In the latest The Call To Unite video, David Adams, SEL Director at The Urban Assembly, and Dr. Tim Shriver, founder of UNITE, discuss social-emotional learning (SEL) as a lever for equity not only in our classrooms, but in our society at large. This is America's Classroom.
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After becoming an American citizen, this Kansas Citian is eager to vote in the 2024 election
Jul 23, 2024
Brooks is a race and culture reporter for KCUR.
Cindy Phillips, originally from Mexico City, became a U.S. citizen in December and registered to vote the very same day. She said systemic corruption in Mexican politics, including the murders of candidates and voters, make it dangerous to participate in democracy there.
“This sounds very stereotypical, But there are cartels taking over the country, and the government is not taking the right measures to control that,” Phillips said.
Escaping that situation is part of why she immigrated to the U.S. almost eight years ago. The other reason was to be with the man who is now her husband. What she’s learned since about the electoral impacts of immigrants like herself makes her feel American democracy is more open and transparent than back in Mexico.
“I’ve read that younger voters have had a huge impact on the election results,” she said. “So in my case, as a millennial, if I vote, I know my vote is going to count.”
Philips, who’s 35, represents a rapidly growing sector of the American electorate: immigrants who are newly naturalized citizens.
An estimated 3.5 million voting age adults have been naturalized in the U.S. since the 2020 election, according to the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at the University of California San Diego and the National Partnership for New Americans. And the number of immigrants who are eligible to vote has increased by 93% since 2000, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center study.
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Though the same Pew study points out new citizens tend to vote less than American-born citizens by around 8%, the number of new naturalized citizens in some swing states has surpassed the voting margin of recent election results.
In Arizona, where the 2020 presidential election was decided by 10,000 votes, more than 62,000 people became naturalized citizens between 2016 and 2020.
Phillips said the significance those voters have energizes her as she prepares to cast her first vote in the U.S.
“Voting is a right that we have. It wasn’t too long ago they made this a constitutional amendment so women and other minorities were able to vote,” said Phillips, who has lived in Kearney, Missouri, since 2021.
“So it’s something we should remember,” she said. “This is a symbol of our freedom.”
The senior editor for Hallmark Cards has worked mostly from home since the COVID pandemic, and it is partly how she’s adjusted to living in rural Missouri.
She says anti-immigrant rhetoric she’s encountered in her small community has been a culture shock, compared to more diverse cities she previously lived in, like Independence and Olathe.
“They can make some racist comments that I don’t agree with most of the time. I don’t want to mention anything because I don’t want to get in trouble or get into some controversy,” Phillips said of living in Kearney. “I just got tired of trying to educate people when they don’t understand some of the aspects, to be different in this country.”
Phillips also worries that the lack of diversity in Kearney’s schools and businesses may negatively affect her 4-year-old daughter, who was born in Merriam, Kansas.
“I’m trying to teach her about other minorities by reading her some books and teaching her that everybody looks different,” she said.
She admitted it can feel defeating at times, but Phillips isn’t dissuaded from talking with other immigrants about the significance of voting.
“It’s our responsibility to exercise this right and to make it count for us, because we matter,” she said. “Now we’re citizens, so we need to teach younger generations that this is very important, and it’s essential for our country.”
Pushback to progress
Immigrant voting rights have again become a hot button issue this election season, and American Civil Liberties Union’s Kansas Chapter leader Micah Kubic thinks Americans need to modernize their thinking about what voter disenfranchisement looks like.
“It’s not all Bull Connor and police dogs,” he said, referring to the infamous segregationist commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama, who ordered violent attacks against Martin Luther King Jr. and protesters in 1963. “Voter suppression is when we refuse to make materials available in languages other than English, when we know that it will boost voter turnout.”
Kubic also includes the fact that former President Donald Trump and others have since at least 2016 spread debunked theories about the number of noncitizens voting in American elections.
“The attacks that you see on democracy, especially these completely false, twisted ‘big lie’ attacks that tie immigration to it, are so, so harmful,” he said. “In addition to being factually wrong, they try to discourage people from participating by creating an environment of fear, harassment and intimidation.”
