When Norman Rice become Seattle’s mayor in 1989, he stepped into a heated controversy. The city’s voters, by a narrow margin, had approved Initiative 34, which prevented the city government from spending money on public schools until the school board ended mandatory busing. Mr. Rice, the school board, the city council, and nearly half Seattle’s voters opposed the Initiative, because they worried that voluntary desegregation would widen the achievement gap. The school board refused to implement the Initiative, and Save Our Schools, the citizens group that had proposed it, threatened to return it to the ballot in the next election.

As the debate over busing raged on, “the issue began to create a wedge between black and white Seattle,” said Mr. Rice. Technically, education wasn’t the mayor’s responsibility, but Mr. Rice believed, as the city’s leader, he needed to help “bring about consensus and a more positive effort.” He decided to turn the city’s busing controversy into an opportunity for civic collaboration.

He envisioned a “civil conversation” that brought together diverse stakeholders to focus not on busing, but on “removing stridency, fostering listening, and establishing common goals.” Moreover, he wanted to engage a wide range of people, including those who’d never been involved in public education or civic efforts.

This idea for a community conversation became the 1990 Education Summit, a collaboration between the Mayor’s Office and a variety of community organizations that had been enlisted to help recruit diverse participants to the discussion. Mr. Rice’s strategy for building a constructive conversation was to center the Summit agenda on developing an overall objective, rather than the busing v. no busing debate. “We had to focus on getting to the common values people have about education,” he said. “Everyone wants their children to be safe, healthy, and ready to learn. That’s where we needed to start.” Once attendees agreed on this as their first priority, they were able to start talking about how to build a structure for achieving it.

The Education Summit turned out to be a civic collaboration success story and model for future efforts. It was at the Summit where the community developed the idea for the Families and Education Levy, a property tax voters approved in 2011 to provide education funding through the 2018-19 school year. The levy was designed to fund a number of innovative programs, all geared toward making children “safe, healthy and ready to learn,” including the Early Learning Academy, the Seattle Early Education Cooperative, Step Ahead, and school-based health centers.

Last year, Seattle mayor Ed Murray, convened his own Education Summit, the first in Seattle since 1990. The summit, again, brought together diverse stakeholders to “unite around a common vision” and talk about disparities in education opportunity and achievement.

Because WTIA is expanding its efforts to foster civic collaboration in the tech community, I recently spoke with Norman Rice about the 1990 Education Summit and what he’d learned in his career about building successful citizen engagement. I began the conversation by asking Mr. Rice what mattered most in civic collaboration. He emphasized the importance of citizens who participate feeling that “they did more than influence something, that they actually built something.” His advice was, “Go to the people, listen to the people, build what they say, so that when it is built, they will say, ‘I built that.’”

This was a recurring theme our conversation, that community members need to see themselves in the solution and in the people building the solution. “A lost voice is a lost cause,” he said. Including diverse voices in the discussion helps ensure you look at the problem from many angles and don’t ignore a perspective that could be the project’s undoing down the road. Moreover, he said, “Don’t let ideas go back into the bureaucracy so that they become very different from what people said they wanted.”

Below are some of Mr. Rice’s best practices for engaging in effective civic collaboration:

• Emphasize learning. “Sometimes you have to fail to figure out what you need to do. Everything can’t be about winning – it’s about learning, talking about failure, and figuring out what to do differently. If you can make an honest assessment of what went wrong, you can grow. But if you focus on what ‘they’ did, you never move forward.”
• Foster openness. “We have the challenge of the ‘Seattle Nice.’ But you have to break through that to create an environment in which people feel comfortable expressing themselves honestly.”
• Ask questions and listen. “People want to be heard and told that they were heard. Develop ‘authentic listening’:  have a good ear to what people are really saying, not what you want to hear. Then go back and say, ‘Is this what you said?’ And they have to say ‘yes.’”
• Focus on goals first. “Get everyone aligned on ‘what’ you need to do before you start talking about the ‘how.’”
• Get participants to go beyond being engaged in one meeting to being committed to the journey. “Be clear and ask for that ongoing commitment. When you have the goals and values established, ask everyone, ‘Will you help build it?’”
• Engage community organizations. “They can help bring new, diverse citizens into the effort.”
• Talk about “our” and “we.” “Frame the discussion as ‘This is our problem, and we will all invest in the solution’; rather than ‘It’s your problem, I’ll give you solution, and then you have to pay for it and build it.'”

Norman Rice served as the 49th mayor of Seattle, as well as the city’s first and only African-American mayor, for two terms, from 1989 to 1997. He held a three-year term as a Distinguished Practitioner-in-Residence at the University of Washington’s Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs, leading the Civic Engagement in the 21st Century project. He is currently working on a book on civic engagement. You can hear more from Mr. Rice about the 1990 Education Summit at the Seattle Channel.

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