one of the odd things for us is that you comment on basically a finished regulation, right?
A proposed regulation, but something that is done in the mind of like, if everyone says this is good, we're going to finalize.
And so think about in your own work.
You know, if you produce a report or a memo or something of that nature, and one of your colleagues comes and says, this is great, but actually you should do something entirely different.
You're probably like, that's really wonderful feedback that I'm not going to take, but I will consider that the next time I'm writing a report or a memo or whatever.
It's the same way with regulations.
The comments are meaningful, but not if you're saying totally rethink what you're doing, unless you make an extremely persuasive case.
So you want to get in earlier when you're setting the agenda, when you're thinking about the various options, because that's when people are most open to those conversations.
The next thing is it has to be proactive.
I made the joke about the Federal Register, but most people have no idea what's happening in terms of proposed regulations.
And really they shouldn't, right?
It wouldn't be a good use of all of our time to be doing that.
So it's actually incumbent on the agencies to do that proactive engagement, which first means figuring out who should they be talking to, and then how should they be talking to them.
You know, I made a joke about scavenger account, although it was really only half a joke.
I'm fairly serious about it.
But finding local groups that have that trust, intermediaries to work with, is so critical because we're never going to build that trust, right?
Not because it's not a fault of government, but we're just far away, right?
I think we were talking earlier about potholes.
Fix potholes, right?
We may give you a comprehensive sense about a comprehensive plan for how one considers work on a pothole at a local level in order to access DOT dollars.
And that's extremely compelling.
Yeah, that's extremely, I mean, I saw people writing that down because it is great, but it's not the same, right?
There is, so there's just always going to be some level of that distance.
And so we have to be honest about that and find folks that are bridging that difference.
And that's one of the things that's so exciting to hear about work at the local level groups that are building that strength and capacity because that's what we need.
I mean, the way we often talk about it is sort of it takes, you need a dance partner, right?
If you're going to put out all this effort and this information, there needs to be folks that have the ability to build that public participation, to bring folks in to tell us where we should be going to have these conversations.
And at the same time, we need to be doing a better job of reflecting back the results and making it accessible.
And the reason is, you know, if you're in a group and you spend a whole bunch of time saying, hey, come comment on this regulation, and then no one hears anything, that hurts your credibility.
And you're probably not going to say, like, that was great, let's do it again.
So we need to have a process where we're providing feedback.
That's another big part.
There is this feedback loop.
And the thing is, even if folks, even if you don't take the option that people suggest, but you really consider it, that is very meaningful to folks.
Absolutely.
Very meaningful.
And then the other thing is making it accessible.
We can't anticipate that folks are going to have very detailed views about the parts per million of a particular toxin that's in their drinking water.
Like, that's not a reasonable thing to ask them.
But asking them what they care about, right, when it comes to drinking water, when it comes to the environment, when it comes to housing, that does make sense.
And so there are ways to put this in a language that's cognizable.
And then last, I think partially this is building up trust.
And I totally agree with what everyone said in the last panel, this panel, that trust is something you earn over time.
And you do it in everyday practice.
I'll say it can be challenging for government.
One of my favorite moments when we were doing, we did a lot of listening engagement, public engagement around stuff at OIRA.
And we were in one sort of call that was open to everyone, and someone said, this is amazing.
The federal government would never do something like this.
And I didn't have the heart to say we are the federal government.
I just said, thank you so much, and I appreciate your feedback on this.
But, you know, there is like a little bit of a.
Yeah, exactly.
I'll find that.
I think I know a guy.
You'll be fine.
We'll pass it along.
But no, but it does, you know, there is this lack of trust, and some of that is earned in terms of the way in which we've done that public engagement.
We can be doing a better job.
And so, you know, I think we started some things, but really we have a lot to learn.
And so it's so exciting to hear what you all are up to or what's going on across the country.
And I think that can really inform some of the approaches we take at the federal level.
Well, it's so interesting because, you know, Richard's talking about doing a process where you are engaging people in a gender setting, and you're also saying, right, upstream from the federal regulatory process, we need to engage people.
You know, I have so many thoughts of how to connect this all.
But one of the things that I'm really struck by is the question of capacity, sort of both internally to your organizations and then externally, and also how you leverage that capacity to design initiatives that are more inclusive, that really bring people together beyond the usual participants.
So maybe we'll just go down the line, Rupa, if you want to kick us off.
