Brad Rourke’s Blog
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Learning To Theme
One of the most important skills in working withe the public is, I believe, one of the most often overlooked. People whose work is public facing — community benefit organization leaders, public agency heads, journalists — need to be able to theme what they hear. Put simply, this means “making sense” of what they hear,…
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Best Practices Are Killing Us
A friend of mine recently made the following comment: “[T]he dresses & hairstyles worn at the Emmy’s were really boring & predictable. Bring back the days before the stars paid stylists, please!” While I do not watch awards shows, the comment struck me, because it applies equally well to management and leadership. Today’s obsession with…
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Survey Shows Americans Struggling At Home
I wanted to share with you some work for a client, the Northwest Area Foundation, that is being released today and of which I am very excited. Each year, the Northwest Area Foundation commissions a survey on poverty — my friends at Lake Research Partners (Mike Perry and Tresa Undem) design and execute it. I…
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Time To Reinvent The Civic Purpose Of Political Parties
This guest article is by my friend Eric Siegel: One of the ironies of the current transition in community and network building is that we seem to have forgotten or ignored the previous transition. The “institution-centric” mode of civic engagement (to use Brad’s phrase) is a relatively recent invention, at least in America. (For a…
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How To Reclaim Pedagogy?
Andrea Jarrell drew my attention to a piece in yesterday’s Washington Post by former Howard Dean Internet wunderkind Zephyr Teachout. Both newspapers and universities have traditionally relied on selling hard-to-come-by information. Newspapers touted advertising space next to breaking news, but now that advertisers find their customers on Craigslist and Cars.com, the main source of reporters’…
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Video Dialogue: Beyond "Connecting"
My friend John Creighton and I have recorded another video dialogue about the shift in public life away from an “institution centric” world to a “citizen centric” world. Our starting point was a comment that I heard at last week’s working session so social media and community benefit organizations, which was organized by the National Conference on Citizenship,…
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Memory Of 9/11, From A Distance
I recall I was at LAX, on my way home to Maine. Our flight was being held, no one on the plane knew why. Shortly it became clear that something terrible had happened. Air traffic was grounded for the ensuing week. So many were far more deeply affected than I was. Friends of mine lost loved…
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A New Forum To Discuss Health Care
Interest in health care, and health care reform, have hit a fever pitch with President Obama’s speech last night and the public debates (and arguments) that have precipitated it. I wanted to let readers know about a new resource to think through the issue of health care costs and what to do about them. It’s…
