Transformational Public Service

Portraits of Theory in Practice

Cheryl King, Lisa Zanetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317453376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing Research
• Index: Business

Everyone who aspires to more effective public service should read this book. It provides a compelling antidote to the managerial focus of theory and practice in public administration. Written with the aim of inspiring and rekindling a mission for public service, Transformational Public Service weaves together theory and stories from actual practice to show that public service can (and does) advance the goals of democracy, inclusiveness, and social and economic justice. Eight practitioners from government and non-governmental organizations at all levels - from the street to the executive office - tell their personal stories of transformational public service. Theory, poetry, and popular culture references are woven around the stories. Both students and practitioners will discover new ways of thinking in this book that will enable them to transform their own administrative practices. As the authors note in their prologue: "As we listened to these stories, we heard people say that public service can be and is transformational (transforms institutions, practices, and people's lives and experiences) in ways that serve democracy, engagement, and social and economic justice. The public service they practice is collaborative, humanistic, emancipatory, inclusive, and diverse."

Part I

Citizenship and
Governance

Story

Transforming Citizenship

Greg Coleridge

Executive Director
NE Ohio American Friends Service Committee
Akron, Ohio

Greg Coleridge seems to be everywhere in Akron, Ohio. Wherever there is an important issue of social or economic justice on the front burner, there is Greg.

For Greg, public service is

that essential element of existence that involves working beyond ourselves, given we are social creatures. It’s acting beyond our own immediate environment, our own immediate family, and our own immediate social circles, on behalf of the common good. Public service is helping the world around us, which by doing so helps ourselves by making us more human. We have an obligation to work on behalf of the community at large. We have a responsibility to be publicly engaged to improve our community in tangible ways to the extent that we can. How we do that, of course, is a function of our particular genetic makeup along with the skills and abilities we acquire along the way. There is no magic single way. There are thousands, if not millions, of potential ways this can be accomplished. However it is done, the premise is that we have the social responsibility and duty to work for improvement, good, justice, sustainability, peace, and nonviolence beyond our own immediate sphere.

Akron, Ohio, is Greg’s hometown. Like many Akron hometown boys, he is a child of immigrants. His parents were born in what became Yugoslavia: his mother in Montenegro, his father in Serbia. His parents’ families embodied an immigrant ethic: hardworking people working together (in a community) to achieve middle-class existence. At the center of this is the belief that an honest living comes from honest effort; only the wealth that you yourself generated is legitimate and honorable. If you are going to make it, you have to outwork the people around you.

Greg was significantly influenced by the activism of his parents. His father was active in the rubber workers union. Greg grew up hearing about the formation of the union and the social and economic benefits of organizing; how men and women, like his father, took risks and suffered violence for the cause. Greg says:

Hearing some of those stories made quite an impression on a little kid … that benefits such as social security, minimum wage, pensions and workplace safety aren’t present because of some benevolence from people at the top, be they government or corporate. They resulted from hard-fought, hard-won, no-guarantee results of average, ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

In Their Words

Greg Coleridge

What would you like to tell others about what it is like to do the work you do?

Working for the American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker-related social action organization), the work I do for peace, justice, and sustainability is both thrilling and frustrating. I have the opportunity to work along with and on behalf of many selfless, courageous, resourceful, creative, and compassionate human beings. This is inspiring as well as thrilling. It’s also thrilling to help create and implement educational and action programs which plant seeds of social change that every so often bear fruit in achieving some type of tangible “victory” or “win.” Frustrating is the realization that I lack personally, and at the moment with other social change activists, the time, energy, and resources to sufficiently counter the mammoth power of the media, other business corporations, and the government, which shape public policies, manipulate perceptions, distract attentions, co-opt former allies, adapt themselves in superficial ways in response to criticism, and/or simply ignore popular pressure.

It is also a constant struggle to find the right place between responding or reacting to immediate social problems that arise and maintaining one’s long-term plan for social transformation.

Greg was/is also significantly shaped by his experiences as a person with disabilities:

I was born with a physical disability (scoliosis), and had numerous operations and a great deal of physical therapy as a child. I couldn’t have developed any degree of physical, mental, or emotional stability without the incredible assistance from my own immediate family and others: doctors and nurses, psychologists and therapists, teachers and counselors. It was a collective effort. You know, this reality we call community is an enormously important factor in helping people either make it or not in life.

