How Can We Get More People Involved In Civic Affairs?

Something rare and precious was on display Friday at the Red Lion City Center hotel downtown citizenship.

Of the several hundred people who gathered for a Spokane Leadership Forum, a number were well-known community leaders. Many more, however, were low-profile but energetic workers who dedicate some important portion of their relatively anonymous lives to grappling with issues that clog Spokane’s path to the future: education, housing, economic development, the environment and other concerns that test a community’s capacity for self-fulfillment.

The common thread linking forum participants, whether they express it through their occupations or their volunteerism, was their determination to be involved in civic affairs. Not just observers or critics, but participants.

This community boasts many such people. Those who attended Friday’s forum are some of them, but certainly not all.

Participants are civic stewards. Poverty or potholes, when they see a community problem, they feel a responsibility to help fix it. It’s their community, after all. These are citizens in a genuine sense.

But genuine citizens are outnumbered by the apathetic, the uninformed, the cynical and the indolent.

Casting a ballot once or twice a year, if that, satisfies such people’s ideas of civic duty. But it isn’t enough, is it, to come out only at lengthy intervals and voice approval or disapproval of someone else’s ideas for your own community?

Shouldn’t we be helping generate the ideas ourselves, especially if we want the right to make judgments about the strategies that eventually are used?

It was evident at Friday’s forum that many opportunities exist for Spokane area residents to help define the issues and shape the solutions that become questions on a ballot.

Readers who want to know more about getting involved in those activities can request information through the addresses and phone numbers listed below.

Meanwhile, if effective citizenship means becoming engaged long before public-policy questions reach the ballot, what does it take to motivate would-be citizens? What does it take to motivate you?

, DataTimes MEMO: “Bagpipes” appears Tuesdays and Thursdays. To respond, call Cityline at 458-8800, category 9881, from a Touch-Tone phone; or send a fax to 459-5098 or e-mail to dougf@spokesman.com. You also can leave Doug Floyd a message at 459-5577, extension 5466.