Moving from Enraged Citizens to Engaged Citizens
It is a unique and extraordinary opportunity to spend 36 hours with 100 of the brightest emerging urban leaders in the country, but that’s exactly what we got to do last week at the Urban Next Summit.
Co-sponsored by CEOs for Cities and the San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association, UNS presenters included Alaina Beverly, Associate Director of the White House Office of Urban Affairs; Bill Souders, Senior Corporate Affairs Director at Cisco; New York Times Opinionator columnist and former Dwell editor-in-chief Allison Areiff; Next American City President & CEO John Cary; Kim Walesh, CEOs for Cities board member and Chief Strategist for the City of San Jose; and Local Projects’ Jake Barton.
Carol Coletta delivered the opening keynote, making an urgent and compelling case for cities as the solution to our nation’s most pressing problems.
UNS participants made something else crystal clear: the era of government as a vending machine that can solve all of our problems is over. In fact, anecdotes from many participants indicated that the best any of them hoped for was that government would simply get out of the way (a frustrating, but not unexpected opinion coming from young leaders).
So how do we move from enraged citizens to engaged citizens? Co-creation and collaboration are key themes CEOs for Cities will continue to explore with our partners and collaborators in the US Initiative, Community Challenge and Give a Minute citizen engagement campaign.
Commit to a program like Leadership Memphis, or some other curriculum based community program, that can add to your local knowledge, dispel myths/rumors that have caused your “rage”, and allow you share ideas with others within your community.
