25 Tons of Food

Yesterday, a press conference at Wagner College was held to celebrate a joint partnership between Wagner, ShopRite Grocery Stores, and the Staten Island Advance, the Island's only daily newspaper. The celebration stemmed from successfully meeting an important but seemingly daunting challenge: collecting 25 tons of food over about a 5-month period to be distributed to Project Hospitality - Staten Island's largest service provider for the hungry and homeless. Tremendous credit goes to Wagner Athletics led by Coach Walter Hamelin and his Assistant Director Mike Miller, as well as the many students who worked so tirelessly to collect, transport, and donate the food. Wagner's President, Richard Guarasci, inspired everyone to work their hardest and Kevin Mannix, President and owner of the two Staten Island ShopRite stores participating, deserves kudos for his generosity and community spirit. This is a great project and it enjoyed so much success that the leaders of the partnership decided to hatch a new plan - to shoot for an even more ambitious target of 50 tons of food to be collected over the course of the calendar year. Everyone is betting on this remarkable partnership to once again meet its goal.

There is no question that the food being collected is helping thousands of people to stave off hunger and consume the nutrition they need to work, study, and get on with life. Emergency Food Programs, like the ones coordinated by Project Hospitality, feed thousands of food insecure people every day and are essential parts of any community, especially those suffering from economic deprivation. At the same time, we must never think that soup kitchens, food pantries, and other emergency food programs can, by themselves, solve the problem of hunger in America. There are a 1000 emergency food programs in New York City alone, feeding about 1.3 million people every day, and yet many adults and children cannot be certain about the source of their next meal.

So what can solve this problem? No one knows for sure. It is too complex and there are too many shifting trends and influences to definitively untangle the quandaries associated with the challenge of hunger. But here a few things that we know can help. First, increasing the minimum wage puts more money in people's pockets, so that they can afford the food they need and the other necessities of daily living. A minimum wage to lift people out of poverty would have to rise to about $13 an hour, but such an increase is justifiable for the suffering it would relieve and the boost it would give to local economies. Second, funding for Food Stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, should go up, not be threatened with cuts. Food Stamps are great because they put money for food directly into people's hands and are also spent immediately, which simultaneously gets more money circulating in the economy. In fact, at least one reliable source has said that food stamps worth $1 actually generate $1.74 in economic activity.

For those who think that Food Stamps are too often wasted on luxuries, rather than used to purchase basic food, the evidence is overwhelming that abuse of this kind is rare. SNAP helps everyone, including the millions of children threatened by hunger, who need the basic nutrition that comes from this program to learn and be successful in school. Finally, with respect to children specifically, we know that universal school meals can make a difference. In New York City, breakfast is already universally available without bureaucratic applications and red tape and without the stigma of having to declare oneself poor enough to qualify for a free meal. Now, if only we could accomplish the same thing with lunch in New York, and with both breakfast and lunch all over the country, we would be going a very long way toward ensuring that most children have enough to eat. That would be a huge victory and lead to a level of food security never before achieved in this country.

H.O.P.E. Count

H.O.P.E. in this case stands for Homeless Outreach Population Estimate and it is a process relying almost entirely on volunteers to assess the size and location of New York City's homeless population. I know this, because I spent most of Monday night and early Tuesday morning, accompanied by my wife Karen and 3 students from Wagner College, walking the streets of three South Shore Staten Island neighborhoods looking for homeless people.

Here's how it worked. The five of us showed up at one of the two training sites on Staten Island at about 10:30 pm on Monday evening. The site we went to is on the South Shore, the other is on the North Shore. We reported in, received our assignment, were exposed to a very brief training session, primarily on how to approach homeless individuals, loaded up on coffee and granola bars, and finally headed out into the 35 degree weather just a little before Midnight.

We parked our car near the first set of blocks we would be walking and then, following the map we had been given, carefully traced the route indicated. We had strict instructions to walk every block shown on the map and to speak to anyone whom we suspected might lack housing. This meant that people waiting for a bus or working for, say, the city should be not be approached, but that anyone else who seemed lost or aimless or insecure should be spoken to. Our script was simple. If we saw someone we suspected was homeless, we were to say. "Hello, I'm Steve Preskill, and I'm working for New York City as a volunteer. We are asking people about their housing situation. Any information you give us will remain confidential. Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?" We never did get to follow this script exactly as written, because when we encountered the one person that morning who probably was homeless, I became flustered and said incorrectly "We are asking people about their homeless situation." The person we met, who was rummaging through recycled bottles and cans, immediately answered that he was not homeless and had an apartment not far from where we found him. We should have asked him additional questions that were on our list, but because of our nervousness we were unsure how to proceed. About a half hour later we met this same person again, at a new location, but still very busily rummaged through recycled materials. We said hello, but again did not follow up with additional questions. We concluded, nevertheless, that it was likely he was housing insecure.

At another time that morning, we encountered a young woman who seemed to be hurrying somewhere and this time we more accurately used the script to ask her about her housing situation, but it was pretty clear that she lacked English proficiency and was, in fact, heading for her domicile.

Basically, then, we ran into only one potentially homeless person, despite the fact that we walked all the streets we were assigned and did not finish until close to 4 am on Tuesday. It turns out this is fairly typical during these HOPE counts, but we were glad to participate in this process and to gain this valuable experience. We knew, as well, that we were part of a corps of volunteers who were helping New York City to get a much more accurate count of the homeless population and, as a result, would be better able to provide homeless individuals with the services they might need. In fact, New York City's official count of its homeless population has dropped dramatically since the HOPE count began in 2005, despite the hard economic times. This is a strong indicator that the HOPE count is working and that people like us are contributing something valuable to the overall welfare of the City.
To learn more about the HOPE Count as recommended by John, please go here: https://a071-hope.nyc.gov/hope/welcome.aspx

"Confessions of a Liberal Gun Owner"

I read today's NY Times op-ed "Confessions of a Liberal Gun Owner" with keen interest this morning. The author, Justin Cronin, sounded so reasonable and self-disclosing. How could one not find his point of view persuasive? Well, I, for one, did not, and here's why. For all his willingness to admit that he has often been seduced by romantic, Starsky and Hutch-infused perspectives on guns and firearms that, as he says later in the piece, "are completely wrong," it was his occasional and rather matter of fact conclusions that his guns are ultimately meant to protect himself that made me doubt this guy.

