Mark your calendars, and join Learning Life on Sundays, October 15 and 22 live via Zoom for this special event featuring the family stories of our 2023 cohort of 15 family diplomacy storytellers from 12 countries (see their story topics in the attached poster, below their name). There will be live, participatory discussion of their stories, and we want your feedback! Persons with personal passion and connection to their story topics, and/or who come from the countries our family diplomacy storytellers represent are particularly encouraged to attend.
Learn more about Learning Life’s Family Diplomacy Initiative and how you can get involved here.
On Thursday, September 21, Learning Life and the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College co-hosted a panel discussion on the theme “Democratize America,” with panelists speaking on fierce civility, democratic philanthropy and citizen assemblies.
The event featured three speakers:
Joe Weston, author of the book, Fierce Civility, and founder of The Weston Network, which provides “training, consulting and coaching for individuals, groups, leaders and organizations….with the goal of fostering cultures of respect, civility and mutual empowerment.”
Ben Wrobel, co-author of the book, Letting Go, and co-founder of Proximate, a nonprofit media platform that produces “solutions journalism about innovative participatory models that shift decision-making power to people with lived experience – those proximate to the problem at hand.”
Pam Bailey, Communications Director at People Powered, a nonprofit that supports “organizations and leaders around the world who are building a more participatory democracy, through programs such as participatory budgeting, participatory policy-making, participatory planning, and citizen assemblies.”
In this politically polarized period in the United States and other democracies, Joe argued, drawing from his book, for “fierce civility” against “chronic niceness” that avoids hard conversations across lines of difference. Joe speaks of four ailments: breakdowns in civil discourse, civic engagement, personal agency, and critical thinking. Fierce civility aims to address these ailments by developing skills to move beyond polarities of chronic niceness and aggression.
Drawing on his own book, Letting Go: How Philanthropists and Impact Investors Can Do More Good by Giving Up Control, co-authored with Meg Massey, Ben Wrobel made the case for “participatory grant-making” whereby grant decisions are made by those communities most affected rather than by wealthy donors whose privilege often distances them from the problems they seek to address.
Pam Bailey spoke of People Powered’s work to advance participatory budgeting, planning and policy-making, legislative theater, and citizen juries and assemblies. Pam focused on citizen assemblies, which have been organized in Europe especially, and which bring together statistically random samples of citizens to hear from experts and those affected by the issue at hand (e.g., from abortion to environmental policy), deliberate, then make policy recommendations that governments take into consideration or implement.
The Eisenhower Institute’s Executive Director, Tracie Potts, moderated the panel, including a rich, participatory audience discussion following the speakers.
Readers can view the speakers’ full presentations here via the Eisenhower Institute’s Youtube Channel.
This event followed on Learning Life and the Eisenhower Institute‘s first co-sponsored panel discussion in September 2020 on American polarization. The panels are part of Learning Life’s Democracy Dinners series, and the Eisenhower Institute’s Democracy Week every September. The Dinners are, in turn, part of a broader Democracy Learning Community (DLC) Learning Life is developing in the Washington DC area. The DLC is devoted to making democracy more fun by developing events, products, services and spaces that entertain as well as nurture learning, networking, collaboration and wider, deeper citizen participation. Learn more and contribute to building the DLC here.
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 a video recording of the September 6 CDI meeting, click here. For prior CDI meeting video recordings going back to CDI’s first meeting in June 2020, click here. Photos above are from the September 6 meeting. For more meeting photos, plus the presentation slides, and the Zoom chat discussion from this or prior CDI meetings, click here.
Meeting Participants & Agenda
Participants:
The meeting drew 28 participants from at least 13 countries: Brazil, USA, Ghana, Burundi, Angola, Italy, France, Germany, Turkey, UAE, Pakistan, Thailand and China.
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.
Meeting participants have the opportunity to publicize citizen diplomacy events, publications, projects, programs, and related needs.
Democracy, Education & the Trump Voter
This article is part of a series helping to envision what a metro regional democracy learning community could look like. For the full list of articles, please visit Learning Life’s DMV Democracy Learning Community page. The following article was published on September 1, 2023 in Democracy Chronicles.
At this historic moment in American politics, a lot of attention is focused on whether or not Donald Trump will go to jail, or win the U.S. presidency again. But beyond that headline news lies a deep challenge that will outlast Donald Trump, even if he wins the presidency: the Trump voter. For those concerned and willing to move beyond expressions of frustration and contempt for his voters, part of the long-term solution may be something you have not considered: how schooling may be fueling the Trump phenomenon, and how wider learning communities may help reduce polarization in America.
Donald Trump may be facing multiple indictments, but he still dominates Republican polls, and is in a dead heat with Biden in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll of registered voters nationwide. That is a source of consternation to some Americans, and satisfaction to others, aggravating a widespread sense of polarization.
