Davenport Institute

for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership

A burgeoning revolution in state and local governance is occurring throughout California and around the United States. Due to immense local budget pressures, land use disputes, and a factionalized public, civic and municipal leaders are taking difficult steps towards their publics, attempting to include them in important policy decisions. It is a return to the old “town hall meeting” in some ways, but with significant differences in the complexity and scope of the decisions being made. Former Mayor of Indianapolis, now local and state government professor at Harvard, Stephen Goldsmith, has called this environment the “new normal” where, “the current fiscal crisis isn’t a passing phase; it’s a new, enduring reality that must be confronted. Crisis is now the norm.” In a recent essay, Goldsmith recommended greater involvement by citizens in policy-making: “Public officials who wish to be on the right side of the right sizing movement must create structures that facilitate participation.”

Founded, in part, with the support of Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy in 2006, the multi-partisan non-profit organization, Common Sense California, has been supporting and promoting public engagement at the city and regional level as a means of discovering “common sense” solutions to local policy challenges. Merging organizationally with the Davenport Institute, the new Davenport Institute of Public Engagement and Civic Leadership offers current and future public leaders in this “new normal” an important institution that is training, educating, researching and promoting this new leadership skill: how to engage the greater public – along with and beyond “stakeholders”. Through continued coursework and work-study opportunities, the Davenport Institute of Public Engagement and Civic Leadership provides current SPP students with the skills, experience, and relationships they will need to work towards common sense answers to today’s difficult policy problems.

Visit the Davenport Institute’s Common Sense California Web site.

At its foundation, the new Davenport Institute of Public Engagement and Civic Leadership will seek to answer the most fundamental public policy question in a democratic republic: How can our governing institutions and the citizens they represent work together to solve public problems - practicing effective governance while engendering self governance? The “new normal” has made finding real answers to this question more important than ever.