We have many new members on Students Speak Out, as a result of Carolyn Avaire’s presentation at the Minnesota Asssociation of Alternatives Program annual meeting that students attend. 122 students responded! 38 said they were interested in being student leaders. This suggests to me that students do have something to say and they will take the time to be involved if given the opportunity.

They continue to say important and thoughtful things.

Ashley writes: I was in the district and I needed help and they basically told my step mom to sent me to Irondale which was the district next to us.

Kasie writes: When you reach High School you are supposed to be older and mature and know right from wrong. Well why don’t they give us one chance to show we are?? From the minute you step into the door they are looking for you to screw up.

Can there be any doubt that we need to listen to students?

Property taxes can be a pretty dry subject. But citizens from three counties took their time to discuss with us what they’d like to know. One hot issue is school referenda. The citizens said that they felt like it was impossible to get good, unbiased information– instead, they feel heavy pressure from both sides. So we put together a very basic drop down menu on the website where people can look up their district’s data. We had over 5500 visits in one week. Two-thirds of those who took our survey said that the information did or might influence their vote.

What might this mean? Perhaps that people do want good information and that they are willing to learn. Again, if provided the right opportunity, they will involve themselves.

It’s interesting, because at the beginning, Bea (as well as many of the other women) said she didn’t really do anything great in her life. But I realized that what people consider “great” is what famous people do. We do great things everyday, and what we do–who we vote for, what we like, how we live–is what makes history. Maybe someday when I’m an old lady, someone will ask me what it was like to grow up during the War in Iraq, or when iPods were invented (I bet by then, they’ll be like caveman technology, like phones with cords…ha ha.) and I won’t think of it as anything spectacular. But it’s so important to learn and tell these stories, because they ARE history–and they can help us understand where we’ve come from and help us shape the decisions we make in the future.

Hmmm… It makes sense. When experts and special interests talk about an issue, they are consumed with the “rules” of the system (see previous Policy and a Pint blog posts.) When people talk about an issue, they sense simply that the outcome is not right, and thus they are far more inpatient and frustrated with all the gibberish about how this or that won’t work…

This just gets my blood boiling. Congress authorized the damn war, and surely they had access to far more unfiltered information than the American people. Rather than viewing Americans’ turnabout on the war as people being weak minded, how about giving them some credit to paying attention to what’s going on? Yes, there was some information to the contrary leading up to the war, but if I recall these people were being called traitors and unpatriotric by the Administration. Congress bought the war hook, line and sinker, and they, the Administration and the media sold the war–there was no public discourse. Hey, the New York Times apologized for missing the boat on the war. Just where is the American public supposed to get its information if it can’t trust the media or the people it elects?

The lack of public discourse on Iraq compelled me to create a web page on Iraq. I guess it’s my own personal MAP 150 experiment. I wondered whether the outcome might have been different if we had all chimed in at the time. Many argue that the outcome was inevitable. Perhaps so, but you never know what an honest discussion will produce.

I do have to give Bass credit. He wonders at the end of the review whether it’s the politicans letting the voters down. Amen, hallelujiah and the like.

While this may be a particularly stark example, this same dynamic is being played out around the country: adults fighting for their interests and turf, seemingly indifferent to the effect on students– the ostensible reason any of them have jobs in the first place. There’s a simple question in Little Rock– what do the students think? Are their schools better or not?

In collaboration with policy fellows from the Humphrey Institute with ties to the community, we have started a place to allow students to lead a community discussion of what’s happening in their schools. The Minneapolis school district, and its community, are going through a painful process of closing schools. Enrollment is down. But why? It’s not just demographics. As adults we can wonder all day long about what’s causing students to leave. But we’ll never know for sure until we bring students into the discussion – and ultimately find a better role for them in this process.

In the short week of the website’s launch, we’ve found students to be insightful (closing schools will just lead to more students leaving); open-minded (does having a relationship with your teacher benefit learning? does it benefit the teacher?) and responsible self-awareness (impatience with learning colors and fruits in an English Language course led one immigrant to fail to pay attention, which made dropping out to help with the family income an easier decision).

Of course, Idol is a mega-mega-million dollar hit. So whoever has that knack of striking for gold came up with the idea of “Idol Gives Back.” Broadcast last night, it featured the starving and AIDs-stricken children of Africa. The all-star singing guests were background.

It may have turned me off of Idol forever.

Exactly what Fox and the Idol judges Cowles, Abdul and Jackson were giving back wasn’t clear. Coca-cola’s five million was amply rewarded in commercials. Con Agra’s donation? Hmmm… who profits from food aid to Africa? The rest of us saps were implored to donate any dollar we could. (Oh, did I mention that Idol got 70 million votes for that show, almost double the norm? Who’s giving and who’s receiving here?)

The scenes and stories from Africa were heart-wrenching. An orphaned 12-year old boy serving as surrogate father to his 7 year sister and living in an 8×10 “house” is a lesson to us all. Forget Idol Gives Back. Here’s the real lesson.

Dollars do matter. But let’s not use the occasional donation to blind us from what’s really going on. Bad stuff around the world doesn’t just happen. Everybody is complicit. Each of us is complicit. The truth is that American food policy serves American interests far more than the starving people in Africa, and we could demand that it be changed. The truth is that our over the top consumption of energy is contributing to global warming, which is having the most devastating effect on the poorest countries around the world. American farm subsidies combined with NAFTA have put Mexican corn farmers out of business, encouraging illegal immigration to the U.S.

Things happen for a reason.

The bad. People in Zambia are on the verge of starvation…in massive numbers. It’s not that there isn’t enough readily available food. There is. It was grown by local farmers and stockpiled. Some countries have sent money to purchase the food so it can avert a humanitarian crisis. Not the U.S. It insists that all food aid be American grown food shipped on American ships. If even a quarter of American dollars were used to buy local food, one million more people could be fed for six months and 50,000 lives could be saved.

According to the New York Times, over the past three years, four companies and their subsidiaries have made sales of more than half the $2.2. billion in food aid. Shipping companies were paid $1.3 billion over the same period to move the food aid overseas.

What do America shippers, agricultural companies and elected officials have to say? Gloria Tosi, a lobbyist and immediate past president of the American Maritime Congress, an association of United States-flag ship owners, says ”There’s no constituency for cash.”
Not only is the self-interest sickening, this is a dreadful slap in the face to the American people. I do not believe for one second that they would insist that American food aid be home grown and shipped.

The Ugly. A person having a heart attack can avert muscle damage to the heart if he gets the proper care within about an hour or so. The problem is that many—most—hospitals cannot offer the appropriate emergency care such as angioplasty. However, they don’t want to divert their patients to other hospitals because Medicare reimbursement rates depend on the acuity of care a hospital offers. If the hospital stops serving patients with the more grave conditions, its reimbursements for other care will decrease.

The Uglier. A republican controlled committee doctored the report of an investigation into voter fraud, so that the report would suggest that fraud is far more prevalent than it is. This helped support crackdowns on voter registration in numerous states. Upshot? The ONE thing that probably unites us as American…the unimpeded right to vote, has been maliciously stripped away for some voters. And no surprise, it’s the poor and elderly paying the price.

The Good. I’m not going to comment on the Don Imus uproar. What is interesting though (and not at all surprising) is that MSNBC’s decision to pull Imus from their programming was due to NBC employees. NBC took the time to seek out the views of employees, especially women, who felt strongly that Imus is antithetical to their values.

Americans do care. Ask them. They’ll say buy grain from Zambia, redirect the ambulances and allow people to vote. I’m sure of it.

Turns out lots of people at Bob’s Java Hut were aware of the frequent accidents. They also knew that it would take the police an hour or more to show up– “they have more important things to attend to.” It would seem to me that paying attention to what these folks know in a coffee shop could reduce accidents and help the police attend to more critical matters. I didn’t even bother to ask whether anyone tried to contact the city about this though. I think I know the answer.

As a post script, there were three cars involved. One was driven by a young African American. Apparently the police asked whether he had anything on him (after an hour or more of waiting, you’d like to think he would have gotten rid of it if that were the case.) His girlfiend complained that she sees this all the time. Being Iraqi, she gets it too. She didn’t want to call it racism, but clearly she thought it was. I said, call it what it is.

As I was leaving, she motioned to the driver of the first car and said, “Those damn Somalis, They come to this country and they don’t know how to drive.”

A few weeks ago I spoke with Anthony Williams co-author of Wikinomics. He starts his book with this true story. A gold mining company in Canada is about to go belly up. The in-house geologists have been unable to find any more gold on the land. In a last ditch desperate act, the owner of the company posts all the information he has about the land on the web and offers a prize for information that leads to finding gold. People from around the world accept the challenge. As a result, $3 billion of gold is found.

I tell this story all the time to explain MAP 150, and the power of opening up thorny problems to citizens. Maureen Reed, former Independent Party candidate for Lieutenant Governor and rightly pointed out that the story is also a metaphor for MAP 150: citizens are the gold waiting to be mined.

So here’s my week that makes Maureen’s point. Last week, I attended a LISC community seminar. It began with perfomance artists, hip hop artists and rappers.

It was humbling. Here were young people putting themsleves on the line in a way that policy makers rarely do. It forced me to confront my own perceptions of what “community’ means and what it means to really cede power to community. They and the partipants that followed them talked eanestly and frankly about what’s necessry to have their voices be heard: what’s their responsbility if they want to make a difference? Their voices sound different from mine. They come from a different place.

If MAP 150 is serious, we need to move over and make room for what are still frontier voices in Minnesota. The Native American, the Somali, Latino, Hmong, African American. Granted the people in the room were there because it’s their job to think about community. For them, building community is a matter of life and death that would feel strange in many white communities. My hat off to LISC: I’ve never been in a room with so much ethnic and racial diversity.

At the other end of the spectrum, I spoke with David Edery who recently became the “Worldwide Game Portfolio Planner” for Xbox Live Arcade. David is interested in “serious” games–games that can help us understand our world better and solve problems better. How can games and simulations be used to help citizens weigh in on problems?

We working with a group of mid-career students at the Humphrey Institute, who are interested in getting Mineapolis students’ views on why enrollment is declining in Minneapolis. The school district just announced its plan for closing a school in North iMnneapolis due to declining enrollment. It begs the question; why is enrollent delcining? The typical way of answering this looks to statistics: demographics, transfers, drop ou rates. But that only describes what is happening; it doesn’t tell us why. The Humphrey students, spearheaded by Traci Parmenter of Admission Possible, will help us learn from students what they think is going on.

I met with Ben Shardlow, a young man passionate about civic engagement and the the lack of meaningful opportunities for young people to be involved. From this converesation, MAP 150 is launcing a project for younger adults. Stay tuned.

Sean and I have met with various county and city officials. Their reaction to MAP 150 has raged from outright enthusiasm and tons of practical ideas, to explanations and excuses for why it’s so hard to involve citizens.

What’s interesting is simply this. Whether it’s a neighborhood advocate, a Humphrey student, a young adult starting out in the work world, a national gaming expert, or a local official…it’s clear that people are hungry for a diffent way of making policy that allows ordinary people to weigh in and make a difference. I don’t need to swim. They’re keeping me afloat.