Fall 2016

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VOLUME 8

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ISSUE 3

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The number of Kansans not voting would fill Kauffman Stadium over 18 times.

WH AT WILL IT TAKE TO GET THE MI SSI N G 700,000 TO TH E PO LLS T HI S N OVEM BER?

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$10.00

(Print edition: ISSN 2328-4366; Online edition: ISSN 2328-4374) is published quarterly by the Kansas Leadership Center, which receives core funding from the Kansas Health Foundation.

The Kansas Leadership Center equips people with the ability to make lasting change for the common good. KLC focuses on leadership being an activity, not a role or position. Open to anyone seeking to move the needle on tough challenges in the civic arena, KLC envisions more Kansans sharing responsibility for acting together in pursuit of the common good.

KLC MISSION

To foster civic leadership for healthier Kansas communities

Jeff Tuttle Photography 316.706.8529 jefftuttlephotography.com

To be the center of excellence for civic leadership development

David Lindstrom, Overland Park (Chair) Ed O’Malley, Wichita (President & CEO) Ron Holt, Wichita Karen Humphreys, Wichita Susan Kang, Lawrence Carolyn Kennett, Parsons Greg Musil, Overland Park Reggie Robinson, Topeka Consuelo Sandoval, Garden City Clayton Tatro, Fort Scott Frank York, Ashland

JOURNAL CONTRIBUTORS

ARTWORK

Bruce Ediger carriagefactoryartgallery.com/ bruce-ediger MANAGING EDITOR

Chris Green 316.712.4945 cgreen@kansasleadershipcenter.org ART DIRECTION + DESIGN

Novella Brandhouse 816.868.9825 www.novellabrandhouse.com CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

KLC VISION

KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER BOARD OF DIRECTORS

PHOTOGRAPHY

THE

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Sarah Caldwell Hancock Mark McCormick Dawn Bormann Novascone Laura Roddy Patsy Terrell Brian Whepley

Brian Whepley

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Brian, a 16-year veteran of daily newspapers, including The Wichita Eagle, first began writing for The Journal in 2013. This issue marks the second time he has written the cover story for this magazine.

COPY EDITORS

Bruce Janssen Shannon Littlejohn ILLUSTRATIONS

Pat Byrnes

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Kim Gronniger

WEB EDITION

klcjournal.com

Chris Green MANAGING EDITOR

Chris started overseeing publication of The Journal in 2012. A former Kansas Statehouse correspondent, he is also co-author of “Teaching Leadership,” a book detailing the Kansas Leadership Center’s primary teaching methods.

SUBSCRIPTIONS

Annual subscriptions available at klcjr.nl/amzsubscribe ($24.95 for four issues).

Single issues available for $10 at klcjr.nl/watermarkfall.

PERMISSIONS

Abstracting is permitted with credit to the source.

For other reprint, copying or reproduction permission contact Mike Matson at mmatson@kansasleadershipcenter.org.

Laura Roddy KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER

325 East Douglas Avenue Wichita, KS 67202 www.kansasleadershipcenter.org

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Laura published her first Journal story in the fall of 2012. She is a freelance writer who works in marketing and development for a Wichita arts agency and is an active community volunteer.

Contents INSPIRATION FOR THE COMMON GOOD • VOLUME 8 • ISSUE 3 • FALL 2016 PUBLISHED BY KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER

2.

30.

72.

BY: PRESIDENT AND CEO ED O’MALLEY

BY: PATSY TERRELL

BY: CHRIS GREEN AND MARK MCCORMICK

4.

38.

Welcome to the Journal

How to Read a Political Mailer BY: CHRIS GREEN

6.

Making the Turn BY: LAURA RODDY

14.

The Perfect Mix

Opting In BY: BRIAN WHEPLEY

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True Revolution BY: ED O’MALLEY

58.

Where’s the Leadership?

Amplifying the Public’s Voice

BY: CHAPMAN RACKAWAY

BY: CHRIS GREEN

66.

24.

Getting Outside the Circle PHOTOS BY: JEFF TUTTLE

AND MICHAEL SMITH

Building Trust Amid Chaos BY: KIM GRONNIGER

The Evolution of Protest

76.

Strip Pit Fishing FEATURED POET KEVIN RABAS

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Barn with Dark Sky FEATURED ARTIST BRUCE EDIGER

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The Back Page BY: MARK MCCORMICK

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LETTER FROM KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER PRESIDENT & CEO ED O’MALLEY

A Necessary Dialogue EXPLORING HOW THE KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER SHOULD RESPOND TO A SERIES OF HEARTRENDING EVENTS GRIPPING OUR NATION

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Baton Rouge. St. Paul. Dallas.