Despite the fact that he knows it's safer for everyone when a household is without a gun, he clings to the idea that his guns may be necessary someday "to protect his family." He asserts he is his family's "last line of defense," whatever that means, and that he has therefore resolved to meet his responsibility to take care of his family by making sure he is well armed. But there is virtually no evidence that guns protect people in this way. For one thing, the need to actually use a gun, to physically protect oneself with a firearm is rare, and the likelihood that you will be lucky enough to have access to a gun in a time of crisis is pretty remote as well.

Near the end of the article, he takes pride in his daughter's prowess with a gun and notes that it is reasonable for her to develop her gun skills because, after all, one in five women is a victim of a sexual assault. But, again, real life doesn't work that way. You don't get to blow away the guy who is attacking you, because, well, you don't have your gun with you, or it's just out of reach, or it all just happened too suddenly. Virtually only in the movies do you get to blow the bad guy away. In the meantime, by carrying that gun, you may be endangering yourself and innocent others around you, and the chance that you will do harm to people who have no intention of hurting you (and Cronin knows this) is much, much higher than actually getting to kill an aggressor.

All of this bothers me as much as it does because there is so much at stake and because such thinking is so shoddy and so contaminated by our distorted ideas about aspiring to become the brave and noble savior. It's a fantasy, folks, and it would be quite funny, if it weren't so dangerous and pathetic.

Citizen Alums

As I said in a recent post, I have been attending the American Association of Colleges and Universities conference, which I have found quite stimulating. From a civic engagement perspective, I was especially excited by the last session I attended focused on a new nation-wide program started by Imagining America founder, Julie Ellison, called Citizen Alum. The whole point is to emphasize the fact that the graduates of our institutions of higher education aren't just donors, they are, just as importantly, doers, who are contributing in remarkable ways to helping to make our communities better. Citizen Alum highlights these contributions and urges all colleges and universities to reach out to their alums to hear their stories and to learn from them the many ways that they are helping to advance the civic mission of our democracy. Thousands of our alums are active citizens, giving back to their communities in powerful ways. We have so much to learn from them. You can learn more about the Citizen Alum project by going to this website: http://www.citizenalum.org/. This project is a poignant reminder of the many untapped resources available to all of us in higher education, if only we take the time and the initiative to find out about them. The mentoring possibilities associated with Citizen Alum are just amazing. The more we can learn from our alums the more we can help to create a sustainable, cohesive, and effective community of activists committed to the public good.

What a college is for

I am posting this from Atlanta and the annual conference of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. AAC&U is a group of about 1300 colleges and universities committed to academic renewal, with a very strong bias toward community-engaged education and commitment to the idea that higher education has a responsibility to prepare students to be active citizens who employ the intellectual might they have acquired in college to address our country's most challenging problems.

As the Professor Civic Engagement at Wagner College and as the author of a blog called Democratic Engagement, I am, naturally, quite comfortable with this emphasis, but I also worry about setting up an uneasy dichotomy between education for thought and education for action. You can almost feel the tension between those who want a college that stresses reading, cognition, and basic research and those who want a college that embraces relationship building, problem solving, and applied inquiry. Somehow, I want to find a way to honor the world of ideas just as much as we commit to taking action for public good. But unlike, say, Stanley Fish, who is absolutely convinced that colleges have no business trying to do good, I can't conceive any longer of an institution of higher education that isn't constantly trying to make the connection between theoretical ideas and everyday problem solving, between think tanks and action tanks, between cogitating and agitating. We need our best and most fertile minds working on the problems that are the hardest to solve, that, in fact, don't have any clear-cut solutions. These are the problems that leadership guru Ron Heifetz has called "adaptive challenges." When scholarly experts eschew these challenges, they leave them to others, such as politicians, who too often lack the depth of knowledge and the passion for profound understanding that our best scholars pride themselves on. Of course, scholars alone can't make much headway on our most daunting challenges, but without a concerted contribution from them, we can never make the progress we so desperately need to improve life for everyone.

A Few Wise Men

Lately, I have been reading George Vaillant's remarkable summing up (at least so far) of the longitudinal Harvard Grant Study of Adult Development that was begun in 1938 to study the long-term growth patterns of 268 Harvard undergraduates. The researchers involved, who originally chose the subjects for their physical robustness, wanted to see what kind of adult lives were led by healthy, well educated and highly privileged individuals (all male) and to identify possible patterns or recurring themes that over time could characterize this particular cohort of men. Vaillant's book, which was issued this year, is called "Triumphs of Experience," and it recounts in considerable detail the lessons that can be learned from this study's voluminous findings. Remarkably, Vaillant, as principal investigator, is still gathering data on participants who are now well past 90.

First, it is essential to recognize that because this study excluded women and was confined largely to caucasians, it has very limited use for capturing anything like the full range of human experience. Still, some of the stories that are told and some of the themes that emerge, especially about these men as they grow old, says a lot about what some mature men eventually discover to be the most satisfying aspects of their lives.

As the study progressed, a tremendous amount of data were collected about professional accomplishments, personal relationships, physical health, and overall attitudes toward life. What especially intrigued me can be found in the chapter called "Maturation," especially the stories of men who scored very high on a variety of scales for measuring wisdom. At age 75, the men were asked to define wisdom. Their answers included answers like these below and tended to be quite different from what they said at earlier ages.

