Sarah Campbell is Senior Program Director at Everyday Democracy, where she helps diverse groups of people work together to find common solutions to problems in their communities. She has worked with dialogue-to-change programs since the early 1990s and is particularly interested in issues related to multiculturalism, youth and education. Originally founded as the Study Circles Resource Center, Everyday Democracy has worked with more than 600 communities since 1989.

Betsy Rosenbluth: Tell us about your work at Everyday Democracy.

Sarah Campbell: We work with communities all over the country to help them use public dialogue and problem solving in a way that makes room for all kinds of people. Our vision is of local democracies where everyone has an opportunity to be heard equally and respectfully, and where people of different backgrounds and views routinely work together on public issues. Elected officials have an opportunity to hear from all kinds of people…and people work with public leaders to solve problems. We believe that creating these kinds of communities across the country would make our national democracy more robust, more connected to everyday people.

BR: Is there a particular methodology you follow, or does that change depending on the group or community in which you are working?

SC: I would say that our work has developed over the years. We describe ourselves as a learning organization, and we really are, which means we work with communities, we innovate with them, we learn from their successes and their mistakes, and share lessons back with the wider community.

We first developed a way of structuring public dialogue. From there we realized that a small group or two wasn’t really going to make a difference in a community; there needed to be a way for many more people—especially those that are often left out or marginalized—to be part of a conversation. So we added a method for bringing the community together in a more intentional way. We call it whole community organizing; we hope to involve both informal and formal leaders and a group of organizers who reflect the diversity of the entire community. In recent years, we’ve been focusing more on this connection between public dialogue, action and change, what it takes to make that happen, and how you measure it.

BR: What are the ingredients for success in connecting dialogue and action?

SC: There are a few that come to mind. One is leadership, the right people to drive a project—people who are diverse and representative of the entire community and who have a vision for what it means to really involve everyday people in community life. Leadership is critical at many stages: at the beginning, when you get to the public dialogue phase, and when you get to the action phase. Creating real community change takes a commitment to the long term. You don’t fix entrenched public problems in one year or eighteen months; there are steps along the way.

Another ingredient would be getting to know the issue… Do your homework about what it is that you are trying to affect and how change happens in that particular situation. Reach out to key leaders who lead institutions in the communities to be part of the solution.

Central to this work is understanding the inequities that exist in many of our communities. Iif one group of people is left behind or left out, the whole community really suffers as a result. Significant work on community change needs to be rooted in addressing disparities and inequities.

BR: Is there a story that illustrates this on the ground?

SC: There are lots of stories. I can tell you about one that I just happen to be reading about. This is a small town in South Dakota. There is a Native American reservation bordering the town, and the division between the native and non-native people goes back generations. It wasn’t until they began having small dialogue groups—first around the issues of reducing poverty, and then about racism and how that intersected with poverty—that they were actually able to open up some conversation for the first time. It was a key shift in the history of the community.

A totally different example…a coastal city in New Hampshire (Portsmouth) has been doing public dialogue work for more than 10 years. It started many years ago when they were talking about education reform, but over the years they have used public dialogue to deal with bullying issues in the middle schools and school redistricting, which has been very contentious and revealed issues with class division. They now routinely use small group dialogue and large group meetings as part of developing their city plan. When they looked at waterfront renovation a few years ago…they again used public dialogue. It has become part of the way Portsmouth does its community work.

BR: When there is a hot issue, people really turn out. The Foundation aims to help communities forward, before controversial issues get really intense. Have you found a way to engage people to think proactively about the future?

SC: I don’t think [the answer] is mysterious; the thing to do is be clear about what you are trying to do. People really need to hear why [a process] should matter to them…how it is going to affect their daily lives. And it has to be a legitimate process so that people understand that if they give their time and energy, their voices are actually going to be heard. If someone says, “I will come to these meetings, I am going to participate, I am going to tell you what matters to me,” they have to see that it is actually going to make a difference.

BR: Do you have some advice for how to reassure participants that they have been heard, or thoughts on how to reflect participants’ voices in community decisions?

SC: Yes. What we recommend is not to neglect the communication side of the work. This takes many forms, depending on the community and what is available and how people get their news. So when people ask, “Whatever happened to that project we were working on a year ago?” The answer needs to be “Yes, there’s a web site you can go to that will tell you everything that’s going on.” Or maybe there’s a regular column in the newspaper or a local radio talk show that features the project once a month.

Some of the communities we have worked in have actually instituted an annual event. I’m thinking about a community in the Midwest that held public dialogue year after year. They started out looking at race and diversity, and then it turned into an annual potluck picnic in a public park…everyone that has been part of the program along the way gets invited, and over the years, it has grown more and more. It’s become a celebration of ethnic diversity with different kinds of food and art. The event continues, and more and more people participate. This work laid a foundation in the community for people to come together and tackle more structural problems that had divided the community for many years.

BR: Far too often, community decisions are made for the future, but the folks who are going to inherit the future are left out of it. Is there anything you’d like to share about youth engagement?

SC: I can’t say enough about how important I think that is, and how much fun it is to do. We’ve had experience working through schools and with schools, but there are other ways to reach kids and get them involved…through theater, music, drumming or other kinds of artistic expression. I find young people get this kind of work really quickly; they make it their own and understand that you can make something happen.

I had a wonderful experience with a small school in Vermont, where the principal said, “We need to have a way that students feel they have a voice in their own school. They also have to be able to solve the problem.” We made a few resources available to help the kids think through some things. They really participated in the whole democratic process—from talking about an issue, to learning about it, to looking at strategies, deciding what they were going to do, and then implementing it. It was a wonderful thing to watch. Our kids need to understand what it means to be an active and involved citizen. That probably isn’t what they’re learning in their 10th grade government class.

BR: Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein’s book, Better Together, addresses the bonding within a group versus bridging across groups, with the goal of trying to find common ground. How do you approach the challenge of making meetings comfortable, while still getting a diversity of opinion?

SC: That is a great question. Many of the communities we work in are looking at some kind of racial or economic inequity. Whether it is manifested in the school system, housing, healthcare or whatever, it can be a very big challenge to recruit diverse people into those discussions. One of our suggestions is to establish what we call affinity groups, where people of like mind or similar backgrounds get together first and have the dialogue about things that end up dividing a community… That seems to [enable people] to move on to a dialogue that is more diverse and more representative of the entire community.

The other key point…if someone is going to participate in a public dialogue where they are pushing themselves outside of their comfort zones, then it is all the more important that those dialogues are facilitated… I remember a group I was involved with where I live in Portland, Maine. I was facilitating and trying to invite a person to speak… He finally spoke up and talked about his discomfort (he had never seen himself in that kind of situation before) and how much it meant to him to finally be able to find his voice.

BR: Organizations and officials often fear the conflict that can surface around emotional issues (poverty, race and others). In your experience, is this fear founded? Does the emotion dissipate or does it depend on a community?

SC: It’s the old joke among public officials: don’t get the public involved because that would be a disaster. Their fear correlates to how contentious the issue is. I think squashing [public involvement] ultimately makes things worse. People get more and more angry, frustrated, and probably less inclined to be cooperative at the next meeting.

One question is: how are we going to deal with conflict and disagreements? What we generally recommend is that people stick to the issue and not personalize it. If people can trust the process, trust that the ground rules will work and that they will be allowed to speak their minds, then they are often willing to examine the issues more deeply and see what the trade-offs are. And once you’ve done that, you’re in a position to say, “Let’s identify the things we hold in common and see if we can move forward from that point.”

It’s not magic. It doesn’t always work. There are times when this process can take you only so far, and then people have to go another way—voting policy up or down, legislation or that type of thing. But if people take the time to talk with one another and build trust then it pays off. It is more work. It takes more time. But it pays off.

BR: It feels like Deliberative Democracy and public dialogue are growing, maybe out of some of the poor examples we’ve experienced lately at the national scale. In the context of this growing movement, what comes next for Everyday Democracy?

SC: We often talk about change. One way to think about a different level of change is to think of a ladder: you start at the base with the individual that wants to change behaviors, beliefs and attitudes. The next level is collective action—a small group of people who get together and do something, a task force or action group that really tackles something. New partnerships form across a community; before the public dialogue process, they never realized that group on the other side of town was interested in the same thing. The next level might be institutional and policy change. From there, the whole community changes. Community building groups and democracy building or deliberative organizations—all these groups are coming together. But how does change register, and what does that mean over three, five or ten years? That’s a big question we are asking ourselves now.