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The 50 State Solution was conceived in early 2016 by California Forward (CA Fwd) as a transpartisan effort to build supportive infrastructure--and a platform for sharing information and ideas--among those working on political reform at the state level. While CA Fwd has served as the initiator and early catalyst of the effort, the vision for 50 State Solution is that it becomes an ongoing effort with shared leadership from the political reform community. The goal of the effort is explicitly not to make sure every organization is doing the same work or working on the same issue. Instead, the goal is create a learning community where reformers can share stories of success and failure, find allies, create coalitions and build community.

Government Reform The government should serve voters, not corporate special interests. Public Citizen works to empower ordinary citizens, reduce the influence of big corporations on government, open the government to public scrutiny, and hold public officials accountable for their misdeeds.

"I cannot overemphasize the importance of this fundamental flaw in poverty policy, i.e., the assumption that there is an ample supply of perfectly good jobs out there that poor people could tap if they just wanted to do so. To this day, this misguided notion underlies the conservative policy agenda that views anti-poverty policy as a narcotic that weans people away from the jobs awaiting them. Kill the programs, and they'll get out of their hammocks (Rep. Paul Ryan's term for the safety net) and get to work."

Common Good is a nonpartisan reform coalition that offers Americans a new way to look at law and government. We propose practical, bold ideas to restore common sense to all three branches of government--legislative, executive and judicial--based on the principles of individual freedom, responsibility and accountability. Common Good's philosophy is based on a simple but powerful idea: People, not rules, make things happen. This idea is fundamental to how we write laws and regulations, structure government agencies and resolve legal disputes. It affects all our lives, everyday.

"To promote the wider arguments in the book, Lewis and Conaty produced a series of very short articles. The following Special Report features their series on Community Land Trusts, Mutual Home Ownership, the Garden City Model and the Co-operative Land Bank. The Garden City Model merits special attention, as Garden Cities that took land out of the market were a full expression of radical socialist and co-operative economy planning. Nowadays, a number of parts of the world are showing an interest in reviving them."

New Urbanism is an urban design movement which promotes walkable neighborhoods that contain a range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually continued to reform many aspects of real estate development, urban planning, and municipal land-use strategies.

No Labels is a large and rapidly growing citizen-led organization mobilizing frustrated Republicans, Democrats and Independents - the majority of Americans - into a new political force to break the paralysis of hyper-partisanship and dysfunction in Washington. The goal is to make government work again by fighting for bipartisan, common sense solutions to our nation's biggest problems and reforms to our political system.

Our goal is to provide public finance data, tools and training to local community-based organizations to strengthen their public interest and organizing campaigns. Equity in Public Funds partners with and increases the ability of community-based organizations to produce analyses of City and County fiscal inequities and advocate for reform.

Government transparency is an important issue to many in today's political environment. The recent controversy in the US over health care reform is just one example of how hard it can be to see the realities behind the rhetoric. As researchers, we believe we can help by giving people the right tools to understand, explore, and communicate about government data.

"We activists need to become better "reflectivists", taking the time to understand the system before (and while) engaging with it. We need to better understand the stop-start rhythm of change exhibited by complex systems and adapt our efforts accordingly. And we need to become less arrogant, more willing to learn from accidents, from failures, and from other people. Finally, we have to make friends with ambiguity and uncertainty, while maintaining the energy and determination so essential to changing the world."

Systems thinking, according to HU, has two important dimensions. One is the establishment of a new paradigm that understands global issues as inherently complex, multi-dimensional, conflictive and open to outside influence and intervention. A problem like slavery, for example, may seem intractable because of the economic interests it serves; in fact, the institutional and organizational linkages-the supply chains-that comprise slavery's power structure are vulnerable. The first step in system thinking is to map those linkages to better understand how they fit together and pinpoint their likely weak points. The next step is to devise a strategy that combines public advocacy, coalition building, insider lobbying, and investigative journalism to target those linkages, forcing those implicated in slavery, wittingly or unwittingly, to reform, and weakening the larger circuit of power over time.

What is Systems Change? Systems change is the emergence of a new pattern of organization or systems structure. (Birney, 2015) It is both a process and an outcome. We are facing unprecedented economic, social, and environmental crises, and current reforms offer ineffective solutions. Naomi Klein has called for a movement of change that "connects the dots" to address the root causes of all current crises facing people and planet.

California Forward's mission is to work with Californians to help create a "smart" government - one that's small enough to listen, big enough to tackle real problems, smart enough to spend our money wisely in good times and bad, and honest enough to be held accountable for results. We're different from other efforts to reform our state, because we believe in the importance of working together and understand that only robust public discussion and the creation of broad coalitions can move solutions forward. California's state and local governments must work better together for everyone. If Californians can come together to restructure the relationships between state and local governments, the experience of other states indicates that in five to seven years, we will begin to see the benefits of better governance and renewed private investment.

The following are excerpts from the PBS documentary on the What's Next California Deliberative Poll® on governance reform.