citizen-centered

With nearly 8,000 ideas and more than 600,000 votes, the Ideas for Change In America competition of Change.org made evident a widespread interest in the power of technology to enable citizen-centered policy change. We’ve been watching with great interest here on Social Citizens as thousands of ideas have funneled into Change.org since early November.

But with yesterday’s announcement of the top ten ideas and a lively panel discussion at the National Press Club, I’ve been focused on what it means as this new era of participatory democracy takes hold - perhaps even more so than on the ideas themselves. It’s one thing to rally your network to elect an individual candidate or to vote for a specific idea – but how do you take that network and sustain it, and more importantly how do you use technology to bring new and diverse voices into the dialogue? Read more »

 Today's guest blogger, Asad Jafri is the coordinator of Leaders of the New School, a project located in the south side of Chicago that brings together local youth with artists and mentors to address and help resolve community issues through hip hop and urban arts. Leaders of the New School was one of the Final Four grantees in the Case Foundation’s Make It Your Own Awards, and Asad met earlier this week with representatives of the other 20 program finalists.

I'm personally not a fan of generic labels on an entire generation, but if I had to pick a broad term for the generation I fall under, it would be the Hip Hop Generation. I'm part of a generation that is ready to make change happen collectively with the limited resources around us. That also means I was organizing in my community before I knew what community organizing was. 

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