Yeah, so for us, we had a small city staff group working on, essentially out of the city manager's office, but it's because we partnered with Healthy Democracy.
So they're a nonprofit organization that works a lot in this space.
So our council's $150,000 went to Healthy Democracy.
So they did the stratification process.
Our delegates also got paid for their time, which helped reduce barriers for people that don't generally participate in these kind of things.
So they handled all of that.
Yeah, so Healthy Democracy ran the process.
We also had American Public Trust.
So Rameen Sarabi, he was essentially our political advisor.
He built a lot of trust with council, actually.
And he attended some of our work sessions when we were explaining council what civic assemblies are all about and why we think it would work for this specific topic.
So American Public Trust, Healthy Democracy, Local Policy Lab, that's who hosted the democracy workshop where I found out about civic assemblies.
Laura Woods, she came.
So we had a team of probably at least seven people of nonprofit partners that came in for the weekend and helped us through all these months.
And then, of course, Colorado State University, their students helped run the small group facilitated sessions.
And so it was a small group of us city staff, but we had the help of so many nonprofit partners, which I think also led to the credibility of our process as well.
That it's not just CityStop saying, oh, we think this is going to be great.
It was third parties that were there to lend their expertise on it.
And you've been so generous.
You know, we hosted a webinar with many of those partners, just sharing it out to the public, and there was a lot of demand.
And I've seen you speak about this many times every time I learn something new.
So I think, you know, but it's also a lot, not a burden, but it's a lot to ask of all of you in a way, to be leading the work and be innovators, also trying to socialize the work.
Yeah, so I think that at the federal level, the most important thing that we can do is support efforts at the more local level, both local governments, but maybe as important or even more important, civil society.
Recognize, and that really comes from recognizing the importance of this work, why it is that we're doing it, and why it is then we should be putting federal dollars behind it.
So I would say that's the most important, but I will say, just as another aspect in terms of the internal federal organization, is just taking this seriously as a skill set, meaning public participation.
So I think sometimes agencies would have their communications people just sort of do this work.
And most of the time, a communications staff are folks that work with national and local press.
That is very different than engaging in public participation.
And so having folks with a dedicated understanding, expertise, and then who are in the room at the right time, at the beginning, are viewed as an integral part of the development.
And we started with the regulatory system, but this can be expanded.
That is the idea, not that it would just be regulations, but all sorts of decisions that the federal government makes.
And so, again, in the same way that you want voices outside of government, the right voices in an early stage when you're agenda setting, you need the folks that have that expertise in there as well to start saying, well, how are we going to shape that public engagement?
How do we factor that in?
So it's not a thing that gets thrown in at the end.
We're trying to glom it on top of an existing process, but it's built in from the get-go, which makes everything much smoother.
The question is about capacity.
So I think for Civic Lex, we're trying to run as much of this assembly process as we can ourselves.
And I said that to a proof of stage.
But for us, it's really been like it has been a really slow process to get to this point as an organization.
We were eight years old.
When we started, I mean, our first year's budget was $15,000, right?
And our second year's budget was like 30 or 40, right?
We grew very, very slowly, mostly because we're in Kentucky and it's like a place that isn't exactly philanthropically rich.
And also because I think we were trying to figure out what we were.
And in that process of experimentation with Civic Lex in the first few years, I think we started to really realize what our core competencies were as an organization.
And those core competencies were taking complicated information that local government puts out and making it legible for everyday folks.
It was convening people, getting unlikely people in the same room with each other and making it a moderately enjoyable experience.
And trying to bridge, and bridging this gap between the public and government.
I mean, I think there really aren't a lot of institutions at the community level, or really at any level, that sort of have the hand of both the public and government.
And that's kind of one of the, when I'm trying to explain what I do to my uncle, it's really challenging.
And one of the metaphors that actually doesn't work very well, but I'm going to say it anyways with him.
It's that we're holding one hand of the government and holding one hand of the public, but trying to actually just get them to hold hands and we don't really need to be in the middle.
So it doesn't work with my uncle.
I've tried.
But I think all of those competencies we've really honed in and developed over time.
And I think that this assembly is an expression of those.
We've never run an assembly before, but we've ran large-scale public deliberations before.
We've taken really complex documents like the city charter and made them something that is vaguely understandable to people through.
We've produced seven guides in eight years on our city budget.
And so taking that same approach to the charter seems like it's really doable.
But I think it's, you know, we really, for us, I think the big thing about this process in particular is going to be working with very, very random people from across the city.
