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A Few Good Civic Ideas
February 2010

In a brilliantly worded and eloquently conveyed inaugural speech in January, Mayor Thomas M. Menino called for “a resurgent spirit of civic engagement” and summoned “civic entrepreneurs…to build on our early experiments, deliver on projects we’ve dreamed up, and make Boston a proving ground for dozens of novel solutions.”

Menino’s bold civic summons and the expanded vision he projects for a new Boston is typical for a mayor who has been woefully underrated for his capacity to understand the city’s problems and his ability to contrive pragmatic municipal solutions.

The call for new ideas is fitting for a city that is transforming into something different than what it was just a generation ago.  It is also appropriate given the rapid development of technology and the available abundance of local intellectual and human capital through our universities and non-profit organization leaders.

As chairman of Mayor Menino’s voting rights commission in 2006, I had the opportunity to push for dramatic change in how elections are conducted in Boston.  Working closely with the mayor’s staff and with Jerry Cuddyer, the city’s election commissioner, such changes as bringing diversity to the pool of election day workers, system-wide ballot assistance and interpretation for non-English speakers and the enforcement of voter’s rights at the polls were achieved.

To re-imagine the city of Boston as a new civic space that sets an example for the nation is both fitting and possible.  In the spirit of the call for new ideas, the mayor should consider the following proposals in the areas of civic literacy, civic policy and electoral justice.

First, create the Boston Democracy Fund.  Such an entity would function as a public repository providing neighborhood funding and technical assistance capacity for the purposes of supporting the incubation of innovatory civic initiatives throughout Boston communities.  Operating as a vehicle coordinating civic projects across the city, the Democracy Fund will serve to inspire community-based problem solving around a wide range of local issues that require high levels of sustained resident interaction, planning and imagination.  

Through the Democracy Fund, the city of Boston can jumpstart new civic projects that call for experimentation, visioning and collaboration, promoting fresh ideas and new community-specific problem solving which lead to what Harvard Professor Robert Putnam calls “increased social capital.”

Second, enact a policy creating no-fault voter registration.   Technology has now availed us to the ease of mastering databases that will allow for automatic voter registration for every eligible citizen in the city. 

The bureaucratic necessities of in-person, manual voter registration is now obsolete given our ability to track residents, citizenship and voter age eligibility through various coordinated city, state and federal databases.  As voting is a fundamental right of all citizens, we should move to automatically register every citizen in Boston on their birthdates of eligibility.   It would be as easy as the current practice of assigning every newborn citizen in this country a social security number. 

To be sure, no-fault voter registration would eliminate an unnecessary roadblock to unencumbered enfranchisement and dramatically increase the voter registration rolls. We should take advantage of what we can glean from our increasing technological sophistication to benefit our civic condition. 

Third, establish in each of the city’s community centers compelling public programming that builds civic literacy among youth.  Innumerable academic studies reveal that increased civic knowledge and involvement among urban youth predicts higher levels of political participation and leadership in subsequent years.  Currently the city operates an untold number of youth programs at its community centers each year.  In the coming years, we should work incessantly to provide attractive, compelling and relevant programming that effectively increases civic literacy among youth.

If we desire to insure the civic sustainability of our city for future generations, we would be wise to invest in meaningful youth programming that effectively reinforces our common civic values and democratic sensibilities.