from a recent Mobilize.org press release…

National youth civic engagement organization Mobilize.org released the first report in its series of Democracy 2.0 Entrepreneur Issue Briefs, Money in Politics. The organization, dedicated to Millennial-generated ideas and projects to tackle critical national issues, has adopted a unique strategy to getting Millennial plans into action: give them the information and the financial support necessary to make their ideas a reality.

Mobilize.org is focusing its efforts on empowering members of the Millennial Generation to develop innovative clean election practices, emphasizing the exploration of public finance reforms at the local and state level. While clean election reform benefits our democracy and society as a whole, the Millennial Generation in particular stands to gain considerably from such reform. By changing the system, not only does society have a better ability to reengage young people in politics, but also stands to find solutions to many issues affecting the Millennial Generation that are being inhibited by the current system.

The brief serves as a precursor to the Democracy 2.0 Entrepreneur Money in Politics Grant Summit, which will take place July 18-21, 2008, in Denver, Colorado, focusing upon the impact of special interest-funded campaigns on citizen-centered democracy. Emphasizing the problem at the national level, Mobilize.org, Sunlight Foundation, and Common Cause will challenge Millennials from across the nation to compete for grant monies to support projects working to promote clean elections practices. The call for projects will address campaign finance reform, focusing particular on clean election practices like the public financing of elections, targeting the eighteen states that Common Cause is currently working on public financing within.

Ellen Miller, Executive Director and co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation, commented on the change potential of the Democracy 2.0 Entrepreneur Initiative:

“Mobilize.org is involved with the most Internet-savvy, network generation of our time. We cannot wait to learn how these young entrepreneurs use the new technologies, the trillions of bytes of information about lobbying, political contributions, and the spending of our tax dollars, and social networks to confront the power of big money in our democracy.”

Application materials for the Money in Politics Summit were also released today and are available on the Mobilize.org website.

For questions or to request copies of the issue brief, please contact Christina Gagnier, Mobilize.org’s Senior Vice President of Policy & Strategic Communications, via phone at (510) 717-3022 or via email at christina@mobilize.org.

A consortium comprised of Case Western Reserve University, Peace Partnership International and The Biosophical Institute convened a Vision Meeting, held April 22-23, 2008, at Case, at which a process was launched to design and found a National Peace Academy. Vision Meeting attendees included educators, business leaders, armed services personnel, journalists, community representatives and policy-makers from around the world. A Global Stakeholder Summit is planned for early 2009 as part of an inclusive process to design the National Peace Academy.

The objective of the National Peace Academy is to advance and support: 1. existing peace education and peacebuilding efforts; 2. the study of the phenomena of peace; 3. research, program development, training, and education for professional and citizen practice of peace and peacebuilding; 4. a worldwide network of peace academies; 5. structures and programs in government, military, business, and civil society for a culture of peace. Along with the initial meeting, a website was launched to help further the effort. You can visit it at www.nationalpeaceacademy.us to learn more about future plans.

NCDD member, Loretta Donovan, is acting as one of the guest editors of the latest AI Practitioner (www.aipractitioner.com), and just sent me an email letting me know that her issue, May 2008 AI Practitioner: Wired Discovery, New Conversations and Deeper Connections, is now available. From her email…

In this issue we “venture into the domain of technology … the variations of online tools, the ways in which practitioners are using them, and how they are adding rich texture to the experiences and insights gleaned about the best of what is.” Is there a comfortable, authentic fit for online technology for beneficiaries of AI (our clients) and for the AI thought leaders and caretakers (the scholars and practitioners)? The answer is a confident ‘YES’.

Articles explore what new models frame AI in the digital age, how stories and themes were collected online for a research study, how highly energizing provocative propositions were created using web conferencing technology and where online collaboration connects and sustains a community of AI practitioners.

NCDD member, Lauren Parker Kucera, director of the Soquel, CA based coAction Connection (antracism.com) recently sent us an announcement about their soon to be released film, Shades of Youth.

From their press release: “This remarkable film captures the wisdom of youth as they address issues of race and discrimination. Shades of Youth was filmed at The White Privilege Conference Youth Institute where 100 high school students gathered from across the United States to seriously engage in issues of race, power, identity, oppression and social change. The film offers multiple views and experiences around race and privilege, giving youth and adults entry points to discuss and better understand how institutional racism affects all of our lives. Ideal for use in high school classrooms, teacher education, community and faith-based youth groups.”

NCDD 2008 Note: Lauren will be co-presenting a pre-conference workshop on white privilege with Catherine Orland at the NCDD conference in Austin this October.

Leadership Strategies, Inc. (www.leadstrat.com) invites you to join them at 12pm eastern (and then again at 12pm pacific) on May 15 for a free lunchtime “Webinar” entitled An Introduction to Facilitating Groups: The Secrets of Facilitation.

From their mailing…

Your executive team will be holding a two-day, off-site planning meeting and your boss has just asked you to facilitate the session. Now you lead pretty good meetings and have decent presentation skills, but facilitation is a new skill and you have a lot of questions. What do you do to prepare? How do you get them engaged right from the beginning? What process do you take them through? How do you keep them focused on the topic? What do you do if someone goes dysfunctional? What if there is a major disagreement that you can’t get them through? How do you make sure they get the results they are looking for?

In this 90-minute webinar, Richard Smith, Principal with Leadership Strategies, Inc. and former consultant with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), will provide you an overview of the Leadership Strategies facilitation approach and share with you over a dozen tools and techniques that you can use right away. Whether you facilitate focus groups, executive sessions, community gatherings or task forces doing strategy development, issue resolution, requirements analysis, process improvement, or simply action planning, this webinar will give you a comprehensive approach for working with groups.

For more information and an expanded list of their free Webinars, visit their website.

FYI NCDD Members: many of Leadership Strategies, Inc. top-notch trainings are discounted significantly for paid NCDD members.

The Beyond the Academy Conference is now scheduled for June 10-11, 2008. It will take place on the Arlington Campus of George Mason University, beginning the evening of the 10th and continuing all day on th 11th. Meeting just outside the nation’s capital in the midst of a presidential campaign year, public scholars from across the country will discuss the ways in which their work is more than “academic,” how it helps strengthen democratic institutions and public life and can bring about civic change. For more information go to http://beyondtheacademy.wordpress.com/

NCDD member Mica Stark of the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire just sent us the following…

The Democracy Imperative (www.unh.edu/academic-affairs/democracy) is embarking on an ambitious project to develop a deliberative democracy syllabi repository and they’re asking for public support and contributions. The purpose of this repository is to serve as a database of course syllabi and programs that advance learning in the principles and practices of a deliberative democracy, particularly inclusive dialogue, public reasoning, conflict management and transformation, and social and political policy and decision making. They are interested in courses that teach the theory and/or practice of deliberative democracy, as well as courses in which deliberative democracy may not be the sole focus of the course.

They welcome contributions that reflect a broad range of teaching and learning experiences that are discipline-based, interdisciplinary, associated with a variety of institutional structures such as diversity education, first-year experiences, learning communities, study abroad programs, and capstone courses — and are asking you to please spend some time looking through your own syllabi AND talking with your colleagues on campus and at different campuses, to unearth syllabi for the repository.

Learn more at the TDI Syllabi Repository website.

As we reported back in March, the 2008 World Open Space on Open Space is being held in San Francisco, California, USA, July 21 through July 28, 2008 and NCDD member and WOSonOS 2008 Host Team contact Lisa Heft (lisaheft@openingspace.net) just emailed us to let us know that the event’s schedule — or as much of a schedule as you can have at an Open Space event — is now available on the event’s website, as well as information about the OpenSpace-Online® event to be held in September. Developed by Gabriela Ender, OpenSpace-Online® is described as an internet-based meeting methodology that gives a real Open Space experience in a virtual environment.

Jim Driscoll sent me this announcement to share with the network. Sounds like a fantastic program!

Vets4Vets (www.Vets4Vets.US) offers free weekend workshops all over the country where returning Iraq-Afghanistan veterans get the opportunity to share their stories and their feelings about those experiences with others who have served and learn how to set up similar groups in their home communities after the weekend. V4V is building a nonpartisan, confidential peer support community for these vets. Over the last two years, over 500 Iraq-Afghanistan veterans have taken part in 22 weekend workshops. Local groups are already meeting regularly in eights cities across the U.S. with more forming every month. These groups are generally closed to the vets themselves, so the best thing a non-vet can do to support them is to reach out to vets of this era in your community and direct them to our webpage. For more information, please email Vets4Vets@gmail.com or call 520-319-5500.

Last summer, NCDD had the pleasure of working with Arsalyn (arsalyn.org) to help with their national youth conference in DC. Its already time for 2008 participants to apply for this summers event! So if you know or are a student between the ages of 16-20, you might want to consider this all expenses paid event. From their press release…

Looking at our past two Presidential elections we seem to be witnessing what could be described as a “deepening” of the “partisan divide.” Public discourse seems to consist less and less of communication between political camps or deliberation, i.e., reasoning together about political issues. Instead we find the various camps busy constructing their own communication networks, increasingly isolated from the pressures of a common “marketplace of ideas.” It seems that the camps are more interested in “mobilizing existing constituencies” than in responding to the “cool and deliberate sense of the community.”

Each year the Arsalyn Program sponsors a national conference devoted to “Bridging the Partisan Divide.” The conference is designed to serve as a respectful, neutral forum where diverse individuals promoting youth civic and political engagement can meet as colleagues. The goal of the conference is to bring young people together so they can discuss how people with differing opinions can deliberate to solve common problems through the political process. The conference also provides great opportunities for networking.

Arsalyn’s national conferences are open to individuals that identify with Arsalyn’s mission and are working to promote youth civic and political engagement. Arsalyn provides funding for participants’ travel, lodging, food, and conference materials. To optimize interaction between participants attendance is usually limited to 150 people.

This year’s national conference will take place in Washington, DC at the 4-H National Conference Center the 24th through 28th of July. The application period for this year’s conference begins on March 15th and continues until April 30th. For more information visit our website.

Here’s a must-read: Dave Davenport, research fellow at the Hoover Institute and professor of public policy at Pepperdine University, recently wrote a great article for the Hoover Digest titled Why Conservatives should Embrace Deliberative Democracy.

The article refers to some recent deliberative efforts - CaliforniaSpeaks, a European deliberative poll, the Canadian citizens assemblies for electoral reform, etc. - and talks about how, when he describes these experiments to his political and policy friends, he gets more enthusiastic reactions from people on the Left than those on the Right. “Perhaps,” Davenport writes, “this is due to conservatives’ general reputation for skepticism—according to one colorful description, they are the ones who stand astride history, yelling ’stop.’ But the reservations are deeper and more specific than that. Conservatives wonder whether greater citizen engagement might undermine representative democracy or lead to even crazier policy ideas than are now on the table.”

He then outlines why he feels conservatives should look seriously - perhaps even with favor - upon these experiments.  An important article for our community, since we struggle to get conservatives to support or get involved in this work!

I’ll post the full article below in case it disappears from the Hoover Digest site. (more…)

John McDonnell, MP, ministry for peace invites you to participate in a Conversation Café on the theme: How do we transform political violence into constructive cooperation? May 7th 2008, 7 – 9.00, Room E, 7 Millbank, SW1 (NB 7 Millbank is located on St. Margaret’s Street – past the Houses of Parliament towards Tate Britain. 7 Millbank is on the right, just after Great Peter Street.). Hosted by Trish Dickinson, who introduced the café movement to this side to the UK five ago and integrates them into her work as a trainer in Nonviolent Communication, the event will also include two guests who will lead us into the evening by sharing their experiences Rashad Ali and “Umm Mustafa” former members of Hizb ut-Tahrir. Please RSVP diana.basterfield@ministryforpeace.org if you intend on participating.

The University of Leuven organizes an international conference on Youth and Politics, in Bruges (Belgium), 3-4 July 2008. Various sessions focus on (the effects of) civic education. Key note speakers include Constance Flanagan, Matt Henn, Murray Print, Brian Loader, Kristin Goss, Jennifer Fitzgerald, Carmen Sirianna and James Sloam.

All information can be found on the website: www.kuleuven.be/citizenship or by emailing Ellen.Claes@soc.kuleuven.be.

There’s an interesting model of neighborhood-based social networking evolving in Vermont called the Front Porch Forum. I was recently struck by its connection to broad, national concern about the loss of local news coverage. But before I go further, I have to confess some skepticism about the recent sense of malaise around the media. Here’s why:

Just about everywhere you turn, you are bound to read omphaloskeptic writing about the sufferance of media - its consolidation, how it is biased, how there has been a turn from the local, and certainly the absence of an “alternative” voice. At its finest, some have even called Viacom-produced shows like the “Colbert Report” “independent” news sources. This all plays up the general state of disarray and incoherence out there - but not, at least to me, a state of crisis. And perhaps part of the equation lies in some of the unique qualities of a state like Vermont: small, northern, rural, inconsequential, largely and often overlooked. Perhaps this has allowed something other than the dominant narratives to play out among our bonny green hills.

One of those is the healthy ecology of small town newspapers. Right here in the northern piedmont we have more than a dozen local papers serving a disbursed population of roughly 70,000. Which are all complemented by the circulation of the larger area papers - the Times Argus, Burlington Free Press as well as out of state ones, including the Boston Globe and the New York Times.

So why the health of so many local papers?

(more…)

Emily Menn, Director of Education and Professional Development at the New York State Dispute Resolution Association, manages a great mailing list that shares, on a weekly basis, a long list of current jobs in the dispute resolution field. We’ve posted a few of these lists in the past, but if you want to keep up-to-date, I would highly recommend subscribing. To receive future job listings, you can join the list by emailing her at emily dot menn at gmail dot com with the subject “ADD TO JOBS IN DISPUTE RESOLUTION LIST”

Here’s an example of a current job opportunity… (taken from the Dispute Resolution List)

Assistant Dean of Mediation, Woodbury College, Montpelier, VT

Woodbury College, a dynamic institution offering graduate degrees in mediation and legal studies, and undergraduate degrees in paralegal, pre-law and advocacy studies, seeks an Assistant Dean of Mediation with the capacity, credentials, energy, and wisdom to lead its Mediation and Applied Conflict Studies program to its next level of national prominence. The ideal candidate will hold appropriate academic credentials and be an accomplished mediator, teacher, and established — or emergent — leader in the field. Strategic vision, organizational expertise, and process management skills are essential. Expressions of interest, including a cover letter and vita, and nominations, should be sent to Alison Underhill at alisonu@woodbury-college.edu. Additional information is available at www.woodbury-college.edu.