Everyday Democracy's Organizational Journey

We have come a long way since our organizational start in 1989. 

Early on, we focused on race relations and racism as key issues. This decision led us down a path that we could not have fully appreciated at the time as we began to integrate civic engagement, community change and racial equity--fields that often operate without regard to one another. Because we're an operating foundation (Everyday Democracy is the primary way in which The Paul J. Aicher Foundation carries out its mission), we've had the flexibility to learn from grassroots groups, adjust our investment strategies, and persevere with certain lines of questions, even at times when outside funders showed little interest. This evolution and continual learning has helped lead us to our belief today that: 

This is how we got here:

• Very early on, we focused on the quality of the dialogue, and we learned some important lessons about what makes for quality dialogue on race, once people were at the table. We learned that critical elements included: personal story telling; a chance to dispel stereotypes; analysis of the problem and possible solutions.     
• Still, for many reasons rooted in our society (residential segregation, stereotyping, lack of trust), bringing people together in diverse groups proved very difficult. This led us to focus on whole-community organizing, so that the dialogue was grounded in a diverse, broad-based coalition. The approach was successful in bringing hundreds and sometimes thousands of people together in dialogues on racism and race relations (examples ranged from Lima, Ohio, to Los Angeles). We began to see that people yearned for the dialogue to lead to concrete changes in their communities, and that they needed to see how the dialogue linked to change. 
• Interviews and focus groups with people of color showed us that the frame of our guide was actually a mostly “white” frame.
  In 1997, we organized focus groups in Wilmington, Del., to help us understand how thousands of participants in a large-scale dialogue program on race felt about their dialogue experience. We learned that white people and people of color viewed dialogue on race in very different ways. To see the value of their time in the dialogues, people of color needed clear action steps and results.   
• In 1999 and 2000, a multi-community evaluation funded by the Mott Foundation allowed us to learn from 17 communities that were organizing dialogue on racism (What Works in the Real Word). We began to deepen our understanding of the importance of dialogue leading to action. Thanks to the researchers and many interviewees in the study, we also began to see that two things would help make it possible to move dialogue to action on racism:

Providing more information in the dialogues about the historical, cultural, and institutional manifestations of racism (that is, “structural racism”), including resulting racial disparities

Making an explicit link to action and change following the dialogues so that people wouldn't leave the conversations with just personal transformation experiences.

• The best practices research and our own follow-up research helped us think about framing race in different ways. Interviews and focus groups with people of color showed us that the frame of our guide--meant to be “neutral,” a key tenet in deliberative democracy--was actually a mostly “white” frame. Because white views were dominant in culture, a neutral perspective was inherently white. At the same time, people of color and white people valued having a race frame that allowed everyone in the community to say “this issue is about all of us, not just us vs. them.” We continued to hear from mayors and activists who saw value in trying to mobilize the whole community, and we committed ourselves to finding ways to link organizing and dialogue to measurable community change.