We work really hard when we think about who we're trying to target with our work.
You know, there's, I think about it in like a geological metaphor.
You know, you have the inner core of the earth.
Those are like the people that show up to everything and show up to all the meetings.
We're not really interested in targeting them.
They will be there no matter what.
And then there's kind of like the, this is a terrible metaphor.
There's like the mantle that is like, you know, 60% of the inside of the earth, 70%.
If anyone's a geologist, I'm sorry.
Are there any geologists in the room?
Thank God.
Okay.
So the mantle, right, that is like kind of folks that don't have really any interest in engaging in civic life.
They're just going about their days.
And that's fine.
Our strategy for them is like, we're going to slowly bring them along over time.
But who we're really interested in, the main core of Civic Lex's audience in targeting are folks that have been engaged and have been burned by the system.
We want to bring them back.
Folks that are likely to be engaged, the people that are part of their kids, like PTA or SBDM Council or local business owners or people that are a step away.
Or people that are going to be really directly impacted by the decision the government's making.
Those are the three folks that we target normally.
The assembly is a brand new audience for us.
I think we will be successful if none of the 30 people that are part of our assembly have ever heard of Civic Lex before.
That is what will be a success in our sortition process.
I mean, maybe one or two.
I don't know.
There's probably a statistically representative group there.
So I think that's going to be a really interesting thing for us.
And I'm excited to see how we navigate it.
And I'll say one other thing, you know, anything that we design, any major public-facing project, we design with our community.
We bring people from our community into our decision-making process because we want to model the same thing that we're asking our civic institutions to do, right?
Of bringing people into their decision-making process.
Sometimes it looks really big.
So, for we did the public input for our cities comprehensive land use plan, we had a 35-person working group that built that process.
That was a lot of people.
For this, we have a 10-person group that is like a sort of mix of some folks from more of a professional background, our county clerks on there, but then also everyday people that don't have some sort of delegative hat that they're wearing.
And so, I think part of this work, doing this work in the community in which you live, is not just building up your own capacity, but building up the capacity of your community.
And doing that requires you to bring them into your process in a really meaningful way.
It always makes it more complicated.
It always makes it harder.
It always makes it take longer, but that's the way it has to be done.
And so, we try as best as we can to model that in our work, just as we're asking our institutions to do.
Before we open it up, I just want to give Sam and Rupa a chance to respond.
I thought your typology was really interesting.
And one of the questions that, you know, as we transition to our reception and thinking about, I know that's on everyone's mind, is how do we meet the moment with the local innovation, right?
And how do you think about sort of the crisis of democracy and then local innovation?
And, Richard, I love what you said about bringing people back in who are otherwise disaffected.
I thought that was, I mean, that's a pretty powerful way to think about the bridge of like the big crisis of democracy moment and the power of local innovation.
So, Sam and Rupa, I want to give you a chance to respond, and then we're going to open it up to questions and then wheels up to cookies.
Okay.
Yeah, so Richard, I also cringed a little bit when you said reimagining boards and commissions because that's always like we always want to do it.
And then when we try and get council to figure out what they want to do, they're like, never mind, let's just keep it all the same.
But so, that is one way that everyday residents can participate is in our boards and commissions.
But we also get the same people that constantly apply to participate.
And so, when we concluded our civic assembly, one of the things that we said to them, we actually had our city manager do this, was, hey, there's so many different ways to participate.
Like, so if you liked a taste of civic life, you know, you can do this outside of just the civic assembly process.
And so, we gave them information on how to apply to boards and commissions, how to run for council, how to do those other things.
So, it is about building capacity, right?
And so, and this very specific question about what to do with this former football stadium, a lot of the delegates were like, hmm, why is this topic being, or why is this question being asked?
Because it just seems so like boring almost until they got into it and realized how controversial it was, right?
And so, a lot of these folks, again, also weren't aware of like the greater city community, I will say, and they all met each other that they normally wouldn't have never met outside of that process.
And so, yeah, so I do think it is, it could be a tool where folks that are normally not involved in the process or have been burned before.
We did have one member of the delegation that is very involved in all things city business, and he did not agree with the rest of the delegation, but he also didn't complain about the process, right?
So he was part of the process.
And normally, I think if he was somebody from the outside, he would have complained.
So I think for him, even though he feels like he's burnt from the government, I think he had an understanding of the inner workings of government at least.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think from the federal government perspective, we're definitely thinking about it through the lens of trusted intermediaries, as I said before.