What happened in those three cities in the days following the Fourth of July could happen anywhere in America, including the cities and towns of Kansas.

On Tuesday of that week, Alton Sterling died at the hands of police officers in Baton Rouge. I read about it the next day.

My heart ached. And then I went on. Maybe you did too.

On Wednesday, police officers killed Philando Castile in St. Paul. The next day, I saw the shocking video, taken by his girlfriend and showing Mr. Castile dying, on my social media feed as I waited at a long stoplight in the Kansas City area. Sick to my stomach and emotional, my eyes filled with tears.

A collection of black, white, Asian and Hispanic Kansans shared their thoughts and experiences.

Black men from Kansas City – KLC alums – shared what it was like to be pulled over by law enforcement officers. White businessmen from mainly white communities asked questions.

A microcosm of Kansas was present. From many backgrounds and professions. Different races and political beliefs. Baton Rouge, St. Paul and Dallas stayed in the middle of the conversation. We explored. We learned. We weren’t closer to knowing what, if anything, we could or should do. But the conversation was deep and productively heated.

We then toured some of the most economically depressed neighborhoods in Kansas – just a few minutes away from posh areas of Johnson County.

Discussions continued. The board began contemplating what KLC could or should do. What’s our part?

Was this to be a daily occurrence now?

The light turned green; my thoughts turned. Our KLC board of directors’ retreat was to start that evening.

The killings didn’t become part of our board’s discussion that night. They were occasionally on my mind throughout dinner. But we talked about the center and listened to the stories of three alumni who joined us that night.

Alone in my quiet hotel room later, I had trouble sleeping. The killings kept coming to mind.

My alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. I checked my phone. Dallas.

By the next morning, an idea crystalized. KLC would convene alums to diagnose this situation. It’s an adaptive challenge, after all. Everyone has the same goal. No one wants senseless loss of life.

But when the goal is the same for almost everyone and progress is still elusive you know you are dealing with a deep, daunting, adaptive challenge.

Will anything happen because of one convening hosted by KLC? I don’t think so. But it’s what we can do and it’s what we will do. And we’ll use what we learn to help us discern what we should do next. This is KLC “acting experimentally.” I hope you’ll join us in your own way, exploring how you can engage others to help make progress on one of the pressing issues of our day.

Baton Rouge. St. Paul. Dallas.

Our board chair began the meeting with a moment of silence for the loss of life in Baton Rouge, St. Paul and Dallas. But then we moved on to discussing the business of KLC. We took a bus to visit places in Johnson and Wyandotte counties where our alumni are putting KLC ideas to work. The events of that week didn’t really come up until lunch.

A half-dozen alums from Kansas City, all African Americans, had joined the meeting. I don’t remember exactly what one of our faculty members said, but she ignited a conversation that mattered.

Onward!

PRESIDENT & CEO KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER

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How to Read a Political Mailer

By: CHRIS GREEN

Just guessing this isn’t Joe’s profile photo.

Paid for by whom?

Is this the saddest puppy you’ve ever seen?

Are these news sites for real?

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People who have the opportunity to vote in hotly contested political races in Kansas this year will likely see a deluge of campaign literature in their mailboxes. Political mailers have become such a routine part of campaigns that legislators now routinely refer to being “postcarded.”

That is when a vote you’ve taken as a lawmaker becomes fodder for negative advertising.

Campaigns love mailers because they’re often considered the next best thing to sending a real person to your doorstep. Nowadays even state-level campaigns can have access to enough data about voters to have a pretty good idea about you and your political leanings. Over the years, studies have shown that well-targeted postcards can be more effective at mobilizing voters than other forms of communication, such as television advertising.

But like any form of advertising, postcards are best read with a critical eye. Here’s how to use political postcards to become a more informed voter.

1. Don’t throw them out right away.

If you save all of your mailers for a few weeks, it will give you an opportunity to compare and contrast the messages that candidates and organizations are sending you. What patterns do you see emerging? Why might you be a target for these particular messages? What do you think the goal of the advertiser is? You can always recycle postcards after the election!

2. Read the fine print.

Always check out the “paid for by” section of the advertisement. It’s crucial to understanding how seriously to take the message. You can look up information about political advertisers at http:// ethics.kansas.gov. Sometimes ads will be paid for by innocuous sounding nonprofit groups, which you can search for at guidestar.com. You can also check out the sources being cited in the mailer to see if there’s another side to the story that might not be getting told.

