Spotlight: Fall 2022 Learning Life Interns

Learning Life’s interns do vital work responsible for the energy and growth of our organization.  This fall, their work included outreach to thousands of people on Facebook and Linkedin to help grow the Family Diplomacy Initiative (FDI) worldwide, and our Democracy Learning Community; management, video production and impact evaluation for our first annual training of family diplomats; fundraising research and outreach; plus poster design and social media communications.  Learning Life is very grateful for their dedicated work.  You can learn a little about each of them below.

Janice Dias

Year, major, and school: I graduated from the University of the District of Columbia with a Bachelor’s in Political Science in August 2021.

Hobbies: In 2021, I started running, and I fell in love with it. I run at least three times a week. One of my goals is to run a marathon. I love to travel, especially exploring the USA, because I am not originally from here, and it is always nice to visit places I’ve only seen on TV growing up.  I also love reading fiction books.  One of my favorite authors is Jenny Han. Her stories are always captivating.

Career aspirations: I am multi-passionate. I want to do almost everything in my lifetime, but there are two things I know for sure I will do.  First, I want to have a non-profit one day focusing on education. My target audience will be low-income individuals of all ages and backgrounds. Second, I want to have a successful business in the beauty and fitness industry.  I am a certified body sculpting technician, and a Permanent MakeUp (PMU) Artist. I plan on expanding my business to offer courses about my services.

Why Learning Life?  I chose Learning Life because it focuses on democracy, diplomacy, and education on national and international levels.  Before I joined, I read about Learning Life’s projects, like the Family Diplomacy Initiative.  It caught my attention because it brings people worldwide together to share their cultures, some of their personal stories, and the hardships their countries are facing. The media overlooks some of these issues, but when you have someone in the Learning Life family diplomacy community facing it, and divulging it to you, it motivates you more to advocate for and support them, even if they are thousands of miles from you.  These are circumstances that make us citizen diplomats without our noticing.

Yasmina El Argoubi

Allison Hechmer

Year, major, and school: I am a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying Psychology, Spanish for the Professions, and Speech and Hearing Sciences. 

Hobbies: I enjoy spending time with friends and family, playing tennis, trying out new workout classes, live music, traveling, going to the farmer’s market, and cooking!

Career aspirations: I am looking to work in a career in which I can make a difference in someone’s life. As of right now, I feel pulled in multiple directions as to what this could look like (i.e., lawyer, speech pathologist). Whatever my career will look like, I hope to utilize my Spanish language skills.

Why Learning Life?  In the spring of 2022, I had the opportunity to live with a host family and study at the University of Deusto for a semester in Bilbao, Spain. During this time, I was able to travel throughout Europe, experience different cultures, and see what people’s lives look like outside of the U.S. It was extremely eye-opening and inspired me to look into an organization that fosters positive growth throughout the world. I began looking for internships in the realm of international affairs and stumbled upon Learning Life. I was instantly drawn to this nonprofit because I knew that by being a part of Learning Life, I would be making a difference in people’s lives across the world. It has been very inspiring to be a part of this team, and I have benefitted from being an intern immensely.

Citizen Diplomacy International Meeting #15

About Citizen Diplomacy International

Due to globalization, the internet, rising education levels, and long-term democratization, citizen diplomacy is growing, and becoming a more important part of diplomacy and international affairs.  Thus, in 2020, the Public Diplomacy Council of America (PDCA), a US-based NGO devoted to advancing the field of public diplomacy, formed the Citizen Diplomacy Research Group (CDRG) to advance the research and practice of citizen diplomacy.  In 2023, the CDRG became Citizen Diplomacy International (CDI), a network and program of Learning Life, a Washington DC-based nonprofit devoted to developing innovative learning communities in order to widen and deepen participation in democracy and diplomacy.  

CDI meets every three months online via Zoom for 1.5 hours to share research and news on citizen diplomacy developments worldwide with an eye to building a vibrant global CD sector for a more participatory, equitable and sustainable world..  Meetings typically begin with two presentations on CD research or practice, followed by discussion of the presentations, then news and announcements of past or upcoming international CD-related initiatives, publications, funding, conferences, etc. 

Anyone  — including scholars, students, citizen diplomacy practitioners, current and retired official diplomats, and others interested — can join CDI to learn, network, and/or present substantial research or practice in citizen diplomacy. For more information or to join the CDI email list, contact email@learninglife.info. You can also connect with CDI members via our Facebook group and Linkedin group, to which you can post citizen diplomacy-related articles, books, events, funding, etc. 

For more about CDI, click here.  For the video recording of this CDI meeting at Learning Life’s Youtube Channel, click here.  Photos from the meeting above.  

Meeting Participants & Agenda

Participants:

The meeting drew 24 participants in fourteen countries, including the Philippines, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Israel, Morocco, Romania, Netherlands, Peru, Bolivia, St Lucia, USA and Canada.  

Agenda:

1) Opening Remarks & Introductions  (10 minutes)

Review of meeting agenda.  During this time everyone is encouraged to post to the chat a one-paragraph bio about themselves, including your name, city, country, job title and organization.  Introductions via chat saves us time, provides written details about you, and allows us to share your info after the meeting with those who could not attend.  In addition, I will share the Zoom chat content to the CDRG email list following the meeting, so whatever you share will get a wider audience.    

2) Two Presentations (40 minutes total): 

Presenters:

John Marks, Founder and Senior Advisor, Search for Common Ground: “Track II Diplomacy between Iran and the US.”  

Reina Neufeldt, Associate Professor and Chair, Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Waterloo: “Research as Practice: Lessons for Citizen Diplomacy from a Canadian-Haitian Peacebuilding Partnership.”

3) Questions & Discussion about the Presentations (30 minutes)

4) Announcements (10 minutes).    

A) A look at the October issue of the Citizen Diplomacy Bulletin

B) Meeting participants have the opportunity to publicize citizen diplomacy events, publications, projects, programs, and related needs.  Participants can also post details and links to the Zoom chat box to share with the wider CDRG email list.  

Founder’s Blog: 3 Threats to American Democracy & Their Social Roots

The following article was published in The Fulcrum here on September 27, 2022. 

Democracy in America faces three existential threats: election subversion, a growing disconnect between policy and public opinion, and a longstanding gulf between democracy and Americans’ everyday lives.

On Sept. 19, Joseph Kahn, executive editor of The New York Times, announced that some of the Times’ best journalists are working to “expose the cancers eating away at democracy, as well as joining the search for solutions.” Kahn fingered two threats to American democracy that Times journalists consider to be the biggest: “first, a movement within the Republican Party that refuses to accept election defeat; and, second, a growing disconnect between public opinion and government power.”The first threat, as many journalists from the Times and other generally reliable news sources have documented, includes not just denials of election defeat, despite convincing evidence, but efforts to make it harder to vote, and to elect state and local election officials who can subvert the popular vote.

The second threat saliently includes the growing disconnects between American public opinion and developments in the three branches of government:

• U.S. presidential elections, in which two of the last four presidents – George W. Bush and Donald Trump, were elected via the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote.
• Congressional process, wherein a minority of legislators, Democratic and/or Republican, can block gun control, climate change action, and transparency in campaign financing, among other popular laws.
• The Supreme Court’s new conservative majority, whose recent decisions on abortion, gun control, and other issues run contrary to public opinion.

The third threat, which Kahn does not mention, is more longstanding, and its endurance may account for the relative lack of attention among journalists, who typically focus on what is new. As Kahn notes, “[o]ver the sweep of history, the American government has tended to become more democratic, through women’s suffrage, civil rights laws, the direct election of senators and more.” Yet the direct election of senators, women’s suffrage, civil rights protections, and other government reforms have legally but not so much socially expanded democracy:

1. In schools, STEM education has crowded out civics education, at the expense of students’ civic knowledge and skills. Among other problems, almost no states require community service, let alone integrate service with classroom learning in sustained ways that nurture not only youth civic knowledge, but skills and agency.
2. In workplaces, most employees have little to no voice in decision-making, robbing them of a routine practice in democracy. Despite the laudable efforts of organizations like the AFL-CIO and the Democracy Collaborative as well as the increasing popularity of labor unions, organized labor (which among other things helps workers practice democracy at work) has been in general decline at least since the 1970s.
3. Outside of school and work, Americans spend far more time on leisure, especially watching TV, but also surfing social media or playing video games than they do in civic associations to address the problems directly or indirectly affecting them, from street crime and potholes, to stagnating incomes and climate change.
4. Lastly, and importantly given the continued growth expected in aging and retired populations, too few senior citizens are regularly volunteering with civic organizations that could provide them with a sense of purpose while countering mounting social isolation, loneliness and declining health as they age.

For most Americans, democracy is thus more punctuation than part of their everyday lives: a passing news flash on a phone or TV, a fleeting and often frustrating conversation, or a periodic vote for someone else to do something. Yet there is considerable evidence that:

1. Youth and adults who get sustained, engaging civics education increase their political knowledge, participation and sense of power or self-efficacy.
2. Workers who have union representation not only enjoy better pay and benefits, they reduce wage inequality (and thus, to some extent, political inequality), curb laws restricting voting, and vote more and encourage others to vote more than do non-union workers.
3. People, including seniors, who volunteer can experience a variety of benefits including improved skills and social connection, physical and psychological well-being, protection against cognitive aging, lower mortality and higher trust in institutions with which they engage. This is not to mention the often significant benefits for the thousands of organizations and millions of individuals who are the recipients of that volunteering.

This evidence, in line with accumulated research supporting contact theory, suggests that citizens who are more connected, especially across lines of social difference, are more likely to trust and cooperate with each other, and to trust the institutions through which they connect and collaborate. Unfortunately, as Kahn recognizes, Americans have sorted themselves and been sorted by state politicians into more socially and politically homogenous communities (rural areas increasingly conservative, urban areas increasingly liberal, with polarizing consequences for more urban vs. more rural states). This sorting, along with polarizing changes in our media, makes it easier to distrust and hate those unlike us, especially from a safe distance, online or in-person. Our social sorting and polarizing media also make it easier to imagine that the other side is an existential threat, that they are rigging elections, and that we need to defend our way of life, even at the cost of democracy.

The gulf between democracy and Americans’ everyday lives at school, work, and leisure and in retirement is to a great degree a personal and institutional failure to bring ourselves together across these lines of differences. Personally, we may give lip service to diversity, but tend to pick socially and/or economically homogenous friends, partners and neighborhoods.

Institutionally, we call for national debates yet fail to adequately fund the nonprofits and media that can build a wide and deep civil discourse infrastructure across our nation. At the root of our democratic ills are these social disconnects. No amount of rhetorical calls to “come together,” “deliberate” or “be civil” will help without sustained, systematic investment of money, time and effort to build social infrastructures of citizen engagement in all areas of life.

Paul Lachelier, Ph.D. 

American Polarization Event Launches Democracy & Diplomacy Community

On Saturday, September 17, Learning Life’s first in-person event in over 2.5 years drew metro Washington DC residents to a rich, participatory discussion of one of the most salient political issues in America today — polarization — and launched an ambitious new community devoted to advancing democracy and diplomacy in the USA and abroad.  

The event, co-sponsored by the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College, featured a panel of three speakers:

Nealin Parker, Executive Director, Common Ground USA, and Founding Director of the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University.  

Seth David Radwell, former business CEO and author of American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing Our Nation.

Bill Schneider, former CNN Senior Political Analyst, George Madison University emeritus political science professor, and author of Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable.

Nealin, among other things, offered an international perspective, noting that while violence overall has declined markedly in the past 500 years of world history, more violence is now coming from non-state actors, like terrorist and militia groups.  

Radwell presented some of the historical and philosophical underpinnings, distinguishing moderate and radical wings of American politics since the nation’s founding that inform polarization today.  “In addition to our partisan bubbles, we are caught in a time bubble that inhibits any illuminating historical or longitudinal perspective,” Radwell argues in his book. 

Schneider, in turn, focused on political developments since the 1960s to help explain current American polarization.  “Class conflict [of the 1930s] has given way to cultural conflict” since the 1960s, with religiosity (not what church, but how often one goes to church) and education (especially whether one has a college degree) dividing Americans.  The corresponding shift from a focus on material interests to moral values makes it harder to compromise since values are more central to people’s identities.   

Readers can view the speakers’ full presentations here via the Eisenhower Institute’s Youtube Channel.  Following the speakers’ remarks, participants formed a circle to talk with each other about American polarization.  The rich discussion ranged widely, from human nature, to the state of American civic education, to social media effects on polarization, to existing efforts to tackle the problem, including the work of Common Ground USA, Braver Angels, The Bridge Alliance and Learning Life’s own Democracy Learning Community.     

This discussion was the first in a series of events Learning Life has planned as part of its new, overarching Democracy & Diplomacy Community (DDC).  The DDC builds on the over 25,000 people worldwide connected with Learning Life’s work to foster international learning, networking and action on democracy and diplomacy “because the problems we face demand not demagogues and strongmen, but rather citizens and diplomats.”  Learn more and join the DDC here.