Educating the civic society and government of New York's future // I'm creating a less-than-one-year, new program // Get involved if you have expertise and want to co-teach, build syllabi, and more
Joel Engardio, engardio.com, longtime host of "SF Politics 101" classes and now member of the Board of Supervisors here. Not *quite* as value aligned but still a lot of overlap agenda-wise, and he's distinguished himself for many years now by trying to be a civic educator as well as a candidate.
Friendly but critical comment: this should have a lot of repetitions of "and then attempt to influence your local political system or build local political capital," and it seems not to, if I'm understanding you correctly?
"Go stick up for your local gay bar attempting to get a liquor license against bigots trying to block it" will teach you 100x as much as "oh, yeah, I attended these lectures a while back".
(The example is, no fooling, something that happened in DC in the _2020s_)
I would say this isn't a correct understanding of what I'm currently teaching or planning to teach, but in this summary overview I didn't mention practical political capital, so your comment stands in that specific respect. I do have this note at the top of the essay though: "This will also be mixed with practical doing and interacting with the political system; it’s not just a classroom and theory, although those both have their place."
The classes that I teach do require practice, and examination of the kinds of situations you mention / their value. But also: plenty of people go to protests/actions like the one mentioned above, but don't understand what they're really doing there (even as others do), and it disinclines them toward future action. I've seen people learn nothing from both bad classes and bad action. My goal is to integrate the good versions of both.
Oh, got it. I didn't understand how that note related, I misinterpreted more as a "go-and-see" observational piece rather than go-and-do.
I do 100% agree with the notion that protests/actions generally are extremely poor at translating into action, and that the expected value of protesting has gone down over time for a variety of structural reasons.
Feel free! I definitely have no real ownership in it, it's downstream of talking to a lot of folks who do Toyota Production System / Lean work over the years (but isn't exactly the framing that they would use in that context, either, so I am unaware of a exact previous citable person who came up with that specific dichotomy)
Huh. Do you know of anyone trying to do this in CA? If not, I can think of a couple of obvious people to whom to pitch the idea.
I don't, but I'm all ears if you have collaborators in mind!
I would start with, in this order:
Effective Government CA, https://effectivegovernmentca.org/ and see their substack, https://modernpower.substack.com/about. Seems totally value aligned.
Joel Engardio, engardio.com, longtime host of "SF Politics 101" classes and now member of the Board of Supervisors here. Not *quite* as value aligned but still a lot of overlap agenda-wise, and he's distinguished himself for many years now by trying to be a civic educator as well as a candidate.
SF Guardians, https://www.sfguardians.org/city-guardians-academy, focuses more on "how to run for office" education but again it seems there'd be common ground.
Currently gunning for Valedictorian. Someone come stop me.
Friendly but critical comment: this should have a lot of repetitions of "and then attempt to influence your local political system or build local political capital," and it seems not to, if I'm understanding you correctly?
"Go stick up for your local gay bar attempting to get a liquor license against bigots trying to block it" will teach you 100x as much as "oh, yeah, I attended these lectures a while back".
(The example is, no fooling, something that happened in DC in the _2020s_)
I would say this isn't a correct understanding of what I'm currently teaching or planning to teach, but in this summary overview I didn't mention practical political capital, so your comment stands in that specific respect. I do have this note at the top of the essay though: "This will also be mixed with practical doing and interacting with the political system; it’s not just a classroom and theory, although those both have their place."
The classes that I teach do require practice, and examination of the kinds of situations you mention / their value. But also: plenty of people go to protests/actions like the one mentioned above, but don't understand what they're really doing there (even as others do), and it disinclines them toward future action. I've seen people learn nothing from both bad classes and bad action. My goal is to integrate the good versions of both.
Here's the essay on gaining political capital that I use to introduce people to the idea of doing things on the ground: https://www.maximumnewyork.com/p/political-capital-savings-plan
Oh, got it. I didn't understand how that note related, I misinterpreted more as a "go-and-see" observational piece rather than go-and-do.
I do 100% agree with the notion that protests/actions generally are extremely poor at translating into action, and that the expected value of protesting has gone down over time for a variety of structural reasons.
"go-and-see" vs "go-and-do" is a useful conceptual distinction. I might just steal it.
Feel free! I definitely have no real ownership in it, it's downstream of talking to a lot of folks who do Toyota Production System / Lean work over the years (but isn't exactly the framing that they would use in that context, either, so I am unaware of a exact previous citable person who came up with that specific dichotomy)