3. Be aware of the triggers they’re trying to pull.

Groups send out mailers for a variety of reasons.

Sometimes mailers to build support for a candidate.

Other times, it’s to discourage you from voting for certain people or make you angry at the other side.

It’s usually more about mobilizing or discouraging than about changing minds. The goal is to provoke an emotional reaction – fear, anger and disgust are common. If you can understand yourself and

what postcards are trying to trigger in you, you can make conscious choices and keep mailers from simply pulling your strings.

4. Take a few moments to consider multiple interpretations.

Campaigns know you’re busy, so they try to be as attention-getting as possible and leave you with a definite impression about the candidates they support or oppose, even if you simply pitch the card after a glance. Even the peek you take on the way to the wastebasket might plant a seed in your mind, particularly if it’s a race you know little about. The only way to combat the spell is to take a second to stop and think. What other possible interpretations could there be besides the one described in this mailer?

5. Challenge your own assumptions.

If you’re reading this, chances are you have some opinions about politics and for whom to vote. Don’t fall into the trap of automatically thinking the worst of people you tend to disagree with and the best of people you agree with. It may not change your vote come Election Day, but extending some grace to the other side helps you keep a healthier political attitude and might even make our democracy just a little bit better.

Read more: “The Victory Lab” by Sasha Issenberg Share the postcards you receive with public media outlets at kspostcarding.com.

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Eric Haselhorst of Dodge City, who helped rally his community to support the Long Branch Lagoon Aquatics Park, zips down one of the new slides.

G N I K A M E H T N R TU

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K A N S A N S H AV E D E V E L O P E D A G O O D R E P U TAT I O N F O R T H E I R W I L L I N G N E S S T O V O LU N T E E R .

H OW D O W E L E V E R AG E T H E S TAT E ’ S S P I R I T O F SERVICE INTO MORE ACTS OF LEADERSHIP?

By: LAURA RODDY

We Kansans excel at volunteering. We roll up our sleeves to collect food and clothing, assist with tutoring, help with fundraisers, coach youth sports teams and give our time through our churches.

We do these things at rates high enough – 35.1 percent of us, compared with the overall national rate of 24.3 percent – to rank fifth in the nation, according to the federal Corporation for National and Community Service’s “Volunteering and Civic Life in America” report for 2014, the latest available.

Nearly twice as many of us engage in what’s called informal volunteering, things such as doing favors for neighbors. And more than half of us give $25 or more to charity.

The numbers are even more impressive when we look at our young people. Kansas ranked first in the nation for teenage volunteers with 41 percent participating.

Even with Kansas’ high overall volunteer rate, it is youths and retirees who do the most community service. People in their 30s and 40s don’t volunteer as frequently, according to the national report, but those who have children volunteer more than those who don’t.

But where’s the place where leadership and volunteering intersect? At the Kansas Leadership Center, the goal is to equip people to make lasting change for the common good. What is it that makes people take their volunteering a step

further? How does a person go from making a donation or pitching in to identifying a gap or need in the civic sphere and taking action?

Brandon Kliewer, assistant professor of civic leadership in the Staley School of Leadership Studies at Kansas State University, says civic engagement is best related to as a spectrum, rather than a ladder.

So it’s not that you start by giving a few bucks, then give a few hours and then decide to become a leader.

Rather, it’s about identifying something in the status quo that needs disrupting – envisioning a change away from simply volunteer hours and cash contributions.

As Kliewer points out, in some instances it works to write a check or help with a cleanup. We’re always going to need that in cases of natural disasters, for example.

It’s just that service can inspire acts of leadership.

“When people are out there giving to charity and volunteering, what they are doing is making multiple observations,” he says. That can help them figure the best way to intervene skillfully for lasting change.

For someone without formal authority, Kliewer says, being an effective civic leader means taking

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into full account the social, political, economic and moral spheres surrounding the issue at hand. “Unpacking ‘civic’ with our students becomes really important,” Kliewer says.

It’s also about changing the perspective of the volunteer. “We don’t do service for the community.

We do service with and within the community,” Kliewer says. “When service is done with and within the community, then we see the capacity for change.”

Liz Workman is interested in the intersection of volunteering and leadership. In fact, as chief executive officer of the Girl Scouts of Kansas Heartland – covering 80 of Kansas’ 105 counties – it’s at the very core of her organization’s mission.

