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In Slow Democracy, community leader Susan Clark and democracy scholar Woden Teachout describe how citizens around the country are breathing new life into their communities. Large institutions, centralized governments, and top-down thinking are no longer society's drivers. New decision-making techniques are ensuring that local communities-and the citizens who live there-are uniquely suited to meet today's challenges. In Slow Democracy, readers learn the stories of residents who gain community control of water systems and local forests, parents who find creative solutions to divisive and seemingly irreconcilable school-redistricting issues, and a host of other citizen-led actions that are reinvigorating local democracy and decision making.

About Voter's Edge Welcome to Voter's Edge Voter's Edge is a comprehensive, nonpartisan online guide to federal, state, and local elections in California, Illinois, and New York. With Voter's Edge, voters can: Access their full, personalized ballot by entering their address. Get in-depth information on candidates, measures, and who supports them. See candidate biographies, top priorities, photos, policy videos, endorsements, and detailed information about who funds their campaigns. Read neutral summaries of ballot measures, see the latest news on the measures, and find out who supports and opposes them. Check where, when, and how to vote, including information on their local polling locations. Keep track of their choices to make voting easier. Share information about the election with friends and family.

The Network Weaver Consultants Network is a loosely affiliated group of consultants who provide a wide range of network services for organizations, networks and communities. Some of the consultants have taken a 5-month intensive practicum on network consulting led by June Holley and Kristin Johnstad. However, there is no vetting process for this page: anyone who has experience can put their name on this site. Make sure you contact the consultants directly to access more detail about their experience, interests and availability. The map below shows the Network Weaver Consultants and Services. Click and hold on a consultant's node to focus on who they're affiliated with and what service they provide, click and hold on a service node to focus on which of the consultants provides that service. Keep scrolling past the map for the consultants' bios.

Welcome to WhoRulesAmerica.net, a site about how power is distributed and wielded in the United States. It both builds upon and greatly supplements the book Who Rules America?, now in its 7th edition. The book's new subtitle, "The Triumph of the Corporate Rich," reflects the success of the wealthy few in defeating all of their rivals (e.g., organized labor, liberals, environmentalists) over the course of the past 35 years. The story of how the corporate rich won all the big battles is complicated, but most of the answers are in the new Who Rules America? and/or this Web site; you can also watch some videos of Bill giving invited lectures on the topic.

This is a tool for looking up who your elected representatives are across the United States. Based on your address, we can find all the federal, state, county and local officials who represent you in government.

We find that a powerful approach to understanding your stakeholders is to view them as parts of a wider ecosystem. To do this, we start with a group mapping exercise. The power of the group process means you're more likely to uncover the best information and the learning goes much deeper. Once you've defined the audience, you can go on to identify relationships, who influencers who and then to develop appropriate messages and channels to connect with them.

There's an important debate taking place right now, as you know, about what will happen to the suburbs and particularly the more distant exurbs when economic conditions and the real estate market pick up a little more. On one side are the suburbanists, such as Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, who believe that the march of the affluent to distant locations will simply continue, and we will be building more subdivisions 30 and 40 miles out from the cities. Then there are the urbanists, such as Christopher Leinberger, who argue that the Great Recession marks a demographic turning point, and communities far from the urban center are going to be much less attractive to the next generation of affluent homebuyers.

This article is about power structures in society and how they interact. Specifically it is a guide to seeing who has power when important decisions are being made. It is quite old, but never-the-less of great value to anyone interested in issues of citizen participation. The concepts discussed in this article about 1960's America apply to any hierarchical society but are still mostly unknown, unacknowledged or ignored by many people around the world. Most distressing is that even people who have the job of representing citizens views seem largely unaware, or even dismissive of these principles. Many planners, architects, politicians, bosses, project leaders and power-holder still dress all variety of manipulations up as 'participation in the process', 'citizen consultation' and other shades of technobable.

The Loughborough Junction Action Group, or LJAG, is an independent group of people who live or work in Loughborough Junction in south-east London. We share the common aim of regenerating and improving the area and the lives of the people who live there. We are embedded in our diverse and vibrant neighbourhood and hold festivals, street parties and monthly gatherings, literary and film events and organise arts activities in local schools. Our members work with many local organisations, such as tenants' and residents' associations, community initiatives such as Building Communities in Coldharbour and the Big Local, which are working on projects designed to empower local people, improve community cohesion and enhance neighbourhood facilities.

