RUNNING HEAD: Civil Society Obama

Civil Society 1

RUNNING HEAD: Civil Society Obama

Civil Society in the Age of Obama[1]

Jon Van Til

Rutgers University USA

Jason Machado

University of Colorado at Denver USA

Agnes Kover

ELTE University Hungary

Gabor Hegyesi

ELTE University Hungary

Presented to the Conference of the International Society for Third Sector Research

Istanbul, Turkey

July 2010

Introduction

This paper focuses on choices made within the Presidential administration of Barack Obama in the area of civil society, that vast but amorphous set of individual and group actions that lie outside the formal boundaries of government, business, and family/kin in the contemporary society.[2]

We set the task in this essay of envisioning the possible emergence of an “age” of Obama, a time of potential transformation of both American and global society with an infusion of ideas of participation, belonging, and trust. The potential of this age is of course uncertain, as the new President faces challenges of enormous scope and scale. As the influential columnist David Brooks observes (2010), Obama comes to office in a time in which the “United States is becoming a broken society.” In this time: “The public has contempt for the political class. Public debt is piling up at an astonishing and unrelenting pace. Middle-class wages have lagged. Unemployment will remain high. (And), (i)t will take years to fully recover from the financial crisis.”

One way of humanizing these challenges is by the recounting of stories, and our exploration of emerging policy begins with a recounting of four such tales that appeared on the front page (and one editorial page letter) of a major American newspaper (the Philadelphia Inquirer of December 27, 2008) as Obama came into office. Let us search behind these stories for the “big news” (as sociologists influenced by Robert Park would call it) that lies behind these items regarding the structural realities likely to shape the emerging Age of Obama.

Story One: Budget Woes End Agency’s Role In Aiding City Visitors. This story begins by describing the plight of an older woman who recently arrived at Philadelphia’s 30th Street train station. Nameless and apparently homeless, travelers like her have been helped with temporary shelter, food, and a ticket home by the Travelers Aid Society for the past 107 years. Such assistance is no longer available: the “City’s Office of Supportive Housing has eliminated $300,000 for the agency—almost all of its budget for emergency help.”

Story Two: A Wish List For Philadelphia Projects. This story describes the document compiled by Mayor Michael Nutter, enumerating 100 city projects totaling $2.6 billion, that has been delivered to the Obama transition team with the suggestion that they be incorporated in an a municipal bailout fund anticipated to be part of the new President’s economic stimulus funding package.

Story Three: Taking Obama’s Words To Heart. This story describes recent actions at the Fitler Academics Plus School, where Kyshon Jackson is a student in the eighth grade and a charter member of the newly created Obama Hope Organization. He is quoted: “We were so proud when Barack Obama got elected, but pride isn’t enough. We’ve got to change the world, help the community.” Even first graders among the 340 students at the school have joined the new organization, “which has held meetings, set goals, and planned its first initiative: a literacy campaign pairing younger students with older ones to boost the school’s reading efforts.”

Story Four: Heroic Healer Is Felled. Dr. John Pryor, 42, the director of the nationally recognized trauma program at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, was killed on Christmas Day in Iraq while serving a second tour with a “risky frontline surgical unit.” A volunteer who never stinted in sharing his gifts, he dashed to Ground Zero when he heard the news of September 11, 2001. On his wall hung a statement by Albert Schweitzer that friend found describing his life: “Seek always to do some good, somewhere….You don’t live in a world all your own. Your brothers are here, too.”

Letter To The Editor: The Inaugural Prayer. Anthony T. Massimini writes: “In choosing the Rev. Rick Warren for his inaugural ceremony, President-elect Obama is challenging gays and all other segments of our country to accept the change he is promising. He is calling for gays and all others to fully respect who they are and be fully respected….He is working to build a ‘universal’ America, one that accepts, respects and celebrates ‘unity in diversity’, just as the universe itself does. It is a lofty gamble.”

Keeping these five items from one day’s news in mind, what can we say about the forces that lie behind each story? And how might they impact the unfurling of the Age of Obama in the days and months ahead? We draw one large lesson from each tale.

1.) In a severe recession, charitable giving is at the top of expenses reduced within declining household budgets, as the research shows from many corners of the globe. Nuno Themudo of the University of Pittsburgh identifies this pattern in Mexico[3] and Chulhee Kang of Yonsei University notes it in South Korea. The “kept scholars” within the third sector do their best to mask this finding, seeking to find the silk ears among the sows.[4] And while it is true that some industries within the sector suffer more than others—arts and culture the big losers and social relief less so—the fact remains that recessions are times in which resources decline and almost everyone falls behind.

2.) In a severe recession, the federal government becomes the sole big spender, but the demands upon its coffers will soon reach their limits. Even more sobering, beyond those limits stand the yet grimmer constraints imposed by the planet’s carrying capacity. The coming of the Obama Presidency, overlapping as it did the Christmas season, gave rise to an identity confusion among nonprofit organization leaders, who greeted “Obama Claus” with all the enthusiasm of “kids waiting for Santa to land at the mall” (as the perceptive YOUTH TODAY newspaper put it in its December/January edition). The umbrella organization INDEPENDENT SECTOR deftly puts its claims forward in language consistent with the rhetoric of the Obamans (See table below), but while there may be squeals of delight when the stimulus and bailout checks begin to arrive, it seems certain that even the governmental card will max out in the months ahead.

THE INDEPENDENT SECTOR’S POLICY PROPOSALS FOR OBAMA

1. Ensure adequate resources and fair and responsible fiscal policies to support vital programs that sustain, protect and strengthen communities.

1. Preserve and expand policies that help Americans give back to their communities.

1. Ensure that nonprofits have the capacity and capital to serve the needs of our communities.

1. Protect the rights of Americans to speak out through nonprofit organizations.

1. Ensure that Americans are able to continue vital charitable work throughout the world without unduly jeopardizing their safety or their civil rights.

1. Support funding and policies that provide for transparency and accountability to ensure integrity and public trust in our institutions.

Source: Read on 8 January 2009.

3.) On a more hopeful note, there are lessons to be learned from the Obama campaign for the Presidency, as the creation of the Obama Hope Organization by its schoolyard visionaries indicates. The lesson they seek to teach us is one that might have been learned in the recent electoral campaign, when numerous thousands of volunteers participated in a brilliantly orchestrated grassroots effort to elect Barack Obama to the presidency. Individuals presented themselves at any of thousands of offices that sprung up in visible community locations, were quickly and efficiently trained to canvass neighborhoods to speak with voters or distribute electoral information, and then proceeded to their tasks in time chunks consistent with the needs and wishes of the contemporary “episodic volunteer” (Cf. Macduff, Weller). The “big news” here involves not only the replacement of the traditional party apparatus of organization by a new civil society construct of participatory campaigning, but also the potential contained in such an organizational network to address other social issues and problems in the days ahead. A web-based organization that stands ready to activate itself in the face of a contentious issue or a pressing community/regional/national/global need would reorient citizen and voluntary participation in our otherwise apathetic, bureaucratic, and privatized social worlds. The maxim might become “Think globally, Link homely, act locally…”

4.) The controversy over the selection of Rev. Rick Warren to pray at the Inauguration raises the issue of the connection between civil society and social civility.[5] This is the old question of how it is that disagreements are to be faced in society, and how agreeably or disagreeably we will comport ourselves in the face of such disagreements. In the recent age of Bush, the dictum was clear: Behave agreeably only with those who agree with you. In selecting to interact publicly with Warren, Obama sends another message: Behave agreeably even with those with whom one disagrees. Build a large tent and invite all to its cover, as long as they comport themselves as well within the bounds of civility. Amitai Etzioni called this process the “multilogue”, and its potential underlies the organizational movements known as “sustained dialogue” and “public deliberation”, as developed by such applied social scientists as Harold Saunders and Roger A. Lohmann. As another counter to the woes of apathy, bureaucracy, and privatization, a commitment to civility in political and social life would appear to be a promising initiative.

5.) Then there comes the heroic life of Dr. Pryor—how does it tie into the future of civil society? In Mapping the Third Sector, Van Til (1988) wrote about the power of “pervasive volunteerism” to infuse new strength into corporate, governmental, and family life and organizations. Pryor’s dedication to live life far beyond the boundaries of his formal work assignments vividly illustrates the power of pervasive volunteering. He used his job as a base for his mission to heal the injured. And when he died in that mission, it was necessary to move his funeral mass from a small church in his hometown to the largest cathedral in Philadelphia to accommodate all who wished to mark his life. The volunteer does not require a voluntary association to unleash her or his contribution to society: volunteering can be a pervasive force throughout its organizational realms. Its voice begins with the response to Obama’s call: “Yes we can”. But its impacts call for renewal and repetition, no matter how heroic its practitioners. A distance remains between the call and the commitment, and in that distance may be measured the ability of a society’s citizens to act autonomously and creatively rather than monotonously and slavishly, whether at work, at home, or in the community.

Obama and Civil Society

Critical to the role of civil society in the Age of Obama will be the unfurling of several major themes, at point in tension with each other within the Obama movement and the President himself. First, it is clear that Obama the policy specialist places great belief in the substantive development of public policy and the careful and intelligent resolution of social and economic issues. An inveterate pragmatist, he aims to resolve problems, whatever the ideology represented by the resolution, and whatever organizations are required. If capitalism works in a particular case, if voluntarism works in another, if governmental action is required in yet a third, and if a stronger family is needed for a fourth—that will be the approach and the institution selected. Obama clearly recognizes that society requires all four of its major sectors to succeed—business, government, the third sector, and family/kin/church (Cf. Van Til 1988, 2000, 2008).

Obama’s social policy parallels the thinking of such earlier Chicago reformers as Jane Addams and John Dewey, as the current director of the Hull House museum observes when she says: “Jane Addams would have identified with the sensibility that it’s not just red states and blue states, but about the solidarity of the human race.”[6]

Secondly, and this approach may well conflict with his pragmatism (at least at times), Obama is inclined to speak the language of global transformation. He directly addresses his listeners, and urges them to take the lead in building society and creating the change they see as needed. He remains, as Sarah Palin memorably observed, a community organizer. And to the community organizer, the community comes first in the setting of goals and the orienting of policy. The organizer exists to serve the community, to give it voice and facilitate its ability to act.

Thus Obama says: “We need your service, right now, in this moment—our moment—in history. I’m not going to tell you what your role should be; that’s for you to discover. But I am going to ask you to play your part; ask you to stand up; ask you to put your foot firmly into the current of history (Obama, July 2, 2008).”

We suggest that the vehicle that reconciles pragmatism with transformational organizing in the Obama vision is not the nonprofit organization—slow and bureaucratic and cautious as it so often is. Rather he and his followers seek to support the wider range of individual actions and more loosely formed groupings that constitutes the essence of the contemporary civil society. Here Obama finds the primordial glue that forms itself into an electoral campaign one season, voluntary service the next and social enterprise thereafter. Or, if a depression threatens, it may transmute into a vast employment venture, addressing issues of green development or infrastructure repair.

The Obama approach to an invigorated civil society relies, we believe, on the address of seven major challenges:

1. The extension of voluntary action and national service

2. The validation of faith-based provision of social services

3. The support of social enterprise in a variety of forms

4. The increased and more intelligent regulation of nonprofit organization practice

5. The reduction of surging levels of unemployment

6. The creation of a truly global society

7. The exploration of new visions of partnership and organizational form, such as the growing of a new “fourth sector” in society.

These challenges are explored in the following sections of this paper. While we recognize that a civil society cannot be built by a President or his administration acting alone, we believe that it can be nurtured by their leadership. Building blocks to undergird these changes are being moved into position by the new administration. Let us examine their forms they are beginning to take, and begin to assess their potential impact.

I. The Extension of Voluntary Action and National Service

As of 1974, approximately 24 percent of all Americans were involved in volunteer work through an organization (History of Volunteerism, 2009). Currently, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 61.8 million Americans volunteered in 2008 - approximately 26.4 percent of the population. More than ever, Americans are giving of their time and effort to recognize the important effects of volunteerism. Corporations are further fueling the increase in volunteerism and seeing the potential for added value to their business through philanthropy and community involvement. But increased volunteerism cannot rest solely on the philanthropic sprit of Americans and the incentive to businesses.

Government can also play a significant role in facilitating increased participation in growing civil society (Van Til, 2008). President Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, an early civilian service legislative effort, put millions of people to work during the Great Depression in support of national infrastructure projects. The Peace Corps, formed in 1961 by the Kennedy administration, expanded national service to include international efforts while President Johnson fought the “War on Poverty” with the formation of Vista in 1964, a program specifically designed to help low-income communities throughout the nation. During the Clinton administration, The National and Community Service Trust Act of 1993 created the AmeriCorps program and the Corporation for National Service, expanding the extent and scope of civilian service (Corporation for National and Community Service, 2009).

The Serve America Act

President Obama has renewed the call for service to others since taking his oath by instructing Congress to create new service and volunteer opportunities. Americans have been introduced to an innovative compilation of service and volunteerism policies and programs, in some instances building on the foundations of previous legislation, others quite revolutionary in nature with the potential to create a path toward a new future where service plays a central role. The Serve America Act of 2009 is a legislative initiative that strives to expand and improve domestic and international service opportunities for all Americans. This legislation has the potential to help build a stronger, more vibrant country by making national service more accessible to more individuals than ever before.