William and Mary Student Elected to Williamsburg City Council

You’ve read about this movement before here.

And now, it’s taken another step forward.

After a failed student campaign a year ago, William and Mary students put together an organization called Students for a Better Williamsburg (SBW), an organization engaging local government in order to provide the best outcomes for students. This effort led to the amendment of a housing ordinance, making it more student friendly and eliminating an issue that divided the town and gown factions in the community for years.

This past spring, a student ran for a Williamsburg city council seat once more. Last Tuesday night, Scott Foster, a graduating senior, dominated the contest.

Foster was elected to the Williamsburg City Council on Tuesday night, becoming the first William & Mary student ever to do so. The 22-year-old said his win was a victory for town and gown relationships.

“Today, the people of Williamsburg demonstrated that our city is truly unified,” Foster said Tuesday night. “When I decided to run for City Council, I hoped to receive the student vote. Now, I have been additionally honored and humbled to have received such strong support from across our City.”

Foster received 1559 votes in the election, 741 more votes than the next finisher, Planning Commission Chairman Doug Pons, who also earned a seat on the council Tuesday night. Five candidates, including one incumbent, ran for the two open positions. According to Foster’s campaign, approximately 67 percent of his votes came from students and the remaining votes came from residents.

Over 1000 William and Mary students voted for their fellow student in the election, ensuring that college students will have a strong voice in the city’s government. Between this victory and the aforementioned organization of Students for a Better Williamsburg, William and Mary students have provided students across the country with a model for organizing within the system to produce positive outcomes.

How did Foster do it? Well, in textbook Millennial fashion. Foster used online social networking to spread the news, and then benefited from a student-coordinated voter registration and GOTV effort on William and Mary’s campus.

Foster benefited from a coordinated get-out-the-vote campaign by William & Mary students. Earlier this year, student organizations, including the Student Assembly, worked to encourage students to vote in the election through a series of registration efforts. Approximately 300 students registered this year as a result of the drive. More than 2,100 students are registered to vote in the City of Williamsburg and early estimates indicate that roughly 50 percent of registered students voted in Tuesday’s election.

On election day, the Student Assembly provided transportation for students between the Sadler Center and the Stryker Building voting location. Sarah Rojas ‘10, outgoing president of the assembly, also sent an e-mail to the College’s students, encouraging them to vote in the election.

[…]

Much of Foster’s campaign was run by students who utilized a website and social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. Foster also spent a good deal of time meeting city residents.

After his upcoming graduation, Foster plans to continue his studies at William and Mary in 2011, attending the William and Mary Law School.

Everything’s Political – College Students and the Need for Problem-Solving-Focused Education

Rarely do I intentionally blend my graduate school lessons learned with the material discussed in this blog.  I’m starting to realize that’s a mistake.

As a graduate student in a Student Affairs in Higher Education program, I endeavor to eventually work on a college campus, encouraging students to mind their civic habits and responsibilities, while simultaneously teaching them about life throughout that journey.  In order to fulfill graduation requirements for my masters program, I must work in an office on campus for twelve hours a week; such an experience usually involves creating some form of original work.  In working with a leadership institute on campus, I have managed to perform my own bricolage, mixing two seemingly disparate elements together: politics and education.  I have organized a series of discussions in which students having no knowledge of politics can contribute to a conversation, along with the political elite on campus, on what politics means to them.  I guess one could metaphorically associate this effort with the training wheels needed for what is hopefully a life-long career marrying civic responsibility with education.

My motivation for pursuing what can be an all-too-frustrating task was initially selfish.  I was a political science major.  I didn’t have the guts to denigrate characters in political attack ads or the logical skills needed to practice the law.  I liked living and working on a college campus as an undergraduate.  Voila.  Student affairs allows me to straddle the line between politics and education.

But, as many a graduate student has come to know, this line I speak of is fictional.  That’s the lesson I have learned this year, perhaps nowhere better than these dialogues.  Navigating a curriculum rooted in social constructivism, understanding that there is never a “right” answer, but merely socially-constructed knowledge, has sharpened my realization that politics is in everything we do.  Yes, it’s in presidential elections every four years.  It is in the partisan bickering and strategizing that goes on in Washington.  But it is also in fraternity and sorority elections.  It is in where you get your coffee in the morning.  It is in the choice of news you wish to consume.  Politics is everywhere.

My experience with undergraduates at my former place of employment and my current institution reveals to me that I was not alone in seeing the line.  Politics can be compartmentalized into a convenient box.  Students associate politics with Washington DC, voting, Congress, and the like.  In one of our political dialogues this month, one of the students expressed boredom with politics.  “Whenever I see politics on TV I change the channel,” they explained.  “It’s just not fun.  I don’t really want to get involved.”  Yet, the act of channelsurfing itself is political.  They did get involved in their decision to forego public affairs programming.

I am recognizing that while student affairs practitioners and scholars spend quite a bit of time on social justice education, we tend to spend less time on civic education, developing the set of tools needed to engage in one’s community.  While service-learning and voter registration drives have been trendy on college campuses over the last two presidential elections, engagement in local and state politics continues to suffer.  It’s no wonder students associate politics with dysfunctional Washington.