Still, Kubic said it’s common in his experience for the naturalized community to be politically active, since it takes an average of seven years to complete the citizenship process, depending on birth country.
“To do that you have to be super engaged. You have to be really aware of what’s going on in the world,” Kubic said. “And all of that leads, in general, to higher levels of civic engagement, including voting.”
According to a 2020 report from the National Partnership for New Americans, more than 5 million voting age immigrants became citizens between 2014 and 2020. And the Pew Research Center says 10%, or 23.2 million, of the eligible voters in the 2020 presidential election were naturalized citizens, a record high.
The path forward
In her suburban Kearney neighborhood, cut out of acres of fertile farmland, Phillips often reflects on the challenges of navigating the administrative pathway to citizenship.
She remembers living with the constant worry that sudden policy changes in Washington or Jefferson City or Topeka might make obtaining citizenship harder, or that simple legal issues like a traffic ticket could be considered crimes or a lack of moral standing by a court.
“Having that concern that at any given time they can just take your residency away because it’s subject to some conditions,” she said, “that was very stressful to me. So I wanted to do this for me, but mainly for my family, just to provide some security.”
Phillips is especially grateful for her legal status because she knows other immigrants may never get the opportunity to take the citizenship test, let alone pass it.
“It takes a lot of sacrifices and money and it’s a huge investment just to become an American citizen,” she said. “Once the ceremony was over, I felt very proud of myself.”
Phillips’ husband, who is a natural-born citizen, doesn’t share her passion for voting. She said he sometimes complains about issues like taxes and inflation, but doesn’t feel compelled to vote.
His attitude reinforces her ideas about Americans taking privileges like voting for granted. Still, it doesn’t affect her enthusiasm for making her voice heard.
“I just let it go because, I mean, you just pick your battles, right?” she said. “But I hope he votes in the upcoming elections.”
Phillips said she still doesn’t know who she’ll choose for president in November, but issues like education, health care and public safety will be top of mind when she goes to the polls.
“I’m excited because it will give me the opportunity to preserve the democracy of this country,” she said.
Cover Photo: Cindy Phillips stands by a shelf filled with family photos and Mexican-themed dolls she brings back to Kearney, Missouri, when she travels back to Mexico. “Its a daily reminder of my heritage for me and my daughter,” she said. (Lawrence Brooks IV/KCUR 89.3)
This article was first published on KCUR 89.3 and republished with permission.
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Meet the change leaders: Joe Kennedy
Jul 17, 2024
Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Joe Kennedy is a lifetime basketball player and coach. A 2007 graduate of Northwestern with a bachelor’s degree in education and social policy, he was a four-year letterman on the Wildcats’ basketball team. He was named a team captain his senior season and received Academic All Big Ten recognition three times.
After graduating, Kennedy was a special assistant for the Office of Public Engagement at the White House, where he served as a liaison to key national organizations that helped promote and implement the administration’s legislative priorities. He also built a coalition of sports organizations — which includes the NBA, WNBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, MLS, PGA, USOC and the NCAA — to promote then-First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign against childhood obesity, and coordinated and executed championship visits and other sporting events at the Obama White House.
In the years following, Kennedy spent three seasons as the director of men’s basketball operations at Northwestern, was the director of player personnel at Oregon State and served as a video coordinator for the Sacramento Kings. He has also been an assistant coach for the College of the Holy Cross men’s basketball team. He helped the Crusaders win the Patriot League championship and advance to the 2016 NCAA tournament. During his 12-year coaching career, Kennedy has been an active member of the National Association of Basketball Coaches.
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Most recently, in September 2022, Kennedy became the first executive director of The Team. During the 2020 election cycle, Kennedy connected with Eric Reveno, associate head coach of Stanford’s men’s basketball team, and they became a major force leading a new college athletics movement to expand student-athlete voter registration and create civic resources for coaches and teams. Kennedy is working towards a future where all student-athletes and athletic departments establish civic engagement as a priority. and he believes The Team can make that dream a reality.