"Empathy through which one must synthesize both care and justice."

"Tolerance and a capacity to appreciate paradox and irony even as one learns to manage uncertainty."

"A seamless integration of affect and cognition."

"Self-awareness combined with an absence of self-absorption."

"The capacity to hear what others say."

Synthesizing these responses in a way that I hope is fair, I come up with the following qualities these men deem to be especially important in a human being.

• Concern for specific individuals combined with a concern for the general welfare
• Tolerance for difference and uncertainty
• Balance of emotion and intellect
• Blend of self-awareness and awareness of others
• Heightened capacity for listening

It seems to me that these qualities and others very much like them coincide or are identical with the qualities that we tend to associate with caring, cohesive, democratic societies. Looking out for the other person, maintaining humility about what we know, avoiding the temptation to overemphasize reason, staying open to multiple perspectives, these are the characteristics that are constantly invoked to keep democratic groups flourishing. Getting older really can become, in Dr. Vaillant's words, a "triumph of experience." All of us who care about life in communities would do well spending more time with our elders. They have a wisdom to share that too often escapes our notice and interest.

Stan Musial and Democratic Engagement

Stan Musial recently died at the age of 92, one of the greatest and most admired baseball players of the 20th century, and someone whose athletic prowess I have been aware of since I turned 8, about 54 years ago. Admittedly, his greatest years preceded my direct knowledge of him, though even in 1958, when he had reached the relatively advanced baseball age of 37, he was still able to hit .337. But what does he and his legacy as the greatest of all St. Louis Cardinals have to do with democratic engagement?

Well, first of all, let's get the basics out of the way. For most of his career, he was a model of consistency. His .331 lifetime average is an indication of this. His career totals for hits, doubles, triples, runs, RBIs, and even home runs (a surprising 475) still place him near the top of almost every hitting category there is.  He rarely struck out. He got on base with great proficiency and his lifetime slugging percentage was higher than Mays, Mantle, or Aaron. He was a solid fielder, a cunning baserunner, and, remarkably, never got himself thrown out of a game for bad behavior. St. Louis's love affair with him continued well after his retirement and although his glory has faded a bit, those who know baseball have always known that very few were his equal as a player.

So what's the point of bringing him up here? He wasn't only a superb baseball player, he was a superb competitor, too, and it's not too much of a stretch to say he was a fine human being as well. He cared about winning and he would do everything he could to defeat the opposition, but there is no report of him throwing a chair across the room or kicking a water cooler when he struck out or made an error, and his conduct toward opposing players was unfailingly courteous and even appreciative. He loved the game and knew how important it was to play it well especially for his hometown boosters. But he also knew it was only a game and that there were other things that mattered far more. In other words, he was a mature, respectful, mild-mannered adult who also happened to be a world class athlete.

Many readers have heard that old Jacques Barzun quote "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball." I have never been confident about the full meaning of Barzun's statement, but I have always assumed that Barzun, in part, meant that baseball is the perfect blend of the individualistic and the collective, of the single person who goes in and out of the spotlight and who the rest of the time quietly does what he can to add to his team's advantage. We love the man at bat, dueling with the opposing team's hurler, especially when the game is on the line. Everything depends on that one batter. But we also love the player who backs up the throw from the outfield or tries to go from first to third on a single or executes the perfect sacrifice bunt to put his teammate into scoring position. This is the person who does the everyday things that don't get noticed much, but can make a big difference in determining the outcome. 

That's the kind of player and person Stan Musial was. Dependable in the clutch when everything depended on him, but also willing to do a hundred other things that rarely got noticed to help his team prevail. And that I would argue is what everyday citizens and activists do as well. Occasionally, they will make a speech or publish an article that puts them in the spotlight, but their biggest contribution is in the dozens of quiet and necessary chores they perform everyday for which they receive no credit or recognition. In a sense, these are the two sides of the leader/follower dynamic of any community-engaged individual. Sometimes leading in a way that may attract considerable attention, but far more often following the lead of others, doing the work that needs to get done to further the public good.

It turns out that in many ways that is the kind of citizen Stan Musial was as well. But suffice it to say he will be missed, in part for his amazing and noteworthy accomplishments, but probably just as much for being the kind of person he was, kind, considerate, willing to go the extra mile to help others. Now that's a legacy especially worth celebrating.

What President Obama could say today

President Obama delivers his second inaugural address today on the same day we celebrate Dr. King's birthday (even though his real birthday is on January 15). It is fitting and even obligatory for him to invoke Dr. King's rhetoric in this speech, to call on the nation "to rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed--we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."As Joseph Stiglitz demonstrates so concisely in today's New York Times, we are falling desperately short of even a reasonable level of equality in this country. The last time the United States was this unequal economically was in the 1920s, a degree of inequality which helped to pave the way for the Great Depression.

But in terms of what to emphasize in today's speech, Douglas Brinkley, the distinguished historian, says it best in the Room for Debate column in today's New York Times: 

"No parent should have to worry that their child will be murdered by assault weapons when attending school. No Latino should think that a knock-on-the-door means deportation. No worker should fear that Social Security will be raided or health care benefits incrementally stripped away under a desire for a balanced budget. And no citizen in the Age of Climate Change should wonder whether the federal government will help them rebuild if a natural disaster devastates their community.

"Back in 1937, F.D.R. said that, 'The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.' I hope the president speaks out fiercely for the 30 million in poverty, the unemployed, the downtrodden and the middle-class families that just can’t make ends meet. If one American is hungry, he should say, than we’re all hungry."

These are the concerns that President Obama should stress, that would inspire us to be at our best, that would help us finally to live out that American creed and allow our government to mirror, in a way that could give us new pride and new hope, the "better angels of our nature."

