I am pleased to announce that every Sunday starting today, I will be reporting on a handful of news stories that highlight solutions and stories of people coming together on matters of shared interest!
To put this in context, two-thirds of Americans say that the future of our nation is a significant source of stress, largely due to the constant stream of problems and polarization that play out in the news and media. Trust in news media is at an all-time low, and over the last decade, one in five newspapers have closed, creating an expanding “news desert” of communities without local news coverage. As responsible news outlets decline, partisan news sites, alternative facts, cancel culture, and weaponized social media seem to have overtaken society, which impairs our ability to distinguish truth, connect meaningfully, and act collectively.
Reporting on the problems of the world is not enough. The world’s problem-solving ability is often under-reported and reforms go unrealized. Journalists have a special role as storytellers, and possibility-oriented storytelling can greatly shape the cultural narrative. Journalists can do this by building on the traditional fact-based questions of what, who, when, where, and how, by offering a sixth question: What’s possible now?
At its best, journalism catalyzes and informs conversations and helps us consider possibilities for a wiser, more creative world. It can bring out the best in us, reducing social isolation and loneliness while emphasizing collective power and common good. Armed with information, imagination, the willingness to engage one another, and a meaningful cause, we can and will solve the complex, deeply-rooted problems we face.
Here are today's news stories:
Cops and Community Organizers Are Reimagining Atlanta’s Jail
from We Are Not Divided
An unlikely collaboration could transform a place of imprisonment into a center for equity. Redesigning the jail would mean re-imagining a hulking, 471,000-square-foot carceral facility. “Even though it seems painful to bring people from so many perspectives together, it’s like the only thing that gets us to the final agreement,” says Xochitl Bervera, director of the Racial Justice Action Center. “If you don’t have the head of the Department of Corrections and police alongside the homeless person who has just been arrested, or the trans woman who has cycled in and out of that jail, you’re not gonna get to where you need to go.” The next 12 months included small focus groups as well as larger community gatherings that engaged a total of around 600 people. Groups included formerly incarcerated people, immigrant communities, homeless communities, survivors of violence, harm reduction experts, justice experts, homelessness experts, mental health experts, neighborhood planning units, youth, and business owners surrounding the jail. With each group, the vision for the Equity Center richened.
It was suggested the Center for Equity could serve as a “one-stop-shop” for victim services. Engaging surrounding businesses helped participants re-imagine not only the jail, but the entire district as a potential engine for new economic opportunities. The “Space Planning and Finance” game was designed to give participants a basic understanding of how spaces in a building are planned and how a project like this would be paid for. “A lot of time there’s a disconnect between what people want to have happen and how you actually fund it,” explains Davis Roberts. “But there’s creative ways to program a building and combine funding sources … it sounds complex, but once you get people playing it can be relatable and fun.” Community and government partnerships mean shared power — you need structures and systems, not just collecting input from the community and creating a glossy report,” Bervera continues. She believes the engagement around the task force — a process she calls “exhilarating, frustrating, inspiring and exhausting” — was a good first step.
‘De-Task’ the Police, Says Former Toronto Mayor
from The Tyee
People talk about it when there’s wrongdoing, when the police kill somebody or badly beat somebody up, but there’s not much talk about what the police actually do and what kind of changes have to be made. What do we want police for? In terms of someone who is having a mental crisis, phone the police. Too often, you call the police and they shoot the person, because they don’t know how to deal with that. What we should be doing is we should be “de-tasking” police. Some people say defunding. I use de-tasking. Take those tasks, those functions, away from police, put them in the hands of community services.
It’ll be less expensive, and we’ll get much better results. We sometimes think the police can be involved in crime prevention. But in fact, that’s not true. Crime prevention is carried out by all of us in our social and community roles: teachers, social workers, shopkeepers and transit operators. They’re the people who are actually providing crime prevention and the idea of community security. So, we’ve got a misunderstanding. And it’s a misunderstanding that the police play up very, very strongly. The presence of police officers, in fact, isn’t something that prevents crime or makes people feel safe. The police always say, “We have to have a police presence so that people will feel good.” In Ottawa, only one out of every 80 calls for service actually is a priority-one call, where there’s some kind of threat to human life. The other 79, there’s not. You don’t need somebody with body armour and a gun going to those. There are 19 police forces in the world where the police aren’t armed, the largest one being the Metropolitan Police in London, England. They seem to operate perfectly well without guns.
