The Audacity of AmericaSpeaks to Improve Democracy Holds Lessons for Us All

AmericaSpeaks closed its doors in January after 19 years of innovative, occasionally controversial, always audacious work to engage Americans in discussing and resolving important public-policy issues. The arc of the organization’s history shows the point nonprofits can reach in their efforts to push democratic innovation—and also the point at which governments must contribute.

While many public officials, agencies, and organizations have used inspiring language about participation and open government, few have had the courage and commitment to put those principles into practice. Throughout its history, that is what AmericaSpeaks did.

The organization was known above all for its sheer ambition, its willingness to engage people in challenging projects, on contentious issues, using new technologies and in regional, national, and global projects that tested the scale at which citizens can contribute to policy making.

AmericaSpeaks was the brainchild of Carolyn Lukensmeyer, former chief of staff for Ohio Governor Dick Celeste and then a key leader of Al Gore’s Reinventing Government effort. Her experiences working in government convinced Ms. Lukensmeyer that getting citizens more involved in public decision making was not only valuable but essential.

During the 1990s, AmericaSpeaks was one of many nonprofits and foundations, including Everyday Democracy, Public Agenda, and the Kettering Foundation, that helped communities organize large-scale, deliberative processes to devise solutions to big challenges. This form of public participation relies on engaging hundreds or even thousands of people in small-group sessions in which they share experiences, consider a range of policy options, and decide together what should be done. In hundreds of places, this approach has produced civil, productive public discussions that have led to volunteer actions, changes made by organizations, and policy changes.

The approach developed by AmericaSpeaks, called the 21st Century Town Meeting, was the most ambitious of these methods: held in convention centers and other large venues, these events attracted more public officials, more people, and more media attention than any other kind of public participation.

At these sessions, AmericaSpeaks incorporated keypad polling and wireless networked computers into its meetings. It was also one of the first organizations to weave online discussion together with face-to-face meetings.

Over the next 19 years, the organization enlisted Americans to debate some of the hottest topics of the times, including the plans for ground zero after the 2001 terrorist attacks, the redevelopment of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. budget deficit, health-care reform in California, and mental health throughout the country. Some of these efforts were pathbreaking because they were attempts at statewide or national engagement. Others, such as Voices and Choices in Northeast Ohio, were influential because they involved citizens in policy making at the critical—and often overlooked—level of the metropolitan region.

Along with the successes came criticism.

Uninformed detractors would zero in on the grant makers supporting a particular project and charge that the deliberations were simply a front for a secret agenda. In the case of Our Budget, Our Economy, right-wing observers charged that the support of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation meant that the project was intended to advocate for cuts in defense spending, while left-wing critics argued that the Peter G. Peterson Foundation was financing the effort to campaign against entitlements like Social Security.

The participants in the process were in fact a balanced mix of Republicans, Democrats, and independents, from Tea Party members to MoveOn.org supporters. During the deliberations, they calmly and reasonably came up with deficit-reduction plans that included both defense and entitlement cuts—the kind of compromise that is completely missing in the national news media and on Capitol Hill.

More knowledgeable and constructive critics wondered if the substantial effort and cost required to pull off a 21st Century Town Meeting was justified by the results. Others questioned whether AmericaSpeaks—along with other public-participation groups—should focus less on temporary processes and find better ways to make public participation more sustainable and easier for others to copy.

The debate about how to stimulate public involvement at the state and federal levels will continue to be challenging and divisive.

But this debate about how to make democracy work best is only possible when people have the audacity to try to improve democracy in the first place. Despite intense political polarization, legislative gridlock, and levels of trust in government that are lower than at any other time since polling began, most state and federal officials of both parties continue to ignore the lessons of AmericaSpeaks.

Local officials have been far more likely to organize successful deliberative projects—witness the spread of efforts to let residents of a city or town decide how to allocate a portion of the municipal budget.

The 2008 Obama campaign used the language and some of the tactics of public participation to win the White House, but the Obama administration has largely ignored them. The White House’s open-government plan contains no meaningful steps to increase participation in federal policy making (though it does call on the Department of Housing and Urban Development to support local efforts to let residents get involved in spending and budget issues).

At the national level, the campaign to improve American democracy is still being driven by a small, vigorous, mainly anonymous collection of nonprofit organizations as well as scholars and foundations.

AmericaSpeaks summed up what it learned in a legacy document released as the group shut its doors. It is worth reading, but the most important lesson comes not from that document but from watching the organization in practice.

If we want to make democracy more equitable, participatory, and powerful, we need to be as ambitious and outspoken as AmericaSpeaks was willing to be. Americans have spoken many times about their frustrations with our broken political system. We need knowledge to improve our democracy, but we also need audacity.

Matt Leighninger is executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium.