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Youth as Regional Catalysts?

What does it take to get a region “organized”? To get citizens focused on critical issues, common sets of priorities? To think beyond narrow confines of township or race or ethnicity, economic group or bureaucratic silos?

Neal Peirce The Citistates Group

It’s an endemic question, raised to new importance by the rise of regionalism and the necessity for individual citistates to think and plan collaboratively.

Latest to raise the issue is our Citistates Associate Richard Louv, prolific author and columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune. In a column, Louv bemoans the San Diego region’s lack of a cohesive voice and asks why the region hasn’t given birth to an organization on the scale of — or with the impact of — 1000 Friends of Oregon, Envision Utah, Chicago’s Metropolis 2020 or the Citizens League of Minnesota.

A quick and glib answer is: Not all these groups are finding the task easy – especially over the long run. The Minnesota Citizens League, its brilliant past record notwithstanding, has now hit rough waters and is being obliged to reinvent itself. Metropolis 2020 has recently made major breakthroughs through a challenging set of regional indicators that are awakening regional consciousness on growth and housing issues. But will the business and foundation support, so critical to its success so far, stay in the for long haul? That’s uncertain.

Louv mentions that Curt Johnson and I, in our “Millennium Report” on the San Diego region, published in 1999, suggested some form of a citizens’ league there – maybe a copy of the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group, with its record of success on transportation and affordable housing issues. But despite San Diego’s significant high tech base, no business or civic group, has stepped forward to organize region-wide.

So, Louv suggests, should a region like San Diego turn to youth – perhaps its high school students? Louv tried the idea on Stephen Weber, president of San Diego State University. Weber was immediately interested. "Kids aren’t jaded," he said. "They’d look at everything in a new way."

Latest report is that Weber has produced a plan of how a three-year youth civic league could bring together hundreds of young people from across the San Diego region, representing every economic and ethnic group. They should be 19 years-old, Weber is recommending, on the theory that at that age, their views would not be so easily dismissed.

Curt Johnson and I recall making a similar suggestion for the Reading, Pa. region in 1996. Reading city, packed with the area’s minorities and low-income populations, had a property tax rate ten times that of its affluent and seemingly disinterested suburbs. Our idea was simple: If the adults are hopeless deadlocked and/or disengaged, let the kids, the future, have a crack at seeking out solutions.

The idea didn’t take off – most likely because of an absence of strong regional leader ready or able to take on the challenge.

That indeed, may be the dilemma: to create a new democratic order, a region surely needs one or more strong individual leaders, people with clear credentials, to get the ball rolling.

But at least in some regions, the new century may be a ripe time to get young people — coming on with fresh attitudes, less patience with old ways, fewer ingrained prejudices — involved in regional truth-telling and the search for solutions.

http://www.citistates.com/2003_04_01_archive.html#200109260

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