So it's unlikely that we're going to be able to pinpoint folks that are going to be impacted in a local community around changes to their public school because the federal government is just too big and it doesn't have that kind of engagement.
What we need and want and are excited about, and here I'm using the, I guess, the past we, what the federal government should be interested, excited about, is groups that are doing that work.
And how do you plug in?
And that to me is why one of the big things to focus on, and I think is worth spending time on, is thinking about how do you do that work in a way that's effective to support the development of and strengthening of groups, local groups and communities, trusted intermediaries, and how do you do that in a way that's durable?
I mean, I think unfortunately we've seen that we don't necessarily have a federal government that can be a trusted, credible partner, even on things that previously were bipartisan.
That's a much bigger issue beyond just this space, but it is an issue in this space as well.
And so I think it's worthwhile for folks, and a lot of that I think is interesting enough, sort of like a dialogue that you all have every day, right?
Which is basically getting folks at the federal level to have the conversations with people on the ground to understand, and vice versa, what are the needs, what are the pressures, what's the most useful thing, et cetera.
And in the same way that the trust that folks build at a local level isn't built in a day, it's the same thing when you're talking about the federal government and intermediary groups.
And so we just have to do the hard work of building that trust, I think, ideally when we have a federal government that itself is trustworthy.
Come on over to the local government side, Sam.
We're ready for you.
I think we're recruiting someone to Fort Collins.
All right.
Questions?
The mic runner, I think.
Oh, yes.
Yes, this is Primro.
Thank you.
Hi, I'm Irena Asmundson.
I have worked in bureaucracy at all levels of government, so I sympathize with all of you guys.
One of the best pieces of advice my boss ever gave me was follow the rule of no surprises.
And that because when people are surprised, they have feelings about it.
And then situations become much more difficult to deal with.
What are some underappreciated ways?
You guys have all kind of touched on this, about going upstream, like engaging people.
What are some underappreciated ways that you guys try to reduce the level of surprises so that we can all talk about the things that we actually need to talk about?
I love that question.
Let's get one or two more.
Let's do this person and then Chris in the back.
Hello, everyone.
Thanks for being here and your free perspectives.
We've heard a lot about community engagement, meeting people wherever they're at, and getting the public back involved.
And I'm just interested in how specifically you're reaching these people.
Is it through social media?
Is it through influencer work or just direct emails?
And to get somebody physically to a public assembly, how do you approach them?
That's a great question.
Chris, in the back, and does anyone else have a volume?
Thank you for the presentations today.
Thank you to Holly for organizing the panel.
My name is Chris.
I'm curious, given the focus of this discussion on the issue of trust, how each of you in your kind of governing roles is thinking about defining trust and also measuring trust through your various processes.
Are you planning, is it kind of looking at the increased participation from people that otherwise wouldn't participate?
Or are there other measures that you would actually turn to and document over time to measure the change in trust?
Thank you.
This is why you have to love DC.
These are great questions.
I feel like I'm like, this is really into it.
Tools, the trust, the bureaucratic capacity, really great questions.
I defer to you, Tory.
Yeah.
So speaking of no surprises, so I'll start with how are we specifically involving people.
So for the Civic Assembly itself, so Healthy Democracy, they sent out 15,000 postcards.
So this was random postcards.
And we got 246 responses for 20 seats.
So that's less than 3% response rate.
And I will say that we were pretty rushed for time.
And so we didn't do a whole lot of social awareness campaigns or anything like that.
We did use our normal avenues to get the word out.
For some of the underrepresented populations, we host community conversations.
So we took those opportunities to say, hey, if you get this postcard in the mail, this is what it's all about.
So please respond to it.
We also, one of the categories that we stratified across was housing status.
So we did take postcards to our social service organizations to have them encourage any of their unhoused populations to participate.
And we did actually have one member of our delegation that was unhoused.
So we didn't, if we had more time, love to get the word out to more people.
But in this circumstance, we did it through mail.
How do we reduce the level of surprises?
I mean, yeah, I'll say we don't do a good job with that.
So I do think that that's something that, and I guess I'll just speak on behalf of City Fort Collins because maybe a city has figured this out.
But a lot of times, you know, governments think that we're making pretty mundane decisions.
And I'll give you an example.
Right now, one of our rec centers has grown in its programming and events that they do at that center, and there's only one egress.