Kennedy leads a Team project in partnership with the Bridge Alliance that started in the fall of 2023 called The Engaged Athlete Fellowship. This fellowship empowers student athletes from across the country to strengthen nonpartisan civic participation on their teams, on their campuses and in their broader communities. (The Bridge Alliance publishes The Fulcrum.)
I had the wonderful opportunity to interviewKennedy in June for the CityBiz “Meet the Change Leaders” series. Watch to learn the full extent of her democracy reform work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyfxuO4t3DA&t=1s
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How we might better navigate the culture wars
Jul 16, 2024
Harwood is president and founder of The Harwood Institute. This is the latest entry in his series based on the "Enough. Time to Build.” campaign, which calls on community leaders and active citizens to step forward and build together.
Earlier this year, Escambia County, Fla., received national attention for banning over 1,600 books, the most by any single county in the entire country. If you’ve been following book banning efforts, many titles on the list won’t surprise you. But these might: multiple editions of the dictionary, various encyclopedias, and “The Guinness Book of World Records.”
Meanwhile, less than half of Escambia County third-graders are proficient in reading and multiple elementary schools in the area are in danger of state takeover due to persistent low-performance. Let me be clear: I believe youth success is not simply a school issue, but the responsibility of an entire community.
Saying we want our youth to succeed is easy. Ensuring we focus on what really matters so that they do is proving increasingly difficult. And not just in Escambia County. Culture wars over education are spreading all across California and other states as well.
Now, there are valid discussions to be had over the content we put in front of kids. Communities need to address such issues. But there’s a growing trend in our country today of too many communities getting distracted by an array of culture war issues — typically stoked by a small minority — that divide people, diminish hope, and stymy wider progress.
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So many community leaders tell me they don’t know how to respond effectively to these culture wars. I often see groups and organizations respond to the loudest voices by seeking to match them. They create their own group to oppose and fight existing ones; they raise money to mobilize people; they even weaponize their own agendas. As if raising the temperature could somehow quench the flames. The other tendency is for people to retreat entirely, ceding the public square to growing divisive forces. The result is that the community is held hostage, unable to move forward.
When I took my civic campaign — Enough. Time to Build — to Pensacola, the seat of Escambia County, people there, like people across the nation, told me they were exhausted by the culture wars. They were frustrated by a lack of progress on education and other vital community issues. They felt stuck and couldn’t see an alternative path forward.
My experience working to transform communities for over three decades proves that there is a better path that can inoculate communities against the culture wars. The way forward is for communities to temporarily set aside culture war issues and commit to coming back to them once their community has forged a new civic path.
What does this civic path look like? It starts with determining what we can agree on regarding issues that really matter to people. This means focusing not on “problems” or utopian visions but rather people’s shared aspirations. Then — and this is where I think too many civic initiatives also fall short these days — we must get in motion to take shared action on those issues. Action is key. We must build together. More talk isn’t going to get us where we need to go. Only by building together can we restore our belief that we can get things done and get on a more hopeful path.
Let’s be clear: Building together doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything. It also doesn’t mean we have to like each other. But it does mean we must — amid our real differences — find where we can agree and get in motion on things that make a real difference in people’s lives. Starting small is key. Starting too big is a recipe for failure. The trick is to grow and spread our efforts over time, provide proof that positive change is possible, and create increasing momentum.
When we forge this civic path, I find there is greater energy in a community to move forward, to avoid distractions and even to realize that the issues we so often get stuck on are no longer of such great importance. But beware: We cannot simply sweep aside people’s persistent “culture war” concerns. Our task is to place them in a larger context and tackle them when more civic confidence and trust exists.
When I presented this alternative to a roundtable of leaders in Pensacola, they experienced a new sense of possibility. I wasn’t telling them this approach would solve their educational challenges overnight. But I was telling them real, tangible progress could be made. That by embracing a new path, they could inoculate themselves from the culture wars and start to tackle the real issues that were holding them back.