I was among the first group of physically disabled kids “mainstreamed” in the Akron public school system. It was quite an experience as teachers and counselors tried to figure out how the heck to integrate us into a “normal” setting. They didn’t know how physically, mentally, or emotionally prepared we were. In some respects, they viewed us as guinea pigs and tried out different approaches. In part, we were victims, but in part, because they really didn’t know what they were doing, they consulted with us and genuinely tried to take our views into account. Many of us were integrated into “normal” able-bodied classrooms and were asked: “How much was too much; are we putting too great emotional stress on you by drawing you in with all the other kids who are able bodied or not?” It was a blend between feeling like guinea pigs and feeling like respected human beings, a mixed feeling of being treated in some instances as a subject and in other instances feeling treated with dignity and respect, that your voices counted and views mattered. I think that helped me later in social change work. [One needs to] learn how to shape campaigns, write press releases, run meetings, and all those sort of technical nuts and bolts things, but social change work is also about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.

Greg’s work as executive director of the NE Ohio American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) is centered mostly in a program called the Economic Justice and Empowerment Program. He explains:

AFSC is a Quaker social action organization that has been around since 1917. It began as an expression for people, not just Quakers, but also Mennonites, Brethren, and others who wanted to support this country but who did not support war and violence as a means of resolving problems. So they created an organization to provide humanitarian assistance and relieve suffering to those on both sides of World War I, which was controversial.

Since one of the basic organizing principles of the Quaker-based organization is to see good or God in every person regardless of race, nationality, religion, political affiliation, physical ability, sexual orientation, and the like, AFSC is called to provide service to all. The assistance is more than humanitarian. It’s enabling skills to help people achieve self-reliance, including help to develop their own institutions and self-confidence that can carry on long after AFSC moves on.

Experiences from the war led AFSC’s founders to reflect on root causes to war. There will always be wars unless we address the root causes of injustices. This realization led AFSC to begin, in both this country and abroad, very conscientious and deliberate efforts in community education, advocacy, and organizing against wars, poverty, discrimination, and exclusion but also on behalf of economic and social justice, political inclusion, and nonviolent conflict resolution. This led to the creation of offices and programs in many places across this country and in many countries of the world. AFSC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947 for its post-World War II relief and reconstruction work, but has certainly since then continued to work in sometimes a very quiet way, sometimes in a very visible controversial way, in some forty places around this country and thirty to forty countries around the world in doing this integration of social service and social change work.

Greg works on four major projects: a campaign-financing project that is “very seriously, aggressively, and intentionally trying to change public policy, not just educate, not just persuade, but transform rules and the laws governing how campaigns are financed.” He works “in support of a community organization, a grassroots group located in Uniontown, Ohio, located between Akron and Canton, that has been trying to expose the presence of an EPA designated Superfund toxic landfill. This group has, for the better part of thirty years, been educating, advocating, and organizing for a safe and permanent cleanup of this site and working to try to get significant change.” He is also working on addressing the root causes and aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, which invites the public to “pause and reflect on some of our own actions as a country and our domestic policy and more significantly, our foreign economic and military policies.”

Greg’s heart, in this moment, is in the work he has been doing for the past few years challenging corporate power.

We work with activists around Ohio and, to a certain extent, across the country who have been battling private corporate power: individual companies, corporate lobby groups, or corporately friendly legislators and judges that have run roughshod over the ability of citizens to make decisions affecting their lives. Several years ago, I participated in a workshop in Ohio led by people connected to a national group called Programs on Corporation Law and Democracy (POCLAD). They were going around state by state, meeting with frustrated activists who, like themselves, have been working for years in the environmental, legal, consumer, and labor arenas battling one company at a time, one labor lawsuit at a time, one toxic dump at a time, one sweatshop at a time. POCLAD felt there wasn’t enough time to deal with all the individual corporate harms, that we the people were losing more self-determination every day, that something more fundamental had to be considered. Therefore, they began questioning and examining the basic, inherent structural relationship between human persons and this human creation, the corporation, that is often bigger than any person, groups of persons, in some cases even nation-states; a legal entity which has amassed constitutional rights to govern and by doing so has trumped the rights of citizens to govern themselves. POCLAD helped us here in Ohio, as well as others in other states, come to the realization that we needed to step back from some of our single-issue fire fighting and rethink/restrategize our work and actions to be more intentional and proactive. We educate the public to help people understand how we got into this mess did not happen overnight, was not because of some cosmic forces, and was not by accident but because of an intentional effort over generations by a few who wanted to use this corporate form as a shield to rule. It’s going to take the same sort of intentionality, understanding, deliberation, and collaboration to democratically govern ourselves. Hopefully, we can be more inclusive this time around. We’ve written a booklet, produced a documentary [http://afsc.net/economic-justice.htm], spoken and organized workshops statewide. Our message is, to whatever extent we had democracy, or still have democracy, it was due to the unique and important role of social movements, not because of top-down efforts from the politicos or corporatos. It is the work of people like ourselves. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things. We must create, yet again, a social movement—this time for inclusive democracy.