The Girl Scouts are known as do-gooders. Adult alumnae are more civically engaged, volunteer more and vote more, studies show. But that’s just part of the equation, she says.

“Everything we do has a leadership element,” Workman says. “Girl Scouts is really about preparing girls and women to empower themselves for everyday leadership.”

The organization focuses on activities that are girl-led, cooperative and hands-on. The message, Workman says, is: “You can make a difference, and you have to act to do it. You have to engage with others.”

The Journal spoke in-depth with three volunteers who have done just that. They have served, and then they have acted to make lasting change for the common good.

the hashtag #communitymatters when she checks in at a meeting.

Miles says she says no regularly, but she also is eager to say yes to the right opportunities.

For example, although she was honored to be asked to compete in the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Woman of the Year fundraising contest, she turned it down.

“I have defined a personal mission for my life,” says Miles, who is the executive director of the Nonprofit Chamber of Service. “Outside of that, when people approach me about different projects, I decline.”

If it relates to education, children, poverty or domestic violence, Miles will pour her heart and soul into helping. “Serving on the boards, the committees is my hobby,” she says.

Miles says overcoming difficult experiences in her own life is what inspires her to help others.

She grew up in poverty and was a victim of molestation and child pornography by a violent, alcoholic stepfather. Later, she ended up in a violent marriage herself – afraid to stay but also afraid to leave. At age 26, Miles had kids ages 2, 4 and 6 with no car, no job and no money, but she rebuilt her life. She dropped out of college, sold her waterbed to feed her kids and took a job cleaning hotel rooms.

“Life was pretty rough growing up,” she says.

“I was able to direct my life in a different way than I grew up. That’s what drives me every day – how can I help people go in a different direction?”

Frequently, people assume Wichita’s Cindy Miles just doesn’t know how to say no.

Miles says her own struggles helped her develop empathy and understanding. As a child, she didn’t understand why her mother didn’t leave her abusive spouse. When she found herself in a similar situation, she found out just how hard it is to walk way.

She is involved in many organizations – Crimestoppers, Sunlight Children’s Advocacy and Rights Foundation, a city district advisory board, Junior League of Wichita, the Wichita Coalition for Child Abuse Prevention, to name a few – and she is active on social media, often using

Miles, who along with her husband is raising four grandchildren, is particularly proud of her efforts in getting two programs off the ground: a leadership program for youth through the Kansas Hispanic Education and Development Foundation and the recent founding of the

TAP INTO YOUR PASSION: CINDY MILES

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“ W E D O N ’ T D O S E RV I C E F O R T H E C O M M U N I T Y. W E D O S E RV I C E W I T H A N D W I T H I N T H E C O M M U N I T Y.” BRANDON KLIEWER

ABOVE: Brandon Kliewer, assistant professor of civic leadership at Kansas State’s Staley School of Leadership Studies, thinks civic service can inspire acts of leadership.

RIGHT: Cindy Miles of Wichita is raising four grandchildren, including 9-year-old Kaytlin, with her husband. Miles encourages volunteers to better define what it is they care most about.

“ I K N OW BY H E L P I N G T H E S E O R G A N I Z AT I O N S , I C A N T H E R E B Y I M PAC T P E O P L E .”

CINDY MILES

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Incubator for Nonprofits of Kansas, which aims to assist nonprofits with budgets of $250,000 or less.

She found she could use her marketing background and experience with nonprofits’ management to help them be more effective.

She pushes for boards to implement and follow a strategic plan. Miles also advocates for diversity in membership, making sure to have fundraisers, worker bees and people with connections, as well as members with marketing, accounting and legal expertise.

The Kansas Hispanic Education and Development Foundation is important to her because Hispanics are under-represented in positions of influence in the community, she says. With the Incubator for Nonprofits of Kansas, Miles finds that nonprofits are passionate about their missions but often underfunded. She finds that using Kansas Leadership Center principles – in particular, diagnosing the situation and focusing on adaptive work – can help those entities be more successful.

“I know by helping these organizations, I can thereby impact people,” Miles says.

Miles says her volunteer life was transformed when it became an act of leadership for her – when she had a vision for making progress on an issue that she cared about, rather than simply assisting with an organization’s day-to-day operating.

She spent years helping out through her kids’ activities, such as serving as the soccer club secretary or helping coach a team, but for her, “it was more out of obligation and not out of passion.”

That’s why Miles believes that to be the most effective volunteer leader, you must define your personal mission.