This is how we can get the future of our communities back on the agenda.
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In the ‘Omnicause,’ colliding causes can defeat each other’s purposes
Jul 12, 2024
Page is an American journalist, syndicated columnist and senior member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board.
When does political protest seem to become an end in itself?
Climate firebrand Greta Thunberg, 21, seems to raise that question when looking at photos of her arrest last month outside the Eurovision Song Contest in Malmo, Sweden.
Wearing a black-and-white keffiyeh scarf and shouting, “Shame on you,” in a show of solidarity with the pro-Palestinian cause, the famous climate warrior was protesting the participation of Israeli singer Eden Golan. I was not familiar with Ms. Golan or her actual position on the war that has ravaged Gaza, but I immediately felt sympathy for her, which was hardly what the protesters seemed to have in mind.
What does Thunberg have to do with the war in Gaza? She certainly has the right to object to any cause she chooses. But, after decades of witnessing similar displays of organized outrage around causes of the moment, I felt drawn to conclude that what mattered most to these protesters was the protest itself.
“Welcome to the Omnicause,” wrote Andy Kessler, a Wall Street Journal opinion columnist, borrowing a term that has gone viral on X, formerly Twitter. “If you protest one thing, you protest everything — intersectional inanity.”
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Omnicause? Welcome to the ever-changing vocabulary of today’s social and political activism.
Coined by Alysia Ames, an Iowa accountant who writes for Ordinary Times, Omnicause is an alternative label for intersectionality. That’s the social theory credited to Kimberle Crenshaw, a leading legal scholar of critical race theory, which in today’s political arenas has become a widely known term to many more people than those who actually understand it. Put simply, Crenshaw points out that one identity is not enough for many people when one examines systems of oppression. For example, a woman of color may face obstacles that a white woman or man of color might not.
But the risks inherent in a theory like that include whether and how one is supposed to measure and compare levels of oppression felt by various sorts of victims.
Protest signs such as “Queers for Palestine” and “Palestine is a climate justice issue” illustrate the tangle of competing interests or victim groups that various causes can raise. The hazard of fighting for too many worthy causes at once is a confusing and often counterproductive victimization competition. The result can be a competition for sympathy and prioritization.
That’s why, as a strong and longtime believer in equal opportunity, I am troubled by the more arguable quest for “equity,” which employs a variety of controversial yardsticks for measuring who deserves compensation or reparation for historical abuses.
Advocates argue that, if you try to tackle only one part of the pattern of abuses, you often reinforce existing inequalities. Yet efforts to repair only one part of the abuses can create animosity between different races, genders or other marginalized identity groups.
By then, one can find the world of theory collides with a reality that means you lose more supporters than you gain for your efforts, especially when one group feels their problems are being overlooked or minimized in favor of others. Such theories also provide fodder to opponents who point to such conflicts and contradictions in order to deride progressives as practitioners of “reverse racism” or “reverse sexism” and other allegations to which overzealous activists are vulnerable.
That’s not to say, of course, that such excesses don’t arise just as ferociously on the political and social right, as we have seen in disputes among conservatives over how far bans against abortion or in-vitro fertilization should go before they kick up a backlash.
In other words, politics and social policy are complicated.
“Pretending every cause is every other cause gives fuel to the view that there’s a left-wing conspiracy to take over your life,” Ames said in a recent interview on the Symposium YouTube stream, “even if several Omnicause positions are technically popular.”
As Hadley Freeman writes in The Jewish Chronicle, Omnicause is “the Fatberg of activism,” referring to the label given to a rock-like mass of unprocessed waste matter that can clog sewer systems.
Instead of fighting for the Omnicause, activists are better advised to think small. By taking the time and effort to understand the views and experiences of the marginalized communities they are trying to reach, they can make progress on real problems and sidestep the fatbergs.
(C)2024 Clarence Page. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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Can your group stay neutral on controversial topics? 5 things to know
Jul 11, 2024
Chalmer is senior director of communications at Leading Edge, a nonprofit elevating culture and leadership in the Jewish nonprofit sector.