And so for these large-scale events, we opened up a back gate that opens up into a cul-de-sac.
And yeah, so we heard about that topic.
I mean, it's still, you know, we had so many people show up to city council.
We get so many emails about it.
And that's something that we didn't think was going to be this huge impact that people were going to have.
And we were surprised.
So I don't know if we've figured that piece out of it out yet.
We are undergoing a citywide engagement assessment where we're trying to figure out those things of how do we connect with our neighborhoods like at a neighborhood level and make those connections so that when we do make these decisions that maybe won't have an impact, at least the neighbors will know about it and we can have those conversations early on.
The issue of how we're defining and measuring trust.
I don't know if we have specific metrics, but I will say one of the things that I've thought about was, and maybe just because we're full-on in election season right now, of how many people show up to the ballot box.
It is a lot easier in Colorado to vote.
Everybody gets a ballot in the mail.
And how do we increase voter participation?
Because I do think a lot of times people don't want to participate in even voting because they don't think that their voice matters and it's not going to make a difference who's sitting on the dais.
But having more people involved at the ballot box could be a measure of how we're increasing trust at least and that people are wanting to have a voice in what's happening.
So I'll take the no surprises one.
I mean, I think the most important thing is dialogue, ongoing engagement.
That's partially because it will reduce surprises, but I think the reality is you can't ever reduce surprises.
I think probably all of us will have 15 surprises today in the context of our own family about various decisions that were made or who needs the car when or who left their jacket at school or et cetera, et cetera.
But when you have built up trust, then the, and through dialogue, there's an assumption that that surprise is not nefarious, right?
That we're taking it as, oh, well, that was probably a mistake or an oversight.
Or we talked about 15 things, so I understand why you might have left off the 16th or the 17th, or maybe you thought we did.
And so that really is, I think, where trust can be so important.
And the way that you do that is through dialogue.
And the way that you have dialogue is that you prioritize it.
It's something that from a leadership level, folks are making time for in addition to the other parts of their job.
And so it really is if you don't put in the time, you're not going to get the results.
I'll try and quickly answer all three.
So on the question of how we reach people, for the assembly in particular, we're also sending out postcards.
But generally, our strategy is really just like go to where people already are.
We don't need to be convening people all the time.
We don't need to always try to say, hey, come to our party.
We need to go to other people's parties, right?
And then they'll want to come to our party.
Or maybe we can have a party at their party, you know?
And it really seems to work, right?
I mean, there are already so many ways in which people are gathering, whether that's in their church or in their kids' school or playing pickleball or at a yoga class or in a birding group.
People are already gathering.
It's just maybe not civically oriented.
And so if we can go to them and be like, hey, you can like what birds are around City Hall, we can hopefully bring some folks into the fold that way.
On the no surprises thing, yeah, I mean, that's exactly right.
It's just like it's constantly staying in dialogue.
We really, you know, I think it would be really easy for an organization like ours to take more of an oppositional frame to government, right?
I think to be like, oh, you should do better.
Like, you know, and we really don't, right?
Because what we're trying to do is be in a relationship with them, right?
We're trying, like, it is all about when you get down to the local level, and I mean, really at every level, this is all about relationships.
And if you constantly show up in a relationship and you're constantly surprising people or you're constantly aggressive, it's going to be a lot harder for you to build a reciprocal and meaningful relationship.
And so for us, we always assume good intent.
We always are trying to operate with good faith.
And it irritates people, I think, sometimes that we're not more oppositional.
But that's just, that's not our role.
That could be someone else's role.
We can have different roles, and that's okay.
So that's the other thing.
And then to this trust question, this is something we think about a lot and how we measure our work.
I think sometimes we get a little hung up in this space on quantitative measurement.
And I think it really risks instrumentalitizing.
That's not a word.
You know what I'm saying?
It really risks making instrumental relationships.
Right?
I mean, it's like any, this work is like, it's like, it's about relationships.
It's if you're going to, it's like if you're out on a date with someone for your first date, right?
You're not going to ask them at the end of the date, on a scale of one to five, are you more likely to go on a second date with me?
I mean, you can't.
You can't watch that show.
You can, yeah.
So is that why I'm single?
And like, that's not, it doesn't feel good to leave one of our events with being like, all right, do you trust us more?
So, you know, I think like for us, the way that really the two things that we think about a lot are like stories, right?
Like qualitative measurement is a thing.