More Jokes on Civic Engagement

By popular demand, it is time to return to a few humorous tidbits from the world of community engagement.

Joke One:
Salesman: "This new assessment instrument will cut in half the time it takes for you to do an effective community assets inventory."
Community Activist: "Great, let me have two of them."

Joke Two:
A deeply committed advocate for better housing who spends all of his time trying to improve conditions in a poor neighborhood decides to investigate an abandoned 3-storey building on his own that has possibilities as a future site for low income apartments. He climbs the rickety circular staircase and just as he reaches the final steps leading to the third floor, the stairs suddenly give way and in the nick of time he reaches out for a piece of metal that is solidly embedded in the wall. As he dangles from a great height with nothing but the metal bar to cling to and with the prospect of a 30 foot fall facing him, he calls out desperately for help. A deep voice thunders: "I, the Lord, am here. Let go of that thin piece of metal and I will save you." Still dangling, the man yells back: "Is there anyone else out there?"

Joke Three:
A community activist who is also a rigorous empirical thinker finally agrees to leave the city with a friend to take an auto tour of the countryside. As they pass one particularly picturesque meadow, the friend calls out, "look the sheep have been shorn." The thinker responds blandly: "Yes, on this side anyway."

Why we shun DVDs to watch movies on the big screen

Okay, so this title is slightly more melodramatic than our actual practice is. We don't exactly "shun" DVDs; we watch them on our home screen occasionally. But we especially love to go to a large theatre with comfortable seats, a wide screen, and good sound to enjoy a film, often a classic, with lots of other avid filmgoers in attendance. Experiencing wonderful moments of a movie with others by laughing uproariously together or sitting collectively in suspenseful stillness greatly deepens our enjoyment of any picture. 

Last night we headed to the New-York Historical Society to take in another installment in their series of films about New York City. This one was Gene Kelly's and Stanley Donen's ultimate big city musical "On the Town" from 1949. Of course, it was done better and more stylishly by Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein and others on Broadway in 1944. Producers at MGM Studios shortsightedly decided to cut some of the best songs from the Broadway show, including Lonely Town, and to allow only a week of shooting on location in New York City. That week of location shooting would ultimately result in the film's opening - by far, the best 6 minutes of the whole thing. Those moments catch the three awestruck sailors, limited to 24 hours of shore leave, hurrying from one New York attraction to another, pretty much of all which still stand today.

Despite its flaws, the film has an exhilarating effect on a live audience. The dances by Kelly, Vera-Ellen, and Ann Miller, the voice of a young Frank Sinatra, the mugging of Jules Munchin and Betty Garrett, all make for a fun show that seems to grab people, especially the older people in the audience who have such fond memories of post-World War II Manhattan. 

The point I want to make here is that experiencing a film in public on a big screen, alongside lots of others, both young and old (we actually spoke to a 14 year old and a 65 year old just before the film began), fosters this vague sense that it matters to you whether people are having a good time or not, and that this consciousness of others' level of enjoyment changes how you view it and how you feel about it afterwards. It is almost as if you say to yourself, "if we're going to do this together, let's make it as worthwhile as possible," so you laugh more heartily and clap with greater enthusiasm, not just for the film, but to cheer on the value of this collective viewing. It has a shared, civic quality, and if you care about such things, you want to make such public outings more likely in the future, so you do what you can to make sure everyone has a good time.

When it comes to public viewings of films, my ideal way to organize them is to open with a brief orientation about the film, its dates, its initial critical reception, its place in history. You then, of course, actually see the film under the best conditions possible. And finally you end with a panel discussion or even a general open discussion that encourages people to voice their opinions and their reactions. What a wonderful way to bring people together, to promote cohesion, and to give people a sense that leaving their homes for a public forum, at least occasionally, adds value to the whole community.

Friendship Dinners and a Vision for Port Richmond

In a part of Staten Island called Port Richmond where Wagner College is doing much of its community engaged work, a "friendship dinner" is regularly held at St. Phillip's Baptist Church, usually on the 4th Thursday of each month, to bring together a diverse a group of people from the surrounding area to share a meal together, to form new relationships or get reacquainted with one another, and to talk about the state of their neighborhood.

The dinners were started a couple of years ago when antagonism between different segments of the community grew so heated that violence resulted and a series of strategies were put in place to ease ethnic tensions. In addition to the Friendship Dinners, an Anti-Violence Task Force was formed to take proactive measures in the community to prevent the future eruption of violence. These strategies have worked. Violence is way down; tensions seem to be greatly alleviated. For instance, one of the ideas that has contributed to community cohesion is Midnight Basketball, where the local Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) building is opened up on Friday nights so that local youth have a place to play basketball and soccer as a constructive alternative to roaming the streets. Hundreds of youth regularly participate in these late night games.

At last night's Friendship Dinner, led by the remarkable Port Richmond community activist Charlie Kitts, a professor and students from a Hunter College Urban Planning Studio who were asked by the Anti-Violence Task Force to come up with a plan for revitalizing Port Richmond, briefly presented their stimulating findings. What they came up with is impressively professional and worth studying closely. A brief summary of their recommendations follows, but actually reading the Executive Summary and full report is the best way to appreciate the breadth of their proposals. Here is the link to the report: http://issuu.com/npstorey/docs/vision_port_richmond

As this 143 page report states, the overarching goal is: "To unlock the potential of Port Richmond and increase opportunity for all residents by building a safer community, advancing economic development, and fostering neighborhood cohesion." 

They focus their recommendations on 7 goals. 