“Make a list of things you really care about,” she says. “What is it that you’re passionate about?

You can’t do everything.”

GIVE YOURSELF PERMISSION: ERIC HASELHORST

Being active in the community is something that comes naturally to Eric Haselhorst, who along with his wife and three children calls Dodge City home.

Haselhorst works as director of stewardship for the Catholic Diocese of Dodge City, so service through church has always been important. And his wife’s job with the Dodge City Convention and Visitors Bureau has driven home the importance of civic pride.

For him, volunteering became an act of leadership when he decided to attend an informational meeting about a new pool for Dodge City. “Our whole region needed this,” Haselhorst says.

So that’s how he found himself helping to spearhead a task force two years ago dedicated to persuading city and county officials to undertake the project.

It was a tall order, but one that he said was desperately needed after two unsuccessful attempts had consumed decades.

The existing pool was a traditional rectangle shape with a slide, but it was aging, deteriorating and leaking.

The new Long Branch Lagoon Aquatics Park, which opened in the summer of 2016, has an Olympic-sized lap pool, lazy river, shallow water pool, play structures, slides, a climbing wall and more. In Haselhorst’s view, the aquatics park improves the quality of life in the region for all ages and abilities, with swim lessons, low-impact water aerobics and competitive swimming.

“There’s no comparison,” he says. “It’s not even apples and oranges.”

Haselhorst says he acted both because he had the passion for the project and thought he had something to contribute. He knew he had the skills and willingness to speak in public meetings and rally support from the community members.

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“It was grass roots all the way,” Haselhorst says. He had countless conversations, telling people, “If you love this idea, we have to have your voice heard.”

Haselhorst also addressed opposition head-on.

Some people didn’t favor spending $11 million on a project that would be open only three months a year. His response was that in three months, the new attraction would have more traffic – a projected 1,200 visitors a day – than others in Dodge City have all year.

Another concern was the amount of water needed, 3 million gallons. But Haselhorst was able to explain it was a drop in the bucket compared with what people on a city block use or what it takes to grow corn.

Haselhorst says it was eye-opening to work with government, but he encourages others to act and not wait for some sort of elusive permission.

“Right now is the greatest time in human history. Even though there is a lot of darkness, there can be tremendous light,” he says. “Go. Start. You just have to start.”

BRING OTHERS ON BOARD: LAUREN BROWNING

Lauren Browning of Overland Park could be the poster teen for Kansas youth community service. The 19-year-old was honored nationally this year as one of the state’s top two youth volunteers. She just as easily could have been honored for leadership skills.

Browning started a charitable face-painting outfit called Faces of Hope nine years ago that is still going strong with a cadre of a dozen volunteers.

Now that she has started college out of state, she handed the reins over to two dedicated tweens.

Faces of Hope, which after years of effort recently became a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit, developed when a close family friend, Braden, developed childhood neuroblastoma cancer.

Browning found there were very few opportunities for kids under 12 to contribute in a significant way. “It’s like, well, you can hand out water bottles,” she says.

Painting faces was something she enjoyed and found it could brighten the lives of sick kids.

“ R I G H T N O W I S T H E G R E AT E S T T I M E I N H U M A N H I S T O RY. G O . S TA R T. Y O U J U S T H AV E T O S TA R T.” ERIC HASELHORST

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“WHEN YOU GET OUT INTO THE COMMUNITY AND SEE THINGS BEYOND Y O U R N O R M A L E V E RY D AY L I F E , Y O U S E E T H E N E E D F O R L E A D E R S H I P.” LAUREN BROWNING

First, she did it mostly for the cancer community.

With help from her parents, she branched off and added more painters. The crew is now booked almost every weekend, never charging to paint at any event aimed at bettering the community. Faces of Hope does accept donations, however, and sends all proceeds to a rotating group of charities, but Braden’s Hope for Childhood Cancer is always on the list.

It was a serious time commitment, and Browning acknowledges that there were times when it was inconvenient and she didn’t particularly feel like squeezing in another event.

“The weekends that I don’t want to paint are the weekends that I need to paint,” says Browning, who is in the process of setting up a Faces of Hope satellite as she pursues a bachelor of fine arts in theater.

She reminds herself of the time she painted the face of a little girl wearing pink who used a breathing machine. The girl was so happy, and Browning found out that she died just days later.

“Whenever things get tough, I always think of that,” she says, emphasizing the importance of the interaction between the painter and the child. “The actual painting is the least important thing we do in my opinion.”