WHO is the directing and coordinating authority for health within the United Nations system. It is responsible for providing leadership on global health matters, shaping the health research agenda, setting norms and standards, articulating evidence-based policy options, providing technical support to countries and monitoring and assessing health trends.

A healthy city is one that is continually creating and improving those physical and social environments and expanding those community resources which enable people to mutually support each other in performing all the functions of life and developing to their maximum potential.

From Common Goals to Uncommon Results The Collective Impact Forum exists to support the efforts of those who are practicing collective impact in the field. While the rewards of collective impact can be great, the work is often demanding. Those who practice it must keep themselves and their teams motivated and moving forward. The Collective Impact Forum is the place to find the tools and training that can help achieve success. It's an expanding network of like-minded individuals coming together from across sectors to share useful experience and knowledge and thereby accelerating the effectiveness, and further adoption, of the collective impact approach as a whole.

CEPR is based on what was (in 1983) a new model of organization, a "thinknet". It is a distributed network of economists, who are affiliated with but not employed by CEPR, and who collaborate through the Centre on a wide range of policy-related research projects and dissemination activities. CEPR was founded at a time when European economics had relatively few "centres of excellence" with international reach but many excellent researchers, widely dispersed, with few opportunities for interaction. One of CEPR's main achievements has been to create a virtual "centre of excellence" for European economics through an active community of dispersed individual researchers, working together across international boundaries to produce high-quality research for use by the policy community and the private sector.

Together We Will: Provide resources and guidance to empower everyday people to organize and act locally; whether new to community organization, returning to a new era of civil rights defense, or seasoned veteran of political and social activism, we will curate and produce resources to serve their needs. Work to elect progressive government leaders in local, county, state, and national races who will defend our values and rights, with an emphasis on identifying and providing resources to prospective candidates of color, female, diverse in abilities, and from the LGBTQ community. Radically include underrepresented groups in our leadership and membership, at all levels of our organization to explicitly combat systemic racism and build institutional equity. Partner with organizations who do the above successfully and amplify their actions to give voice to the millions who have been silent for far too long.

Xavier University's American Dream Composite Index™ (ADCI) measures the extent to which people living in the United States achieve the American Dream. The ADCI is based on a random sample of no fewer than 1,000 adults who are surveyed online each month, with at least 400 respondents recurring from the previous month.

Here's how the positive deviance approach is different: * Outsiders don't bring in ideas to change a community's culture. Instead, they ask the community to look for its own members who are having success. Those local ideas, by definition, are affordable and locally acceptable - at least to some people in the community. Since they spring from a community's DNA, the community is less likely to feel threatened by these ideas and more likely to adopt them. * The focus is not a community's problems, but its strengths.

The Democracy at Work Network (DAWN) is a network of certified peer advisors, all with strong social and professional ties, who cooperate in training themselves and providing technical assistance services to worker cooperatives. Our goals are to meet the demand for technical assistance and development advice with high-quality services, and increase worker cooperative technical assistance capacity from inside the movement.

Too often, our national debates are defined by the rigid or outdated orthodoxies of both the left and right. This polarization leads to ideologically driven policies and political gridlock, and it drowns out the voices of millions of Americans in the forgotten middle. We believe there is a better way, a "third way"-one that discards the false choices presented by both sides. This third way philosophy is ideal for fostering the most effective and emergent approaches to major problems-ones that can attract the plurality of citizens who represent the political center and whose support is crucial to effective and credible governance.

You are warmly invited to participate in Civil Society Politics - a new politics that is grounded in communities and social relationships, and an alternative to the failed ideologies of Left and Right. Civil Society Politics is: A movement - which individuals may join. Global in scope - civil society is global, and a movement to strengthen it is needed in every country. Open to members of existing parties and members of none, including those who seek new parties based on civil society.

Results Based Community Planning implements RBA™ population accountability within a local community. It is ….. - Working with a cross section of members of a local community (eg Maitland or Coonamble) - To decide what are the big picture results or outcomes they want for their local community (eg People Belong and are Connected to their Community) - Then work out how they would measure if they had achieved that result (eg Percentage of People with an Effective Neighbourhood Network) - To consider what factors effect that measure and how the local community is going against that measure at the moment - And brainstorm potential partners and potential strategies that could be undertaken to "improve" this measure (eg increase the percentage of people with an effective neighbourhood network) - With some of the strategies having to be Low Cost or No Cost, and some of them Off the Wall because who knows what just might be possible!! - And it is not just about planning, but then getting on and doing it!