Harvard recently adopted a policy of “institutional neutrality,” saying it would no longer take a position on divisive issues. This follows controversies over Harvard’s handling of student protests, leading to the resignation of President Claudine Gay.
Many organizations “stay neutral” about controversies in this time of polarization, workplace divisions about diversity, the Israel-Hamas War, and a divisive presidential election. Depending on the situation, that decision may be morally right, pragmatically prudent, or strategically effective. Or it may not. But leaders and communications professionals often embrace neutrality with unrealistic expectations. Some use it to hide from problems that often find them anyway; others may underrate its value.
Here are five principles of neutrality to help make hard decisions about whether and when to take sides.
“Neutral” isn’t declining to take a stance. “Neutral” is a stance. You might intend your neutrality to signal, “This organization will not answer this question.” But it doesn’t. Rather, neutrality suggests that the organization accepts all answers. Depending on the circumstances, that position may be great or terrible. Consider a question like: Do you approve of Nazis? It’s obvious that “neutral” doesn’t always feel truly neutral.
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And neutrality is a stance even when the matter at issue is “unconnected to our work.” Leaders sometimes lean on that phrase as if it is a shared truth affirmed by all. But the world is large and ornery, and someone will dispute it. The issue might truly be “unconnected to your work,” and everyone you trust may agree. But not everyone will.
True neutrality is not impossible — just unsustainable. It occurs when an organization has never considered an issue. But as soon as an issue is raised, and a nonprofit’s leaders consider whether and how to respond, even momentarily, true neutrality is lost. From that moment, whether you speak or say nothing, that’s a stance.
When issues are likely to arise and stir passionate disagreements, it’s risky to assume you can maintain true neutrality. Before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, many workplaces assumed what they believed was a neutral stand on abortion; after Dobbs, that became harder. Stakeholders demanded responses, and practical HR questions — e.g., whether health benefits would cover interstate travel for abortions — forced groups to take up critical issues. True neutrality can collapse in a flash.
Neutrality can’t protect you from defending your position. Leaders sometimes expect neutrality to rescue them from the need to discuss or defend their views. It can’t. A neutral stance might sometimes minimize the volume or difficulty of the defenses you must mount, but internal and external stakeholders — staff, trustees, donors — will ask questions about any stance on a hot-button issue — including your neutrality. And while some voices can be ignored with little or no cost, you will likely have to engage in these conversations at least sometimes.
Neutrality can offer organizations some amazing gifts.
- It may maximize your external reach, alienating fewer supporters or potential partners than taking sides would do. It allows your organization to engage people on multiple sides of an issue. Of course, neutrality might lose you some people who judge neutrality as unacceptable. But for some issues, it may be the most inclusive option.
- Neutrality might maximize your talent pool. You may benefit from talented people with strong opinions on any and all sides of an issue, as well as talented people who feel uncertain or ambivalent.
- Neutrality might improve your team’s culture and thinking. Workplaces with proactive norms of free expression and open inquiry — including staying neutral on at least some hot-button topics rather than creating a “party line” for every conceivable controversy — may cultivate creative cultures. Teams may disagree more constructively and are more likely to think critically, seeking the truth without fearing disagreement or retaliation and unlocking new insights related to the organization’s core work.
Own your moral choices. In our secularized age, we’re sometimes uncomfortable with explicit public moralizing. We don’t want our organizations to express religious values, moral judgments, or even subjective opinions. The problem is: Explicitly or not, they do. Taking a position — including a neutral one — is a moral and subjective act. Taking a neutral stance means you believe the benefits of neutrality (see No. 4) are worth accepting every side (see No. 1). That’s moral math that people calculate differently. There is no place to hide from subjective judgment or values.
And that’s OK! Depending on the issue, neutrality can mean cruelty or curiosity, cowardice or courage, hubris or humility. Let’s choose our sides and our neutralities wisely, and own them with conviction as morally meaningful choices.
This writing was originally published in The Commons, a project of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
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