Even though Browning loves to volunteer, she has strong feelings about required service for teens.

“It hurts my heart when I know a kid just wants to volunteer to get hours for school or for a résumé,” she says. “I think it totally puts the value on the wrong part. Although the intentions are good, I think the result is skewed. I know so many kids who are jumping through hoops.”

She compared it to reading – which she says is fun for lots of kids until it is an assignment, and then it often is viewed as a chore.

“Forced community service is not how you find your passion,” she says. “I genuinely love painting faces.”

Browning, like many community go-getters, has a laundry list of involvement beyond Faces of Hope: school mascot, president and founder of the yoga and pilates club, and dedicated drama student. For her senior project at Blue Valley Southwest High School, she wrote and directed 20 original works on gender norms, date culture and rape in society.

Browning says leadership and volunteering go hand in hand. “I think when you get out into the community and see things beyond your normal everyday life, you see the need for leadership.

Community service helps encourage the right kind of leaders.”

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HOW TO TURN VOLUNTEERING INTO LEADERSHIP

1.

BE CLEAR ABOUT YOUR PASSION.

If you really want to make a difference, you can’t do everything all the time.

You have to make conscious choices about where you devote your energies.

Cindy Miles suggests making a list of the things you truly care about and building your volunteering efforts from there.

2.

GIVE YOURSELF PERMISSION TO LEAD.

The only person who can give you the authority to lead is yourself. Nobody is going to send you an invitation. Eric Haselhorst was able to lead in his community because he found an issue he was passionate enough about to step forward on.

3.

BRING OTHERS ON BOARD.

You know you are exercising leadership effectively when you are able to energize others to join your cause. Lauren Browning started a charitable face-painting group that grew to include a dozen volunteers.

It continues even after she left for college outside the state.

4.

FOCUS ON CONNECTIONS, NOT JUST DEEDS.

Exercising leadership is more than just doing nice things for others.

It’s also about forging new connections and understandings. You’ll create more change if you focus on interacting with and developing relationships with those you serve rather than simply trying to do good deeds.

Discussion Guide 1. What volunteering activities do you undertake? To what extent do you think that you are exercising leadership as a volunteer?

2. What are the barriers that get in the way of your exercising more leadership as a volunteer?

Mayor What interpretations can you make about the barriers?

Wichita Jeff Longwell says the days of south-central Kansas What experiments might you try to exercise more leadership in your volunteering? cities3.competing with each other to score jobs are over.

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Amplifying the Public’s Voice

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THE EVERYDAY EXPERIENCES AND INSIGHTS OF THE PUBLIC ARE UNDERUTILIZED RESOURCES IN ADDRESSING OUR MOST DIFFICULT CIVIC PROBLEMS. MAYBE WE SHOULD START CHANGING THAT

BY BUILDING A NEW, TRUSTWORTHY PROCESS.

By: CHRIS GREEN

The relationship between constituents and their elected officials feels more strained than ever these days, bringing the prospect of increasingly ugly and dysfunctional times for democracy in our communities, state and nation.

People too often distrust government and feel disconnected from the decisions that those in authority are making, even at the local level.

Elected officials face massive problems that dwarf their expertise and authority, defy quick fixes and force them to make agonizing choices between competing values and compelling priorities.

But what if everything that was wrong with our current political system was actually a great opportunity? If elected officials could entrust John and Jane Q. Public with some power to make meaningful decisions about their communities, we might be able to make progress in rebuilding the bonds of trust needed to hold our society together. We might even end up making more progress on our most daunting challenges.

There could be benefits for all involved. Elected officials wouldn’t have to tackle the most difficult problems facing the state or their communities on their own. They’d have more people walking a mile in their shoes. They might know what level of support exists for the changes they are making well before they stand before voters on Election Day. Residents would have another mechanism to ensure that their own values and experiences are taken into consideration when government makes decisions. They would gain a little more control and power over the decisions being made. And because they would have to struggle to reconcile their own needs and the views of others, they might be more likely to find compromises they could live with and support (rather than rhetorically throwing stones at any idea that isn’t exactly what they had in mind).

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At the Kansas Leadership Center, we often encourage our participants to bring their leadership skills to the public arena. We think Kansans should live out the idea that anyone can lead on what they care about without a formal authority position. But what if our state and local officials did more to bring the arena to their constituents? Would that make a big difference?