If we were to take a problem-solving approach in our student affairs practice, we might make some headway.

Embracing a problem-solving approach to learning would be appropriate if we seek to rid higher education of the “mind/body split” that compartmentalizes intellectual discussion from one’s public actions (hooks, 1994, p. 16).  A problem-solving approach would require the construction of deep and sustainable relationships between student affairs educators and the rest of the faculty, staff, and administration; a problem-solving-based model would necessitate an emphasis on the common good, meaning that students would see departments and offices role model this approach by collectivizing agendas as much as possible and placing the institution’s mission (which would ideally emphasize problem-solving) above their own.  In addition to the construction of strong relationships, a problem-solving approach would encourage student affairs educators to create Freirian relationships with students; with an emphasis on community problem-solving, student/teacher and teacher/student “learn from and teach each other” – “doing ‘with’ rather than ‘for’” (as cited in Manning 1994, p. 95).

In this model, collaboration is the name of the game. The common good is at the heart of this effort, with problems uniting academic disciplines, student affairs staff, and students as opposed to egos, departments that are siloed off from each other, and disengaged students. To get here, we do need to re-examine our social justice efforts.

In order to face society’s problems today, our students must first begin the process of understanding and exploring their identity, their values, and how they view difference. In addition, the educational nature of problem-solving demands from students the ability to see an issue from another’s perspective. Following these tough lessons, students also need to learn about power and privilege, the source of many of the problems our students will be trying to solve.

Politics does not have to be perceived as a bad thing. The derivation of the word — “polis” is the Greek word for a city or state, thus “politikos,” or politics, means affairs/issues of the city/state — is hardly negative. What is bad is that college students associate the broken system currently in Washington with politics; consequently, “politics” gets a bad name and other, more positive opportunities for political engagement become invisible. With just a bit more effort, student affairs practitioners can reveal the other side of politics — civil conversations, learning from others, changing their realities to help themselves and others — and align programs with our institutions’ “citizenship”-laden mission statements.

Public Broadcasting Gets $10 Million to Better Cover Local Issues

37 local NPR and PBS affiliates will be receiving over $10 million in total funding in order to better cover local and regional news stories. The funding is intended to make up for a fledgling newspaper industry.

On Thursday, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced the creation of local journalism centers in five regions. NPR and PBS stations in each region will collaborate on covering key issues, including immigration, agribusiness, the economy and health care. They will jointly hire about 50 multimedia journalists.

[…]

The funding initially targets the Southwest, the Plains states, the upper Midwest, upstate New York and central Florida. Proposals also are being accepted from stations in the South and Northwest, and Harrison hopes to expand the effort.

It will involve 37 local stations, though at least 100 applied. To date, 13 radio stations, 13 joint ventures operating both radio and TV outlets, and one stand-alone TV station have signed on. Stations were selected on the basis of a business plan that included an outline for becoming self-sustaining within two years.

“The idea of pulling together radio and television for content that is broadcast and online this is going to be our template going forward,” Harrison said.

The Corporation – already the single largest source of funding for NPR and PBS – will provide $7.5 million of the investment for the project, while the stations involved contribute $3 million.

Preparing public broadcasting to fill in for failing private media is a great move on behalf of American citizens. Though just part of a larger effort, providing Americans with substantive coverage of issues (as opposed to personality) is an important step in increasing civic engagement.

Ravenstahl Backs off on Student Tax

In a reversal, Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl requested that the Pittsburgh City Council cancel the vote on his proposed tax on Pittsburgh college students. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl has asked city council to shelve his proposed tuition tax, saying instead that a broad-based “New Pittsburgh Coalition” will work to solve the city’s pension problem.

The mayor is willing to cancel the tuition tax vote that could have occurred today in spite of the fact that he can’t claim to have landed the $15 million-a-year needed to right the pension fund, nor the $5 million compromise demand he made earlier this month. “This is a leap of faith for all of us,” he conceded, but if successful, it will bring the needed funds — hopefully in time for the 2011 budget, when the city will otherwise face a dire fiscal situation.

For students who were already facing skyrocketing tuition and textbook prices, this tax would have been one more obstacle to gaining access to a college education.

For Ravenstahl’s part, this is a political loss (despite it being a good decision) based on his push for this and his subsequent walk-back. He did not manage to secure any additional funding for the city in exchange for retracting the idea, though he did get assurances from Pitt and Carnegie Mellon that they would increase their yearly donation to the city. Ravenstahl must hope, or in his words exhibit “good faith,” that these donations dent the budget deficit he must erase by 2011.

In the end, though, this is a good decision for the future of Pittsburgh’s college students and educational institutions.

Students for a Better Williamsburg Creating Change

Remember the group of William and Mary students I wrote about a couple months ago who sought to better connect the student body with the community? They formed Students for a Better Williamsburg, an organization that seeks to engage local government in order to provide the best outcomes for students, and last week they already started to make change.

