Going Public — This Week's Insights “We still haven't worked out the best mix of each culture in our own institutions and in society as a whole. How should it look?”  - Mike Gecan, Going Public: An Organizer's Guide to to Citizen Action, page 174

Going Public — This Week's Insights “Pick your interest or public passion. Evaluate the ways the market culture and bureaucratic culture have performed. And then just try to convince me that there is not a role for crafty and capable leaders, well organized and comfortable with power, rooted in a third sector that is working...Continue reading

Going Public — This Week's Insights “At the core of the relational culture is a belief in the ability of most people to grow and develop, as well as a faith in the newly arrived or recently organized people or formerly excluded people to exert their new-found power in effective and responsible ways.”  - Mike...Continue reading

Going Public — This Week's Insights “At the end of several months of training and strategy, the staff came to a critical decision: everything that they did…would be put to a simple test. Did the activity lead to the training and developing of leaders? Or not? If it did, they would invest their time and...Continue reading

Going Public — This Week's Insights “This trend will continue–and more Americans will choose either to bowl alone or not bowl at all–until the leaders and organizers of our voluntary associations confront a few major failings.”  - Mike Gecan, Going Public: An Organizer's Guide to to Citizen Action, page 131 “Leaders can confront the critical...Continue reading

Going Public — This Week's Insight “On issue after issue, in agency after agency, affecting scores of communities, our organized teams of leaders learned what it was like when a focused government actually wanted to respond to focused citizens.” - Mike Gecan, Going Public: An Organizer's Guide to to Citizen Action

Going Public — This Week's Insight “We don’t see the value in practicing politics deductively….we know that we need to work inductively, through the process of individual meetings and house meetings, through the acquired habits of action and evaluation, and through the testing and retesting of ideas and strategies in cities and states, before we...Continue reading

Going Public — This Week's Insight “We were taught that merit mattered. If we just presented the facts in a full and fair manner, if we got the words right, the slogan right, the tone right, the photo-op right, then others would realize the errors of their ways and move in our direction. We learned...Continue reading

Going Public — This Week's Insight “Intelligent action, even public confrontation, is at bottom an attempt to engage and relate. Most activists fail to appreciate this. Bureaucrats seek to stifle it. Reenactors have lost sight of it. Celebrity self-promoters try to monopolize it. And terrorists long to destroy it. Our leaders study and practice it....Continue reading

Going Public — This Week's Insight “But constructive and creative action doesn't just happen. Rosa Parks didn't wake up one morning and spontaneously decide to sit on a seat near the front of the bus. She thought about her nonviolent but high-risk action and debated it with other leaders. She trained at the Highlander Folk...Continue reading

Going Public — This Week's Insight “How do you think new and better schools will be built? Because they are desperately needed? Because it’s a good idea? Because the honchos at the Board of Education wake up in the morning and decide to do the right thing? Because the city is appalled by the chronic...Continue reading

Going Public — This Week's Insight "We forget or deny that the appetite to relate is fundamental, and that the willingness to relate is nearly universal. People who have ideas and drive are on every street, in every project, every workplace and school, waiting in the wings, ready to be discovered. Someone has to reach...Continue reading