Polarization has a number of roots, and it is worth briefly mentioning three of the most commonly cited ones. First, in many states, Democrats or Republicans dominate the state legislature, and when it comes time to draw U.S. House districts, they draw in their party’s favor. This makes it easier for their candidates to win, which makes the party primaries, not the general election, where the competition happens. That in turn pushes candidates to be more partisan to win party primary voters. Second, there’s the now commonly cited fact that conflict and outrage draw ears and eyeballs, so it is profitable for media companies to promote conflict and extremes. Third, Americans are moving to communities where they feel more comfortable, and since lifestyle preferences increasingly align with political inclinations, Americans are polarizing themselves, sometimes unintentionally, when they move.
There is no single solution to these polarization problems, but for all the talk about the need for civil discourse and perennial calls for “a national conversation” about this or that, it is striking how little talk, let alone action, there is to institutionalize democratic conversation nationwide in ways that could foster greater Comprehension, Civility and Collaboration. As two Americans, born thirty years apart, one a black woman, the other a white male, we nonetheless find common ground in sociology, and common interest in the potential of wider learning communities to cultivate those three Cs.
Learning communities (LCs), most simply defined, are associations focused on learning together. LCs can be in-person or online, and their learning focus varies, from math to gardening to diplomacy, but at their best, LCs (a) are open to interested persons of all income levels, (b) connect diverse people, (c) deepen participants’ understanding not only of their chosen topic, but how to think about the topic, and (d) foster civility in part through collaboration.
Learning communities are not new. The earliest learning communities can be traced to the earliest civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia India and China, where the inception of writing helped spur the development of schools to train scribes, teachers, priests, monks, government officials and other elites, and advanced science, medicine, mathematics, history, philosophy, and other bodies of knowledge. But the earliest schools tended toward the strict transmission of intellectual traditions through memorization and repetition, rather than open learning through dialogue, testing and observation. The collapse of the Roman Empire in Europe led to a fragmentation of power among many competing principalities, which fostered not only military but intellectual and technological competition. This competition, along with the rise of modern states, over time encouraged the development of primary and secondary schools as well as universities that together are now, in our knowledge-dependent modern societies, an important part of the social and economic lives of individuals, families, towns and countries.
Schools, including universities, are a kind of learning community – understood most simply as places where relationships are focused on learning. But for all the learning they nurture, schools also increase our world’s inequalities as much if not more than they decrease them. Schools, of course, offer their students the opportunity to develop themselves, and compulsory schooling extends that development to more people, thus increasing equality. However, vast differences exist in school quality and status in the same localities and across the world. Some elites may prefer it that way since their children tend to be better prepared and favored to get into better schools. Plus, the better teachers, technologies, programs and alumni connections those better schools provide help sustain and strengthen elite power. In short, widespread educational segregation benefits elites.
None of the above is new, at least to those who study education, but this has implications for politics and polarization. Intentionally or not, schools have long been instruments of exclusion. They sort people into social hierarchies based on whether and where students go to school and their performance therein. Schools also position and equip elites to rule, and others to fulfill needed roles, from farmers and cooks, to teachers, accountants, and engineers. Clearly, the process is not rigid; not everyone who graduates from an elite school ends up in a leadership position in government, business or nonprofits, and some farmers, teachers, and engineers become those leaders. Yet the facts that (a) a disproportionate share of business, government and nonprofit elites come from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and other top schools, and (b) elites’ wealth and income have been rising since the 1970s in the United States and abroad, as, generally, have those of their alma maters, underscore the pattern of exclusion.
At the same time, exclusion is one of the roots of the rise of Trump, and the Trump voter. Many accounts of their rise point to economic stagnation and decline among Americans with a high school degree. The association between educational and economic outcomes has only strengthened in the last several decades, and reinforces the links between Education, Economics and Exclusion. In some sense, Trump voters have every right to be angry if they have been at the losing end of this three-E’s process of exclusion, made worse by the contempt of educated elites.
But what if education were more an instrument of inclusion than exclusion, of the three C’s rather than the three E’s? What if learning was not bound to a period of one’s youth inside school walls, but rather a wider part of one’s life and region? What if education was also fun and social, forging engaging relationships across America’s deep political, economic, racial and generational divides?
We turn to these questions and more in the second part of this article on democracy, education and the Trump Voter.
Paul Lachelier, Ph.D., is a sociologist and founder of Learning Life, a Washington DC-based nonprofit developing innovative learning communities in order to widen and deepen participation in democracy and diplomacy. Ma’Shayla Hearns is a senior at Virginia Tech majoring in sociology and criminology, and an intern at Learning Life.