Until a week ago Thursday night, Williamsburg landlords were restricted by law from allowing more than three people to live in their properties. The consequences aren’t hard to imagine. Realistically, if college students want a fourth person to live in a house, they’re going to attempt it, which brings up the safety issue of not knowing who is in what residence. Furthermore, those houses with four or five bedrooms that by law can only hold three people lead to wasted space. Over 600 houses within Williamsburg contain four or five bedrooms. The three person rule was one of the main obstacles in the town-gown relationship between William and Mary and Williamsburg.

Students for a Better Williamsburg (SBW) and the Student Assembly, though, came together and negotiated with members of the city council. Both groups, working with Vice Mayor Clyde Haulman, crafted a compromise ordinance approved at the council meeting last Thursday, December 10. The ordinance can be viewed here.

The amended ordinance requires that properties within Williamsburg’s four rental inspection districts exceeding 2000 square feet be eligible to allow up to four unrelated tenants with city approval. The properties are also required to contain four parking spots for each tenant. In addition, the same requirements would be extended to B-3 business districts. Landlords would submit their properties to secure the approval of the city’s zoning administrator. Some 49 beds would be added — a minor change on paper — but it’s the start of a dialogue with the council that counts the most for students.

Michael Douglass, one of the co-founders of SBW, remarked upon the ironic contrast in behaviors between the opposed residents and the students supportive of the legislation in an e-mail. One of these residents, Bill Dell, a known opponent of the rule change, expressed unhappiness with the speedy process.

“You all have put things on the table that should be looked over,” resident Bill Dell said, interrupting the vote.

Yet in an August 19 article in the Flat Hat, William and Mary’s student newspaper, one of the planning commissioners remarked upon the need for community participation.

Commissioner Jim Joseph seemed concerned that the community be given ample opportunity to speak.

“We need the participation, yet when the opportunity comes the participation’s not there, and therefore we have to stress that,” he said. “This is a very sensitive issue with a lot of feelings on both sides, and I think we just have to push that as hard as we can to make sure people do participate.”

And in the end, the students were the ones participating with an eye toward compromise.

SBW and the William and Mary Student Assembly demonstrated what can happen with some collaboration and a will to get things done. This is a fantastic example of our brand of youth activism, identifying a need and working the proper channels in a good-faith effort to make change. Yes, things do not always work this smoothly, but in this case, thanks to great leadership and hard work, it did.

Releases by SBW and William and Mary’s Student Assembly are available to read, and video of the council meeting can be viewed here.

Making a Difference Locally

One thing to remember, despite the political community’s near obsession with all things Obama, Blagojevich, and the national political scene, is that local decision-making is sometimes more important. While it’s every young political junkie’s dream to go to Washington D.C. and work on the hill, many of us can be in even more influential roles right at home.

Suzanne Morse at Smart Communities had an encouraging post up a few weeks ago on young leaders who are attempting to make a difference in their local communities. Morse is involved with the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, which sponsors a program called the LeadershipPlenty Institute. Morse discusses the program and the many success stories and signs of hope she has seen within the program thus far.

…Despite the economic, energy, and health care issues we face, there are signs of hopefulness. We saw that hopefulness in real time these last two weeks at our LeadershipPlenty trainings in Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Virginia. By the end of this week in these four sites alone, we will have trained 175 people from 60 communities to offer this skill-based leadership program in their communities. We concluded the training in Roanoke, VA (our partnership with Virginia Tech) yesterday afternoon. The roster of that training speaks volumes about who is interested in community change in our country. Among the participants in this train-the-trainer institute were two current (and one former) elected officials, a Chamber of Commerce executive and a Chamber board member, non-profit leaders from a variety of community development, arts, and economic development organizations in rural and urban communities, a person representing extension, three community college staff people, a community foundation staff person, two pasters (sic), a person who trains Vista and Americorps volunteers, a college professor, a Main Street director, a local business person, and two state government community developers. Now if you are looking for a pattern here–don’t. This group represented our communities in the best possible way. From a variety of perspectives, all of these folks want to make a difference, want to engage more people in the community and the region, and want to build on the incredible assets that exist everywhere. As we listened to their plans for implementation, we heard college students, churches, senior citizens, arts organizations, rural regions, and small cities.

Again, more collaboration, more pragmatic problem-solving, and more influence.

Kevin Bondelli has really focused on User-generated Government and next steps for youth activism in recent weeks, and one of the most important aspects of this movement in my opinion is increasing the number of young elected officials starting locally. School boards, county-level offices, city councils, and mayoral offices are all crying out for new, innovative leadership that target youth as a major constituency while governing. And while winning is of course the goal, the mere presence of a Millennial in local political dialogue is a boon for the innovation we’re going to need as all of our communities try to tackle new challenges.

Of course, running for public office isn’t the only way to get involved, as Morse listed several other organizations that are dying to get new blood. But the most important thing is to be involved in as many community-affecting decisions as possible and the conversations that surround them. In a very short time, we’ll be taking the reins of these efforts, building institutions, and creating new opportunities for collaborative problem-solving. We’ve proven our electoral mettle; now we need to try governing and citizenship.