When:
Hosted by Sterling Speirn @ Sobrato Foundation – Redwood Shores
Join Sterling Speirn, ALF Class IX and recent past CEO, National Conference on Citizenship, while he is visiting from Washington D.C.
It’s hard to avoid the bad news these days about the state of our constitutional democracy. But there is another story, a more hidden narrative of an emerging revival, with civic innovations appearing at the local, metropolitan, state and even the national level. While trust is terribly low, hope surprisingly remains high and evidence of a “democracy movement” is growing.
The dialogue will explore:
· an array of nonpartisan democratic reforms implemented and proposed
· new and proposed civil dialogue platforms like Better Angels and the National Week of Conversation
· new insights into civic learning and civic education from ‘cradle to citizenship.’
Sterling Speirn brings expertise from his roles as past CEO of the National Conference on Citizenship in Washington D.C., W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and Peninsula Community Foundation.
Read his bio HERE
From these philanthropic platforms, Sterling has been a long-time investor in efforts to promote civic and community engagement as well as service and volunteering. He has championed support for local and national dialogues in partnership with organizations such as America Speaks, the National Center for Deliberative Democracy, Public Agenda, the Harwood Institute, Everyday Democracy, and many others. In reflecting on the challenges and seemingly intractable problems our country faces early in the 21st century, he has written “our common problems will only become tractable when we turn our powers of innovation and re-invention to the public-problem solving process itself. Indeed, our country’s democratic practices have undergone dramatic and remarkable change throughout our history in order to keep our system ‘by the people’ a living reality and not a mere slogan. In the face of growing national and global concerns, it is of the utmost importance that we in the United States continue this tradition of innovation in the practice of our Democracy if we are to secure our common future and to restore the vitality of a free democratic society that our revolution proclaimed and our Constitution established.”
Part of ALF’s 2020 democracy initiative – We the People: From Polarization to the Common Good – https://alfsv.org/we-the-people/
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