User:Publicwork/publicwork

Public work is a normative ideal of citizenship developed by the Center for Democracy and Citizenship (CDC) and its partners over a number of years, drawing on civic engagement organizing that has sought to “make work more public” -- more collaborative, more visible and recognized, and more infused with public purposes -- in a number of community and institutional settings. Public work involves sustained cooperative labors, paid and unpaid, by a mix of diverse people which produce public things of lasting value to communities. In public work the citizen is co-creator of a common world.

In Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work, an early treatment of public work, Harry C. Boyte, founder and co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, and Nan Kari, long time CDC associate argue that the public work of building communities created a gritty, everyday, practical and work-centered quality to the meaning of American democracy. It generated respect for diverse talents and contributions. They also propose that the civic ideal of public work created political and civic resources for groups excluded from full participation throughout American history, such as women, the poor, African Americans, and immigrants to claim recognition and inclusion in American public life based on their contributions to “the commonwealth.”

The Center for Democracy and Citizenship and its partners use the concept of public work in a variety of ways. It is the central concept in Public Achievement, a civic and political education initiative begun by Boyte in 1990 in St. Paul. In Public Achievement, teams most often of children and teenagers, coached by an adult, work on a “public work” project of their choice for an extended period of time, often over a school year. Teams address a number of issues, such as creating a park, improving neighborhood safety, working to reduce teen pregnancy, or gaining more voice for young people in their education. Public Achievement is now active in hundreds of communities in more than twenty countries and societies, including Northern Ireland, Poland, Romania, Turkey, and the Palestinian Territories.

Public work has also proven useful in educational reform efforts that seek to shift the responsibility of education to whole communities. In a recent Kettering Foundation report, Creating a Culture of Learning in St. Paul, Kari and Nan Skelton describe the development of a city-wide initiative called “Learning in Cities” based on public work of teachers, parents, business and civic leaders and community residents. Learning in Cities is organizing “Learning Campuses” across the city, in which schools work collaboratively with parks and recreation centers, libraries, nonprofits, the Science Museum and other groups. They argue that public work has helped to counter consumer identities in education -- parents and students as “consumers” of schools” -- as well as “silo cultures” that define patterns of work. It creates new public relationships, and generates new respect for the educational contributions of diverse actors and institutions.

The Citizen Professional Center at the University of Minnesota, founded by Professor William Doherty in the Department of Family Social Sciences, builds a variety of partnerships with different communities and institutions using the concept of public work. The Center for Citizen Professional’s vision is “the renewal of front line professional practice as work by, for, and with citizens, and the generation of useful knowledge for solving problems affecting communities.” Adapting broad-based organizing practices and public work concepts to family and health professions, their citizen professional model begins with the premise that solving complex problems requires many sources of knowledge, and “the greatest untapped resource for improving health and social well being is the knowledge, wisdom, and energy of individuals, families, and communities who face challenging issues in their everyday lives.” The Citizen Professional Center has generated multiple partnerships. These include suburban movements of families working to tame overscheduled, consumerist lives; an African American Citizen Fathers Project seeking to foster positive fathering models and practices; a new project with Hennepin County to change civil service practices into public work; and a pilot with Health Partners Como Clinic, called the Citizen Health Care Home, which stresses personal and family responsibility for one’s own health care and opportunities for patient leadership development and co-responsibility for the health mission of the clinic.

Public work has also proved useful as a conceptual framework in research. For instance, Scott Peters, an educational historian at Cornell University formerly a researcher with the CDC, used the concept of public work to analyze patterns of civic engagement in the history of land grant colleges and universities. He discovered a partly submerged but vibrant tradition, especially in cooperative extension. In Democracy and Higher Education, he argues that faculty, staff and students in land grant colleges, working in sustained, egalitarian, practical partnerships with communities on common projects, often using the language of “public work,” helped to create the identity of “democracy colleges” before World War II.

Public work as a concept of citizenship has gained visibility in a number of forums. For instance, it was used the main normative ideal framework of citizenship used in the 1998 report of the National Commission on Civic Renewal, co-chaired by Senator Sam Nunn and former Secretary of Education William Bennett and directed by Bill Galston, A Nation of Spectators. Harry C. Boyte, co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, served as a senior advisor to the Commission and the Commission heard a a number of presentations on the concept of public work.

Around The World
Public work can be generalized as a normative ideal of citizenship from a class of communal labor traditions around the world. Such work typically involves everyday collective labors based on reciprocal obligations and shared interests, across ranks and divisions in communities, through which people build and care for shared community assets and resources. Harry Boyte identified a group of African traditions of public work in Everyday Politics including letsema in Sesotho, ilimo in isiZulu, dibanisani in isiXhosa, and harambee in Swahili, a term rooted in village labor traditions that became the theme of the liberation movement. Other examples include ga-du-gi (Cherokee); dugnad (Norwegian); minga (Otavalo Ecuadorian Indians); poldering (Dutch), huan gong (Chinese); saambou (Afrikaans) ; naffir (Sudanese Arabic); meitheal (Irish); talkoot (Finnish); ture (Korean); umuganda (Kinyarwanda), gotong royong (Indonesia and Malaysia). Public work traditions are especially rich in agricultural societies like those in Africa, but public work concepts appear in urban societies as well, like polderingin Holland and dugnad in Norway. Research about such labor practices shows them to be adaptable and dynamic.

An early scholarly collection on public work, Communal Labor in the Sudan, edited by the Norwegian anthropologist Leif O. Manger, found that despite “many prophecies about expected disintegration and decline” as rural economies become increasingly involved in markets and state structures, communal labor showed signs of “adapting to new circumstances and developing new ways of survival.” Manger defines communal labor as “formal reciprocal groups that are employed to solve tasks that the basic economic units cannot solve alone,” noting that such tasks are common in agricultural production, animal husbandry, or hunting. They include reciprocal efforts to aid individual families such as house-building, and also efforts that contribute to the well being of the whole community such as well-digging. They also include supplemental activities surrounding production, such as magical rites and prayers.”

Barn-raising

Bee (gathering)

Bayanihan (Filipino) Dugnad (Norwegian)

Meitheal (Irish)

Talkoot (Finnish)

Gadugi (Cherokee)

Gotong royong (Indonesia and Malaysia)

Harambee (Kenya)

Polder Model (Netherlands)