WANT TO HELP CITY HALL FELLOWS? DOWNLOAD THE EXTRAORDINARIES IPHONE APP TODAY: http://Download.BeExtra.org
Be Extraordinary
by Bethany Rubin Henderson
Executive Director, City Hall Fellows
When I left my partnership-track job at a big law firm to launch City Hall Fellows
nearly 2 years ago, I expected to get a lot of questions. Before
making the leap, I prepared myself to answer questions about the
viability of the business model. About how the program would work.
About how I would interest America’s
best and brightest — who had been avoiding government for decades — in
local government. About my vision for the future and how City Hall Fellows would
change the world. I even was prepared to answer questions about my
personal choice to forego certain financial security for a risky social
endeavor. But there was one question it never crossed my mind to
prepare for: “why does city government matter?”
Since
then, I have spent a lot of time practicing my “pitch” by talking to
strangers about what I do – not just potential funders or city
officials, but also the guy sitting next to me on the airplane, the
nurse in a doctor’s office, a friend of a friend of a friend at a party. Almost
always, the first reaction from anyone who does not work for city
government themselves is “why city government? Isn't it just a big,
useless bureaucracy?” My initial response to this was: “don’t you see, city government is where the rubber meets the road.” I would then launch into how much I learned while working for the City of New York the year after college. After
all, experiencing firsthand on a daily basis just how much even the
most arcane aspects of city government (in my case, the information
technology and telecommunications department) impacted regular people’s
lives is what inspired me to launch City Hall Fellows. But their blank stares told me very quickly just how useless that cliché was in persuading them that city government matters. And
my personal experience more than a decade ago as a 21-year-old city
employee working on technology strategy was so far removed from their
lives that it didn’t really resonate as much more than a mildly
interesting anecdote. Unlike me, the people I was trying to convince had never worked for a city government. Nor did they care to. So I turned to impressive statistics that I figured would make the impact indisputable. For example, according to the Brookings Institute, “85% of Americans live in metropolitan areas.” But, again, their blank stares made it clear I wasn’t getting through.
A few months ago, Echoing Green sent me the book Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath. In
it, the Heath brothers (both columnists for Fast Company magazine, Chip
is a Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Dan is
the co-founder of publishing company Thinkwell and formerly a
Consultant to Policy Programs of the Aspen Institute) discuss the
importance of concreteness in making ideas clear. Chip and Dan define concreteness as explaining ideas in terms of discrete, tangible human actions and sensory information. They rightly point out that sensory information is too often absent from business communication. And that this absence makes mission statements “often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless.” Chip
and Dan also make their point concretely, by contrasting typical
business marketing with the concrete images replete in urban myths,
such as “apples with razors”. Ultimately, they
argue, “Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea
will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.”
Reading Made to Stick got me thinking. Eventhough
everyone I was talking to lived in, worked in or visited cities, they
had no idea how much of their daily existence was directed, governed or
impact by what city governments did. Most of
them would never notice the routine services their municipality
provides unless the city stopped providing those services. What
these people needed to understand why city government mattered were
concrete examples of how city government impacted them personally. So I shifted my narrative. When asked “why city government?” I stopped responding with statistics and clichés. I stopped telling them why I cared about cities. Instead, I asked the person I was talking to if they knew who set the schedule for the traffic lights near them. How the streets and sidewalks near them were maintained. How come the next neighborhood over got a playground and park but theirs did not. And who maintained that neighborhood’s park. As these conversations continued, I could see the light bulbs start to go off. When
people started thinking about who was responsible for maintaining the
daily fabric of modern life, they started to see just how important
city government was.
Here at City Hall Fellows, one of our goals is to educate Americans about why city government matters. To communicate this, we need concrete stories about how city government impacts regular Americans, for better and for worse. And we need your help.
WANT TO HELP CITY HALL FELLOWS? DOWNLOAD THE EXTRAORDINARIES IPHONE APP TODAY: http://Download.BeExtra.org