Taiwan’s Crowdsourced Democracy Shows Us How to Fix Social Media
from We Are Not Divided
The occupation became known as the Sunflower Revolution. How could Taiwan’s government listen better? To answer that question, Taiwan did not turn to any of the usual suspects. They didn’t ask lobbyists or political consultants. Instead the government arrived at a bustling lecture theater on a university campus to ask for the help of a group that very few politicians knew even existed: the civic hackers. Taiwan’s civic hackers were organized around a leaderless collective called g0v (pronounced “gov zero.”) Many believed in radical transparency, in throwing opaque processes open to the light, and in multi-stakeholderism, the idea that everyone who is affected by a decision should have a say in it. They preferred establishing consensus to running lots of majority-rule votes. As g0v saw it, the problem of politics was essentially one of information. Votes were strung out too far apart to really give lawmakers much of an idea of what the public wanted. And votes, referenda, run-offs and debates often split the public down the middle. They needed a way not to measure division, but construct consensus. Naturally, they thought the internet could offer a solution. But in Taiwan – like everywhere else – the internet was part of the problem. The kinds of online spaces where political debate happened were engineered for an entirely different purpose: to capture attention. Whether it was Twitter’s timeline, Facebook’s news feed or the recommendations on YouTube, these platforms served up information that was shocking, horrifying or crazy enough to keep people glued to their screens. And that often meant amplifying the thundering politics of division and outrage rather than the subtle complexities of compromise.
The hackers’ answer was called vTaiwan. (The “v” stands for virtual.) A mixed-reality, scaled listening exercise, it was an entirely new way to make decisions. The platform invites citizens into an online space for debate that politicians listen to and take into account when casting their votes. Government would start a new vTaiwan process on a political question it was deliberating, and Taiwanese people from across the full spectrum of opinion would join one another to discuss it online. As the debate began, Polis drew a map showing all the different knots of agreement and dissent as they emerged. As people expressed their views, rather than serving up the comments that were the most divisive, it gave the most visibility to those finding consensus — consensus across not just their own little huddle of ideological fellow-travellers, but the other huddles, too. Divisive statements, trolling, provocation — you simply couldn’t see these. “People spend far more time discovering their commonalities rather than going down a rabbit hole on a particular issue."
Japan’s ‘Zero Waste’ Village Is a Model for Small-Town Sustainability
from We Are Not Divided
In Kamikatsu, recycling isn’t just an environmental imperative — it’s the glue that unifies a community. Built on the site of a former incinerator, the center has become the centerpiece of an ambitious goal: Kamikatsu’s effort to reuse or recycle everything it produces. In doing so, the town of less than 2,000 people, set on the Japanese island of Shikoku, has become a world-leading example of how a community can eliminate waste. For starters, to earn “zero waste accreditation,” all of Kamikatsu’s businesses must adhere to a strict sustainability ethos that includes training employees on reducing waste and setting measurable goals. The Kuru-kuru store (a Japanese phrase meaning “to go round and round”) provides free second-hand items such as kitchen appliances and tableware, and sells old kimonos, bags and toys upcycled by local artisans. A brewery produces craft beer using yuko citrus peel provided by local farmers, who use the fruit’s juice to make sauces and dressings, and in turn receive spent grain from the brewery for compost. Cafe Polestar only serves organic local produce and offers discounts to customers who bring their own coffee cups. Hotel Why, which was built using local cedar wood as well as discarded doors and windows, welcomes tourists to experience the town’s zero-waste philosophy. Even the signs in the Zero Waste Center have been crafted from recycled materials.
“We wanted to create an architecture that would be in tune with their behavior and sensibility, always thinking and acting in ways that would allow them to reuse the waste instead of throwing it away,” says architect Nakamura, who also used spare mortar and ceramic pieces from flooring to make plastering material. Kamikatsu recycled 81 percent of all its waste in 2020, according to Ministry of the Environment data, up from 58.6 percent in 2008, and much greater than Japan’s national average of 20 percent. As a result, Kamikatsu has cut its spending on incineration by a third, and now brings in up to three million yen (around US$21,000) annually through selling recycled materials like paper or metals. Those earnings cover a very healthy proportion of the six million yen that goes towards waste management each year.