It’s not something that is going to happen in a flash, and there are sure to be bumps in the road. But after surveying the landscape of politics and what’s called “deliberative democracy” for several months and talking to a number of experts in the civic field, I’ve come to the conclusion that amplifying the voices of everyday people for their help in solving deeply entrenched problems is going to be crucial for the future success of our democracy.

If you’re a citizen, it’s time to think about getting more involved and ask the elected officials who serve you to provide you with opportunities to make meaningful decisions on important public issues. And if you’re an elected official or government manager, it’s time to start thinking about how you can use your authority to experiment with ways to push decision-making powers to the people you serve.

Even simple changes, such as elected officials actively looking for opportunities to engage the public, actively seeking out people to participate and expecting the public to contribute to making hard choices can make a big difference, according to Consensus, a regional nonprofit in Kansas City, Missouri, that works on public engagement matters.

A working group of scholars, practitioners and public officials has even produced a guide, “Making Public Participation Legal,” that includes model local ordinances and state legislation that can be adopted to revise the legal framework for public participation. The publication also outlines policy options and techniques for strengthening the public’s role in policy matters.

It can be downloaded here: http://www.deliberative-democracy.net/index.php/resources/doc_ download/46-making-public-participation-legal

THE EXCEPTION, NOT THE RULE

Before I talk more about amplifying the public’s voice, I want to be clear about what I’m not talking about. Public hearings, traditional town hall meetings, advisory councils and panel-driven forums are some of the most common ways that members of the general public are allowed to give their input in Kansas and elsewhere these days. These efforts can be and sometimes are useful, but they are generally more for people in authority to gather information than they are for the public to have influence over their communities.

Amplifying public voices requires entrusting people with real decisions where they have to, at the very least, weigh difficult value choices. And their preferences should carry some weight with decision makers. Absent that, public participation is, at best, little more than a feel-good initiative.

At worst, public hearings, advisory committees and 30-day public comment periods are not better than nothing. This is the view of Matt Leighninger, former executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium who now works for Public Agenda, a research and engagement nonprofit based in New York.

In a 2014 article, Leighninger argues that “conventional participation practices are far more damaging than we realize.

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“Because they require time and resources to organize, they divert public officials and employees from more productive pursuits. Because they erode trust and communication, they make public problem-solving more difficult. And because they damage the relationship between the public and government, they may also have an impact on tax revenues and the sustainability of public institutions,” he states.

In surveys, fewer than 1 in 5 Kansans say they attend government meetings. And I can’t say that I blame them. If your one chance to contribute is being able to offer three minutes of comments from behind a lecturn a moment or two before a decision is going to be made, it’s understandable that you might want to spend your time elsewhere.

However, more robust forms of engagement between the public and their elected officials are still rare enough that it might be difficult for many Kansans to imagine what nontraditional approaches look like. As a way to help you, here’s a simple example.

When your local school district, county commission or city council passes a budget, it is required by law to conduct a public hearing before approving it. Which is all fine and good, except that the bulk of the budget is pretty much already written by the time of the hearing. You and others can step up to a mic at the meeting and request tweaks, but the values and vision that govern how money is being spent in the community is, in many ways, already set.

What if your local school board anticipated a difficult budget year and convened a committee of nonofficials to work with elected officials in developing the budget in a way that reflects community values and began working months prior to it needing to be approved. Or, what if your local city council set aside a certain percentage of funding for special projects that members of the public direct?

These aren’t hypothetical scenarios. In places such as Chicago, residents in one political subdivision are given the chance to determine how infrastructure funds are spent. In Boston,

local officials have gone as far as giving young people ages 12 to 25 the power to decide where $1 million will be spent to improve the community.

There have been giant town hall meetings involving diverse groups of residents who helped establish priorities for rebuilding lower Manhattan after 9/11 and reconstructing New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Moreover, Kansas City recently served as one of six lead sites for a national dialogue on mental health that utilized iPads and keypads for smallgroup discussions and led to the development of a community action plan that aims to change the climate around mental health issues in the community.

We have national organizations such as the Kettering Foundation, whose activities include helping organize deliberative public policy forums around the country. Closer to home, we have Kansas State’s Institute for Civic Discourse and Democracy, headed by the nationally recognized David Procter, and Consensus, headed by Jennifer Wilding, that convene important discussions on civic topics such as juvenile justice reform. Wilding, whom I talked with in the early stages of crafting this story, and her organization helped Johnson County officials engage the public as it faced difficult budget decisions in 2012 (the subject of a story that year in The Journal).