Goal One is Creating a Safer Community. Some of their recommendations for accomplishing this include: 

• creating a community development credit union 
• lobbying the local police precinct to hire more Spanish speaking officers
• Initiating a well organized campaign to clean up Port Richmond Avenue

Goal Two is Fostering Pride in Port Richmond's Cultural Diversity. Recommendations include:

• establishing a Multicultural Activities Committee to promote cross-cultural interaction and discourage future violence
• fill empty spaces with multicultural activities that improve the streetscape and encourage social interaction
• devise a neighborhood marketing campaign to improve Port Richmond's public image

Goal Three is Promoting Economic Justice and Development. Recommendations include:

• help connect job seekers to employment and education resources
• educate the community about micro-financing opportunities
• conduct a needs assessment survey of all small businesses in Port Richmond

Goal Four is Manage Growth. Recommendations include:

• apply for affordable housing grants
• create a local health cooperative
• improve Port Richmond's bicycle infrastructure and in general provide more transportation options

Goal Five is to Connect the Community to its Waterfront. Recommendations include:

• boost interest in waterfront projects by establishing a task force to promote waterfront construction and activity
• discourage land use on waterfront lots that is not waterfront-dependent
• encourage opportunities for on-water recreation and build a waterfront park at the end of Port Richmond Avenue

Goal Six is to Enhance the Built Environment. Recommendations include:

• make better use of underutilized spaces and buildings
• encourage sidewalk cafes
• implement a Port Richmond design code for all businesses

Goal Seven is to Strengthen the Anti-Violence Task Force. Recommendations include:

• incorporate the task force as a tax-exempt non-profit
• make internships available to help with coordination
• create a website and increase the budget through grants

A Deliberative Dialogue on Gun Control

Spokesperson One (No Restrictions): In my view, any restriction on the buying and selling of firearms violates the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights and the right to bear arms.  This is fundamental and should pre-empt any discussion about gun control. In addition, once restrictions are set in place, it is only a matter of time before a move to confiscate all guns is underway. This is, in part, why the sale of assault rifles and high capacity magazine clips should not be curtailed, as one new gun law leads to ten more. What might have begun as a well-intended effort to promote public safety leads to the slippery slope of unending gun legislation that harms the millions of law abiding gun owners who use their guns responsibly, while accomplishing nothing to prevent violent crime. We know that no matter how much we legislate against guns, criminals and others who want to inflict harm will find a way to acquire and use firearms against other humans. Gun control leaves the law abiding citizen defenseless and the person who is intent on doing harm even more dangerous. The only thing that is going to stop a potential murderer with a gun is another law abiding person with an equally powerful or still more powerful firearm.

Spokesperson Two (Registration and Gun and Ammunition Coding): We don't have to restrict gun ownership to promote public safety. Any responsible person who wants a gun can have one, as long as he or she agrees to register the firearm, accepts a brief waiting period for a background check, and tolerates all forms of ballistic fingerprinting and bullet coding. None of these requirements will interfere with gun ownership. They simply make it less likely that guns will fall into the hands of irresponsible parties, and that if a gun crime does occur, the perpetrator can be more easily traced. These simple guidelines allow those who believe strongly in the right to bear arms to see their rights fully realized. Even assault rifles and high capacity magazines are acceptable as long as we as a society can be assured that none of this lethal equipment is available to people who have been shown to lack the ability and the self-control to use it judiciously. America's love of guns does not have to be disrupted by bans and confiscations. But any reasonable person knows and most developed countries have learned that unless the most dangerous firearms are restricted, there will continue to be more unnecessary killing.

Spokesperson Three (Bans and Limits): People do kill people, but guns make it a lot easier. The evidence is overwhelming that when a gun is kept in a household, it makes that household much more dangerous, as much as three times more dangerous. Additionally, a weapon that is kept at home is 12 times more likely to be turned on a family member or guest than on a prowler. Of course, the National Rifle Association is right when it asserts that the vast majority of guns are used safely, but when 30,000 people a year are killed by guns, including homicides, suicides, and accidents, then something must be done to temper their use. Most people use cars safely as well, but that does not prevent the state from requiring users to demonstrate their competence as drivers and to register their automobiles. Furthermore, there are many kinds of high capacity cars, such as racing cars and formula one vehicles, that cannot be purchased by the ordinary person. The same situation should hold for guns. Strict registration of guns with background checks should be required, coding of guns and bullets should be taken for granted, and high capacity magazines, like the kind Adam Lanza used, as well as any form of assault rifle should be strictly prohibited. This is common sense and we know such restrictions save lives, as demonstrated by the evidence from just about every developed country in the world. Let's get on with the serious business of making the United States safer before another terrible gun tragedy occurs. Strictly prohibiting the sale of all assault rifles and high capacity magazines to civilians is an excellent place to start.

Kathy Goldman and Universal School Meals

I attended the Food Bank's Conference on Hunger and Poverty yesterday in Manhattan and heard from a legendary activist in a session called "Eat to Learn," which focused on efforts through the New York City Schools to ensure that all children, especially the poor, have healthy and plentiful menu options for both breakfast and lunch. The speaker was Kathy Goldman, who, in fact, turned 81 yesterday and whose tireless efforts to feed the hungry in New York City led to the establishment of the Food Bank 30 years ago. The Food Bank has no peer in actively and successfully addressing the needs of hungry people, as it serves 400,000 free meals in New York City every day. And Kathy Goldman has no rival when it comes to protecting the interests of the poor and hungry. She has been doing this work since 1965 and has remained active as Director of the Community Food Resource Center until 2003 and most recently as the Co-Director of Community Food Advocates, inc. She is also one of the country's leading advocates for the federal government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) better known as Food Stamps. In September, the White House proclaimed her a "Champion of Change."