Greg considers his work to be public service, weighted more toward the end of social change. Social change is “attempting to improve the community at large, not simply in an immediate or temporary way, but in a more structural, fundamental, long-lasting way.” He does his work outside of government because:

When I was in college in Ohio, I had the opportunity in study at Boston University for a semester and do an internship at the Massachusetts state planning agency. I experienced state planners discounting the views of the public. That’s when I knew I didn’t want to go to grad school to be an urban planner or urban administrator. I witnessed planners say, “We can’t put this building there because the state representative doesn’t approve, he wants it elsewhere because you know the contract is to be awarded to somebody who potentially gives them money.” It was just unbelievable. I didn’t want to have anything to do with that. I came back dedicated to not being a pawn of political decisions or working for an agency that would belittle public input and my own abilities. I actually felt sorry for the state planners that I was interning for because of the misuse, if not abuse, of their professional talents. I knew I had to connect with something that was more grassroots, that was not associated with government which seemed unresponsive to the public, out of control, and used by others for individual gain.

Greg thinks his work both is and is not transformational.

The flip side of working with grassroots groups that are outside of positions of power is that they are not inherently invited to be seated around the table when significant decisions are made. Yes, your voice can be more authentic, but you have no power unless you build it collectively from the ground up, and once you do, you just have to ascend these amazing hurdles before you’re even recognized. Once recognized, you’re criticized and you have to organize more to ascend another hurdle or another peak. If lucky enough to be still standing and those with you are still standing and haven’t been bought off, burned out, or distracted, you can win a seat at the table. Even then, the elites will try to kill the momentum by granting only a small part of your demands or try to appease a part of the group, a divide-and-conquer technique.

It’s just darn hard to achieve much of anything given the power that you are up against in doing this kind of work. I’ve come to the realization that you have to pick your struggles and see what you can realistically accomplish in the short term. The forces that we are up against are so entrenched and this issue of the breath and depth of corporate governance is so new that all we can do is set the table and begin the process. For me, it has been very instructive to study the history of social movements to see what others who have been in somewhat equivalent positions, what they have gone through, what they have struggled against, what they have been able to achieve. You know in one life span some things are possible, some aren’t. That’s fine. We’ll just do what we can, and at the end, pass along the torch and expect others will be there to carry it. If they’ll be able to harvest more fruits—that’s okay, I can live with that. You have to realize that some goals may not be doable within a period of time.

Maybe we’ll be surprised. Things don’t always progress in equal spaces or equal units, nature doesn’t work that way, and I think social change has an awful lot to learn from how the natural world works. At some point nature progresses very incrementally, but then at other points, you know, the tree falls, the hurricane or tornado happens, the tidal wave comes up. There are incremental occurrences that lead up to those changes, but then there are the sudden bursts. Nature is both incremental and sudden, and I think social change is the same. If we understand that going in and realize both what is and what is not possible in one year, one decade, one generation, then we inoculate ourselves from burning out and help others to see it’s a process and we need to respect the process—the means, the way, and where it leads. The results may be something that maybe we shouldn’t be concerned about because it may be simply outside our control.

Greg is sustained, nurtured, and animated by his zest for knowledge and a lifelong-learner perspective. When asked how he takes care of himself, he responded:

During a sabbatical, I studied three different types of social change. One was community organizing in this country, sort of a Saul Alinsky [1989] model. I went to Chicago where many groups exist using the Alinsky-style of community organizing. Since there was much community organizing done through church-based organizations, I spent some time meeting with people in that forum. The second of the three parts was going down South and meeting with groups started by a Quaker in North Carolina working on what are called the Listening Projects. This involved doing lengthy one-on-one interviews around a controversial issue, helping people realize that issues are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue Wide Awake and Dreaming
• Comment Setting the Stage
• Part I. Citizenship and Governance
• Part II. Theory and Practice
• Part III. Transforming Institutions
• Part IV. Transforming People
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors