Dear Colleagues,
Over the last year, the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) and Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE) have undertaken a collaborative exploration to understand the potential of civic learning as a tool to equip communities in addressing the challenges and divisions they face. With support from our colleagues in the field, we had the opportunity to open a dialogue about how to:
- Reimagine, re-incorporate, and maximize the potential of civics during this divisive time,
- Enable communities to build an inclusive foundation of engaged citizens, and
- Embrace and position civic learning as part of a solutions set to address challenges, particularly social inequities and a lack of opportunity and support for young people to exercise their civic rights and responsibilities.
Today we are releasing an update of the Recommendations Paper, which captures the four key recommendations generated from individual interviews with field leaders and a salon session at the 2017 Annual National Conference on Citizenship. The paper also incorporates feedback and suggested strategies for each recommendation from the March 1 working session.
While this paper reflects learnings and conclusions for our exploration thus far, it is by no means a conclusion. Instead, we offer it as a resource to we hope will be an ongoing dialogue at the intersection of civic learning, equity, and opportunity as others in the field begin to employ these strategies in their own work.
We also invite you to Save the Date for the 2018 Annual National Conference on Citizenship where we also hope to continue these discussions on October 17-18. Thank you to everyone who contributed to these efforts and for the open dialogue and honest feedback throughout this exploration. I’d also like to acknowledge my colleagues Sally Prouty, Interim CEO of NCoC, and Kristen Cambell, Executive Director of PACE, for their leadership of this collaboration.
We appreciate the continued efforts of the field to achieve these visions of equality, opportunity, and equity for communities and to prepare all young people for active and engaged civic lives.
On behalf of the NCoC and PACE teams,
Sterling Speirn
Chief Executive Officer, National Conference on Citizenship