Now, as Co-Director of Community Food Advocates, she is collaborating with Agnes Molnar to achieve one last great victory for food insecure children. She and Ms. Molnar want to pass legislation that would establish a "Universal School Meals" Program, which would ensure that every public school student has free, unfettered access to delicious and healthy school meals. You might wonder why such a program is necessary given the fact that we already have a free lunch program for all low-income children in the United States. The problem is that many eligible children do not take advantage of this program, primarily because of the stigma associated with officially declaring oneself poor or in need. Additionally, the application process is often a barrier to families who find such paperwork confusing or challenging. Universal School Meals would eliminate all paperwork and bureaucracy and the burdensome eligibility requirements that now stand between youth who want to eat but are too proud or perplexed to sign up. Given Kathy Goldman's commitment and persistence, my money is on Ms. Goldman. But in the meantime, I also hope Wagner College students can play their part as civically engaged community activists to ensure that this critical legislation is finally signed into law.

Joe Papp and Theatre as a Public Good

Most New Yorkers know about the Public Theatre, but many have lost sight of its purpose as imagined originally by Joe Papp in the late 1950s. Papp's notion was simple. Live theatre, especially Shakespearian live theatre, should be available to the widest possible audience, one that is composed of many poor people and many people of color. Furthermore, that theatre should be as passionate and complex and chaotic as the world in which it is produced. Casts should be filled with diverse actors and such a theatre should challenge the public and push them to see things anew and to re-imagine creative possibilities for a different world. It should be all those things, but above it must educate and it must be free.

So we learned in a film about Mr. Papp that was presented at Lincoln Center on Monday evening. The film entitled "Joe Papp in 5 Acts" is slated to be shown on PBS's American Masters Series. But the thing that gripped me is this idea that any democratic society is entitled to a public theatre in the same way that we are entitled to free schools, free libraries and free parks. Theatre, especially when it is strong and insistently passionate, is part of our birthright as a free society. We need it to make us better and to tell the story of our struggles to create a more compassionate and more just society.

Papp was an unapologetic communist and sometimes it seems that what we need in our artistic impressarios is a person like Papp who demanded excellence and an uncompromising commitment to inclusion and justice. People who are visionary and even angry and who want to put all that pent-up emotion on the stage are our best bet for a more democratic and inclusive theatre. And ultimately for a theatre that explores those commitments we hold most dear.

Papp especially loved Shakespeare and to this day we have the remarkable Shakespeare in the Park productions that are such a huge part of his influence. But the fact that these productions are usually Shakespeare plays was critical for Papp. He wanted to bring the most beautiful language to a public debased by an overexposure to crude and ugly words. He sought to elevate the taste of the public and, as we have said, to challenge people to want something higher and more challenging than they might have asked for on their own. He strived to create a theatre that fostered human growth and whatever else he accomplished, it was his free Central Park plays that remain his most enduring democratic legacy.

The Tallest Tree in the Forest

On Sunday evening, Karen and I attended the Guggenheim Museum's wonderful Works and Process series. This time around it featured an exploration of a proposed one-man show focused on the life of Paul Robeson called "The Tallest Tree in the Forest." The play is still being developed and will open in California in the fall, but the scenes we were privileged to view indicate it could be a very impressive production. The actor is Daniel Beaty and the director is the quite distinguished Moises Kaufman. Beaty brings a passion and an honesty to the role that should make this production a powerful addition to the theatre world.

So why this mention of a new play about Paul Robeson in this particular blog? It's all about Robeson. As the producers of the play say outright, there was a time in the 1940s when Paul Robeson was the best known Black man in the world. He was only the third African American ever to attend Rutgers University and when he graduated he was honored to be recognized as the valedictorian of his class. In addition, Robeson was a two-time All-American football player who went on to play professional football, which helped him "work his way" through Columbia Law School. By the time, he had become a lawyer, he was also acknowledged to be a powerful bass singer, known for his renditions of Negro spirituals and other songs. This ability to sing would lead to his participation in the great musical by Jerome Kern called Showboat, where he gained a kind of immortality as the person most closely identified with the tune Old Man River. He also had developed enormous talent as an actor and would go on to star in a highly celebrated production of Othello and in a series of critically acclaimed plays by Eugene O'Neill. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, he was earning at least a hundred thousands dollars year and was in demand all over the world.

But he wasn't satisfied, because in addition to the terrible abuse he endured as a Black man in an era of White supremacy, he was deeply sensitive to the pain suffered by poor and working class people everywhere he went. His social consciousness was first piqued when he was living in London and encountered Welsh miners who had marched for two weeks with very little food from Wales to London to publicize their plight. With almost no hesitation, Robeson joined their protest and began to use his own power as an entertainer to bring attention to the problems of racism and social class prejudice. His desire to entertain took a back seat to his desire to make a difference for those in need and when he praised the Soviet Union for its absence of racism, he was attacked in the United States. His stalwart support for the Soviet Union, however misguided that might have been, stemmed from his many visits there where he experienced none of the race consciousness that hounded him in the United States. Eventually, Robeson lost his passport privileges, owing to his praise for the Soviet Union's racial tolerance, and his ability to make a living as an entertainer drastically declined. He died in near-poverty in 1977, sick for his native land, but still defiant and ever resistant against the forces of bigotry and ignorance. His example of excellence and courage lives on. We still have much to learn from him.

Defining Civic Engagement...Again

My colleague, Samantha Siegel, and I have  been working hard to come up with a definition of civic engagement for Wagner College that is clear and practical. We know we aren't there quite yet, but we think we are getting close. Here is our latest attempt. Special thanks to Karen DeMoss for helping us sharpen our message.

Civic engagement begins with people who decide to put aside their individual interests to work and learn together democratically and grow into informed and active citizens more committed and better able to support the well being of communities.

The range of civic engagement options includes but is not limited to: direct service, internships with neighborhood organizations, place-based research and dissemination, public policy advocacy, regular participation in meetings and community forums, and ongoing discussion and deliberation about pressing social issues.

