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Martha McCoy, executive director of Everyday Democracy (formerly the Study Circles Resource Center), has made important contributions to the fields of deliberative democracy, community problem solving, and racial justice. One of her greatest passions is to create close links among these fields. Her early life experiences doing community work in the rural South and in inner cities fueled her conviction that progress in all three fields is crucial to strengthening democracy in the United States. McCoy began at the center in 1991, becoming its director in 1995. She helped take it from a small, start-up organization to its current strength, with 13 full-time staff members, associates across the country, and a network of hundreds of communities. Under McCoy’s leadership, Everyday Democracy has become respected as a national organization that excels in helping local communities build their own capacity to organize large-scale, diverse dialogue for problem solving. Much of McCoy’s energies are dedicated to guiding the strategic direction of the organization. Under her direction, the center is at the leading edge of connecting public dialogue to collective action and democratic governance, and of keeping race and inclusion at the forefront of practices to strengthen democracy. McCoy and Everyday Democracy have won a number of awards. In June 1996, McCoy was awarded the YWCA of the U.S.A. Racial Justice Award for Civil/Human Rights. In 1997, the Los Angeles City Council recognized her and the center for assisting in the city’s ongoing dialogue efforts to build working relationships among the city’s many diverse cultures. Also in 1997, the center received the first Making Democratic Work Award from the League of Women Voters of Oklahoma, for a statewide study circle program on criminal justice that led to groundbreaking legislation. In 1998, McCoy and the organization were invited to work with President Clinton’s Initiative on Race, which named dialogue-to-change programs (sometimes called study circles) as one of the top four “best practices” in race dialogue.
Everyday Democracy (formerly called the Study Circles Resource Center) is a national organization that helps communities find ways for all kinds of people to think, talk and work together to solve problems. We work with neighborhoods, cities and towns, regions, and states, helping them pay particular attention to how racism and ethnic differences affect the problems they address. Created in 1989 by The Paul J. Aicher Foundation, Everyday Democracy has worked with more than 550 communities nationwide on many different public issues.