And, you know, using stories and narrative to more deeply understand the nuances of our work and whether or not it's been effective, I've actually found to be much more rewarding for us as an organization.
And it's honestly more compelling when I talk to people.
Like to go back to my uncle, if I were to say, well, 60% of the people that attend our workshops are 80% more likely to understand local government, like he's going to be like, I don't know what's a workshop.
But if I tell him a story about how someone came to one of our workshops, they left more inspired, and they then did this thing, and it led to this thing, and it led to this thing, that is something that they can really understand.
And I just think that at the end of the day, this is about human relationships, right?
It is about our human relationships to each other in our social fabric.
It is about our human relationships to power and our human relationships to this country.
And I worry a little bit about trying to get too into the nitty-gritty of a veteran.
That's not to say it's not important, but I think we really need to be thoughtful about the way that we ask people whether or not something's been successful for them.
So a quick story to piggyback off what Richard's saying about trust.
So earlier this year, we had an incident with a particular group.
Not to be super vague, but I will be.
And the day after that event, local leaders that represented that particular group reached out to us and asked, hey, how can we help?
Because they assumed, because they knew us through relationships that we've had with them for years, and they said, we're going to assume good intent.
So we sat down and met with them and had a dialogue about what happened.
And very easily, though, they could have been extremely adversarial, made assumptions, and ran with it.
But because of the trust that we had built over years, when something did happen, then they wanted to meet with us and figure out how we can move forward from there.
Any other comments or This has been an extraordinary conversation.
I'm going to do a few quick, I loved your three takeaways, Kim, so I'll try it myself.
Boring until it wasn't.
I thought that was really great.
Sort of building those trust and those trusted intermediaries, the relationships, the storytelling, getting folks who otherwise wouldn't have been involved, right?
Who is not usually in the room.
And I think you can see why we are so lucky to have this extraordinary group of leaders who flew in from all over the country to be here.
I just want to do a quick thank you to everyone who made today possible.
We have a tremendous amount of partners, Campus Compact, PACE, Democracy Notes, the Ed team.
Lumina Foundation's been so supportive and helpful.
There's just been so many people here, so many folks in the room.
And a big thank you to the events team, New America, New Grand Plus Cam, and on the political reform team, Kim, Marisa, Elena Sara, and Mark, our fearless leader, who probably before anyone else understood why we need local level innovation to complement structural reform.
And it is an honor to do this work and to showcase, I mean, you all have so much heart and soul in this.
And I think it really shows, and it's just immensely, we're so grateful to you.
Thank you.
Book TV, every Sunday on C-SPAN 2, features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books.
Here's a look of what's coming up this weekend.
At 1 p.m. Eastern, we visit Chicago for the Printers Row Litfest, where authors gather to discuss parenting, Harriet Tubman, the future of democracy, and more.
Then at 7 p.m. Eastern, it's America's Book Club.
From the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, Master of the Legal Thriller John Grisham joins host David Rubinstein to discuss the author's early life, writing process, latest novel, and his work with wrongfully convicted prisoners.
At 8:30 p.m. Eastern, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kevin Sack, with his book Mother Emmanuel, talks about the long history of the African Methodist Episcopal Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, including the 2015 shooting that killed the church's then pastor and eight parishioners.
And at 9:15 p.m. Eastern, Executive Vice President of the Trump Organization, Eric Trump, with his book Under Siege, talks about growing up as a Trump and his family's involvement in business and politics.
Watch Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org.
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold new original series.
Sunday, with our guest, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, only the fifth woman to serve on the high court and author of the book, Listening to the Law.
She joins our host, renowned author and civic leader, David Rubenstein.
david rubenstein ▲ ● ▼
And what do you hope most people will take away from your book?
justice amy coney barrett ▲ ● ▼
I think what I want them to take away from the book is that they should be proud of the court.
And I want them to be able, I want them to understand the way the court grapples with the legal questions that matter to the country.
unidentified
Watch America's Book Club with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼
We are back this morning with Congressman Mike Herodopoulos, Republican of Florida, represents the 8th District.
Thank you for being here during the government shutdown.
Have you stayed in Washington or are you making the trip back and forth?
unidentified
We're doing a lot of back and forth, so we are quite busy.
My wife is actually the chief of staff to the Surgeon General, so we go back and forth with him an empty nester now.
And so the kids are at college or off at work.
And so we're spending a lot of time up here making sure we're handling constituent calls here and in the district.
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