“We face deep divisions across the country. Now more than ever we the people have to step up: to reckon with injustice across ideological divides and to repair our frayed social fabric.”

This is written on the Citizen University National Conference’s webpage. The event, which was held on March 24th and 25th at the Seattle Center, was themed “Reckoning and Repair in America.” Seattlite Eric Liu is the founder and CEO of Citizen University, an organization that “works with a national array of partners to help Americans cultivate the values, systems knowledge, and skills of effective citizenship.”

This conference came about during a time when people seem to be especially interested in civic engagement. We at WTIA are exploring more opportunities for cross-sector civic collaboration, so I like to experience how other organizations convene diverse communities and the conference seemed like an ideal place to do that. I was inspired by it, but being there also confirmed for me how complicated “reckoning and repair” really is. We recognize we want it and yet no one, not even the people of Citizen University, seem to understand how to get there and how to model it for others.

Because I know not everyone could afford the time and registration fees ($150+) to attend the conference, here are my thoughts on how it went.

1. The Community of Conference Attendees

I’ve always been impressed by the range of people who are willing to spend triple digits to attend Citizen University events. There was a visible diversity of age, race, and life experience that is rare to see at Seattle conferences, especially tech ones. On my way to my first break out session, I spoke to a middle-aged Latino man from Boston. He told me how he just became naturalized even though he’s been in the US since he was five years old, and was homeless until a federally funded program helped him turn his life around. Now he’s learning how to become a community organizer. Citizen University also had a “family style lunch” where we ate a vegan meal and actually talked to one another. At my table were AmeriCorp volunteers, a stay-at-home mother, a retired professor, and a government worker. I also ran into a few friends from the tech industry. Although it was good to see such diversity, it can be difficult to satisfy such a wide range of people. I could hear some of the college students complaining that the on-stage conversations felt long-winded and boring.

The production not only put a spotlight on community activists, but community artists as well. Throughout the conference, folk musician Benjamin Hunter went on stage and performed between talks, playing songs that had to do with the theme of reckoning and repair. YouthSpeak spoken word poets also performed.

2. Modeling “Better Arguments”

Throughout the conference, people said they wanted to have “conversations” and “better arguments” but it never quite got there. In a four-expert panel, Washington Post columnist Ruben Navarrette pointed that even though the speakers had debates backstage, he had yet to see any arguments onstage and he was going to pick a fight with each person onstage to model how to do it. But the panel ran out of time and we never got to see how better arguments were modeled.

The talks were supposed to be in the “conversation” format, which means speakers were supposed to be having a conversation with each other. Instead, it felt like the speakers were giving mini-presentations on their own personal views with an occasional acknowledgement of the other people on stage. For conversations to happen, there needed to be more questioning. In one breakout session, the three speakers Berto Aguayo, Brittany Packnett, and Bob Woodson seemed to be sharing their perspectives and experiences one after another without explicitly pointing out their differences. It wasn’t until an audience member during the Q&A tried to draw the difference out of them that they shared more.

This is not so much a criticism as it is a portrayal of how difficult it is to have authentic conversations during which we are not rushing to find a consensus, and we can actually explore our differences. I still don’t know what “better arguments” look like, and the speakers also acknowledged how difficult having better arguments can be.

3. Other “Ah-ha” Moments and Takeaways

• Rajiv Chandrasekaran, senior vice president of public affairs at Starbucks, talked about the behind-the-scenes creation of the Starbuck series Upstanders – “ordinary people doing extraordinary things to create positive change in their communities.” I watched the all the episodes later on.
• “Ascribing motive” in conversations is laziness. Ruben Navarrette said people operate now by asking themselves How do we short circuit the debate so we don’t have to go through the work of understanding? The other panelists agreed that an “ascribing of motive” means we don’t have to walk through why we may disagree.
• Mobilization Lab (MobLab) was featured in a breakout session led by Greenpeace leaders. I have no association with Greenpeace and no real opinion on their work, but it was fascinating to learn how they have created a methodology incorporating design thinking to create “effective, people-powered campaigns.”

One speaker at the conference said that “we don’t respect the process of learning any more because it is hard.” I went to a Citizen University conference two years ago and we were talking about how to alleviate economic disparity. At this one, I felt like were going back to basics and trying to relearn how to talk about difficult things.

Sputnik was mentioned a few times at the conference. It made me curious to look up the original John F. Kennedy speech, and this quote stuck out to me: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

The tech industry can seem impatient, frustrated with the slow speed of progress, eager to find a way to automate the process and grow to scale. Gatherings like Citizen University remind us that learning can not be fast forwarded and sometime we have to rewind before we can move forward again.

 

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