As an institution of higher education, Wagner College supports the development of a civically engaged academic environment by deepening relationships among students, faculty, staff, and community members through classroom, co-curricular, and place-based learning. In all of these contexts, opportunities to reflect critically on experience are encouraged and to relate what is learned to local and global contexts.

At its best, college-supported civic engagement increases motivation to go on learning, raises civic consciousness and commitment, fosters empowerment through hands-on participation that addresses community-identified issues, and supports the continuing improvement of our overall quality of life.

Who Stole the American Dream?

Who Stole the American Dream? is the title of a new book by veteran journalist Hedrick Smith. I was curious about what Smith had to say because for years he was a leading foreign correspondent for the New York Times and a voice of reason and moderation throughout his tenure at the Times. He wrote an outstanding book about the modern Soviet Union back in the early 90s called "The Russians" and somewhat more recently he penned a volume titled "The Power Game" which explores how the United States Congress actually passes key legislature and shapes public policy. It is a sobering account about an institution that seems to respond more to the highest bidder than the best argument, and puts self-interest far ahead of moral obligation or social urgency.

In Who Stole the American Dream, he offers an increasingly familiar account of the role government has played in selling out the poor and the moderately well off. Just about every legislative initiative that has emerged from Congress since President Reagan has proved advantageous to the wealthiest Americans. And while those in positions in power have made the most of governmental directives that have been designed to support the rich, those who are poor or on the margins have suffered, often grievously.

Near the end of his book Smith explores what needs to happen to restore a modicum of economic and social justice. He proposes a massive jobs program to heal America's infrastructure, strong governmental support for science, technology, and innovation, a severe reduction in the military budget, a more sensible and compassionate housing policy, and modest adjustments to how Social Security and Medicare are funded to ensure their viability.

He reserves the very last section of his book for what he considers the most important change of all. A plan to unleash an army of volunteers "to get the country back on track..." to exploit this army of volunteers to "reclaim the American Dream."What he especially has in mind is a mass movement that would insist, that would, in fact, demand a new morning in America in which those lacking work would finally be able to secure employment to repair America's broken places. These broken places include the highways and bridges and sewer systems that have fallen on hard times, but they also include the schools that lack sufficient qualified teachers, the poor communities that lack healthy food, and even the relatively well off places that lack sustainable energy sources and clean water and that continue to spew far too many pollutants into the air. It is a call for everyone to become civically engaged around the issue of work for all those capable of taking advantage of it and a new commitment to a social contact that puts the needs of people before institutions, the priorities of health and well being ahead of empty platitudes regarding America's primacy in the world.

Grow to Give

I just returned from a Grow to Give meeting, which is a subcommittee of the Staten Island Hunger Task   Force, a group committed to seeing to it that food pantries are well stocked and policies are in place that ensure hungry people have enough food to eat. Grow to Give focuses specifically on creating community gardens whose yield can be used to help feed the hungry. Originally, the plan was to have a conference on February 2nd to share with as many interested people as possible how far the community garden movement has progressed on Staten Island. It was decided, however, that this is not a good time for such a meeting and that the three segments of Grow to Give: Food pantries, Gardeners, and Volunteers should identify some goals and priorities for the coming months.

It seems to me that members of the Wagner community potentially represent both the gardeners and the volunteers of Grow to Give. A while back, there had been talk of creating a community garden at a charter school that would be supervised, in part, by Wagner. Although this garden has been slow to get off the ground, I think we have a new motivation to get it going. The motivation is dealing with hunger. Initially, the charter school garden was being planned to support educational efforts and to bring the members of one local neighborhood together around a worthwhile project, while also producing healthy food. Now, with Grow to Give, we have the added incentive of growing food to address the needs of hungry people. Incredibly, about 1 in 4 children in New York City go to bed hungry every night. In this one section of Staten Island, the hunger rate among children may even be higher. A community garden is a small but very productive way to begin to deal with this problem. If this community garden can get up and running and lead to other such gardens, the impact could be significant. Furthermore, when Wagner students learn about the garden and its goals, I think we will have a lot of volunteers and a lot learners who want to gain a deeper understanding of the systemic causes of hunger and poverty. How far we can get on this is hard to say. But Grow to Give seems like a wonderful place to start.

Defining Civic Engagement

We were working on content for Wagner College's Center for Leadership and Engagement website when we encountered the daunting task of trying to put forward a clear and useful definition of civic engagement. One definition we played with goes something like this:

Wagner College has a long history of promoting civic learning and engagement through its highly integrated academic curriculum and its robust co-curricular offerings. At least since the 1998 launch of the Wagner Plan for the Practical Liberal Arts, the college has demonstrated its commitment to “learning by doing” through clusters of courses called learning communities linked to real-world, community-based situations. Over time, this twin commitment to enriched student learning through community engagement and to utilizing Wagner’s strengths to address a variety of community challenges has only intensified.  Civic engagement encompasses a wide array of activities at Wagner College that include close observations of community practitioners, active participation in the work of key community organizations, and neighborhood-based inquiry and research. All of these activities are centered on connecting our students and faculty to the larger community to enrich academic learning and to promote the well-being of our community partners. 

Wagner has learned over time that civic learning and engagement should include the following:

• ·       Consciously and meaningfully connecting classroom learning to existing community realities;
• ·       Encouraging student participation in hands-on, community-based activities;
• ·       Systematically reflecting on place-based experiences to foster deeper explorations of the roots of pressing community issues and to help students understand the impact of their own civic contributions;
• ·       Guiding students toward seeing themselves as co-authors in defining and developing the College’s civic mission;
• ·       Increasing appreciation for the value of civic knowledge and collaborating with others to take action in the community to advance the public good.

For Wagner, then, civic engagement can be summed up as follows. It entails rich civic learning and engagement building on classroom-based theoretical knowledge, deepening student understanding through community-based activity and critical reflection, raising civic consciousness and commitment, and fostering student empowerment through actual, hands-on participation in addressing real issues facing real communities.

Two Civic Engagement Jokes

Joke One: Two cows are standing in the pasture. The first one turns to the second and says: “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the threats to democracy. Unless we educate young people to see themselves as full-fledged partners in helping to make our communities better and unless we give them plenty of opportunities to practice the democratic arts of discussion, deliberation, shared decision making, and conjoint social action, our democratic experiment will falter and ultimately perish.”

The second one turns to the first and says: “Moo.”

Joke Two: A former teacher who has done everything possible to give back to her community is waiting to die. As a teacher, she was fully committed to democratic pedagogies. She regarded her students as her teachers and found countless ways for them to take the lead on important in-class and out-of-class projects. Her goal was to prepare them for a rich and active public life. But she didn’t just teach these things, she also lived them. She volunteered at the local food pantry, she advocated for better, more innovative anti-poverty programs, she campaigned for progressive candidates, and she relentlessly lobbied public officials to make good on their promises to create a more just and equitable society. Although she never thought about it much during her lifetime, as she prepared to die, she imagined the celebratory greeting she would receive in heaven for her selfless service. She was sure she had earned a place of honor there.

When she actually died, however, she found herself on a rather ordinary street corner handing our leaflets publicizing a community meeting to protest cuts in Food Stamps. She turned to one of her fellow-leafletters and asked where they were. “In heaven,” he replied. “Really,” she answered, ‘it’s not at all what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“Uh, I’m not sure. Singing angels, perfect harmony, perpetual peace.”

‘That’s how it used to be but then everybody got so bored they couldn’t stand it any longer, so they changed it. Welcome to the New Heaven.”

“But then how is it different from life on earth?”

“It’s not except for the gift of eternal life and the fact that for us the phrase ‘long haul’ has a whole new meaning.”

Lincoln and Civic Engagement

I greatly admire the recent film about Lincoln and the push in the House of Representatives to pass the 13^th amendment abolishing involuntary servitude forever. Daniel Day Lewis’s portrayal of Lincoln is superb, but so are the performances by Sally Field as Mrs. Lincoln, David Strathairn as Seward, and Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens. Additionally, Tony Kushner’s script is eloquent, subtle, and deeply moving. There are some historical inaccuracies, as numerous commentators have pointed out. See especially Harold Holzer’s comments in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Sean Wilentz’s in the December 31 issue of the New Republic. But both of these historians, like quite a few others, put these relatively small errors aside to praise the film.

The larger and more interesting critique has to do with the absence of Black activists from this narrative. It can be easily argued that the unique focus of this story, the deliberations of the U.S. House of Representatives during the month of January in 1865, precludes the inclusion of Blacks, but craftsmen as skilled as Spielberg and Kushner could have easily inserted a flashback or two showing the influence of Frederick Douglass and other Black abolitionists on Lincoln’s evolving views toward emancipation. By the way, it probably doesn’t need to be mentioned, but Lincoln always hated slavery, so it wasn’t his views toward slavery that evolved. Rather, the big shift in his thinking had to do with the meaning of the Civil War. No longer simply about preserving the union; it was for him, as he makes plain in his 2^nd inaugural address, about the need to completely and unalterably eradicate slavery. On this point, Douglass and other abolitionists were transformationally persuasive.

So, in an already long film, what might Spielberg and Kushner have inserted as flashbacks, particularly with respect to the influence of Black abolitionists, to trace Lincoln’s path toward abolitionism?

For one thing, Lincoln was the first President to receive Black abolitionists at the White House.  The most famous of these was surely Frederick Douglass who spoke favorably of his meeting with Lincoln, despite their sharp disagreements about many issues involving emancipation and recruitment of Black soldiers. Douglass was somewhat surprised to learn that Lincoln seemed to follow closely his arguments against slavery in the various magazine articles that Douglass wrote. Lincoln also probably heard Douglass at the abolitionist Washington Lecture Association that he and Mrs. Lincoln attended fairly regularly. During their time together, Lincoln even hinted to Douglass that his strong words had not fallen on deaf ears. But Douglass was hardly the only Black activist he conferred with at the White House. Elizabeth Keckley, Mrs. Lincoln’s Black dressmaker, whose influence on both Lincolns was far greater than shown in the film, arranged to have Sojourner Truth, another noteworthy abolitionist orator and leader in the Underground Railroad, speak with the President. Their meeting was similarly positive and Truth went out of her way to comment on how cordially she had been received. Still another Black leader who met with Lincoln was Bishop Daniel Payne of the AME Church. Like the others, he attempted to persuade Lincoln that the time was ripe for emancipation, but he, too, left the meeting with renewed respect and appreciation for the President.

The point I want to make here is that Lincoln hardly existed in an ideological vacuum, which is sometimes the impression we receive. He didn’t just read his Shakespeare and his ever-handy Euclid, but was an avid follower of the news and opinion journals of the day. Black activists like Douglass, Truth, and Payne, as well as many others, whom Lincoln also greeted at the White House, were influencing him all the time. His decision by the end of 1864 to forcefully seek approval of the 13^th amendment was shaped by his contemporaries, who were constantly trying to change his mind in any way they could. In other words, these contemporaries were civically engaged and though discouraged at first by Lincoln’s lack of movement on emancipation, slowly began to see the fruits of their involvement and their commitment as his first term as President was coming to an end.  And although Spielberg and Kushner chose not to show the trajectory of that decision in their film, there is no question that the people, many of them African American, who wrote about the War and who spoke to Lincoln directly in the White House, left a mark on his thinking that helped to change the course of American history.