It’s not like Kansas doesn’t have elected officials who appreciate the importance of engaging the public in decision making. But for all the resources and interest – and Kansas may have more than its fair share – amplifying the public’s voice remains the exception rather than the rule in state and local government. Some of the barriers are systemic. As a result, bridging the divides between constituents and their governments are very much an example of an adaptive challenge, the kind of challenges we talk so much about here at KLC. THE LIMITS OF EXPERTISE

One of the challenges at play is that divides between the public and the people who represent them are basically hard-wired into our

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democracy, says Hawaii state Sen. Les Ihara, a member of the Kettering Foundation board of directors, who is also active with the National Conference of State Legislatures. When our governments were created, we set them up to be representative democracies, in which people vote to have someone represent them in a state or national assembly (or closer to home, the county commission, school board or city council).

“Legislators,” Ihara says, “swear to uphold state constitutions that establish a representative form of democracy.” The public, though, still has a sense that it has some direct role in democracy – even though, technically speaking, that role is simply to vote for somebody every two or four years who makes all decisions.

It’s no wonder then, that elected officials and constituents often don’t see eye to eye. “It’s like people living on different planets,” Ihara says.

Our nation’s founders distrusted too much democracy, fearing the “tyranny of the majority,” to quote a phrase used by John Adams, and sought to create some distance between elected representatives and the masses.

Other barriers to public participation came later.

One of the lasting legacies of the Progressive Era (which lasted from about the 1890s to the 1920s), as Leighninger, the author of the book

“The Next Form of Democracy,” has pointed out, is that our governmental systems became infused with an “expert orientation to governance.”

The progressives targeted the waste, fraud and corruption running rampant in the political machines at the time and sought to elevate a scientific approach to problem solving. The assumption that technocrats – skilled elites – can solve public problems through specialized knowledge remains a powerful undercurrent in governance today that often leads us astray.

While I appreciate the value of knowledge and expertise, they most certainly have their limits.

Too often, those in authority succumb to the temptation to engage only with experts and other authorities. They don’t give a lot of thought to what role, if any, the public should have.

Changes made in the name of public good may rarely involve much formal effort to try to consult the public.

Democracy has a long, messy, imperfect history in our country, but the general arc has been toward pushing decision-making power into the hands of more people. It’s a push that can create new problems even as it solves old ones.

But it seems like a hard sell to ask people, who are granted so much decision-making power in many other areas of their lives now (and are

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increasingly connected to the happenings of the world and one another through social media), to serve as bystanders in areas of public policy.

Recent experience should tell us that it’s time to set aside some of our dependency on experts and begin stepping into a new era, one where authority and expertise remain resources to be used. But instead of spending those resources to create quick-fix solutions, we should be using them as catalysts to engage a broader array of people in working on the problem themselves.

Here’s why: Most of the really tough problems we face these days aren’t simply technical in nature. They also have adaptive elements, as we say at the Kansas Leadership Center, which require deliberation of public values and widespread acceptance of losses and trade-offs. The way we generally think about government’s role, the technical side, only addresses one portion of the problems we face.

Tackling value-laden adaptive challenges requires attending to the thornier elements of the problems, not just seeking an authority- or expert-driven quick fix. It requires engaging the people who live with the problem but don’t have their hands directly on the levers of power.

LEFT: Members of the public gather at The Monarch, a Wichita gastropub, to learn about trends in Kansas education. The event was part of “Engage ICT: Democracy on Tap,” an initiative from Wichita’s public radio station, KMUW, that offers monthly gatherings featuring panelists in venues that include bars and restaurants. RIGHT: John Allison (left), superintendent of Wichita USD 259, joins James Freeman, USD 259 chief financial officer, and David Kirkbride, director of the state teachers’ union affiliate for suburban Wichita, to offer perspectives on education at the Engage ICT event at The Monarch, before the audience steered the discussion in the direction it wanted.

MAKING CONSEQUENCES AND TRADE-OFFS CLEAR

Look around our country’s civic landscape and you’ll see the ground littered with examples where expertise has come up short to some degree in the development of public policy.

President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act passed largely through dialogue and debate involving experts and those in authority. While it has survived court and political challenges to remain the law of the land, it still remains more unpopular than popular with the public at large, according to recent polls.

Or take the historic Kansas income tax cut bill, developed with the help of tax consultant Arthur Laffer, that Republican Gov. Sam Brownback signed into law with great fanfare in 2012. The governor famously promised the legislation would be a “shot of adrenaline” to the state’s economy. But despite some positive economic indicators, such as a low state unemployment rate, the promised boom has never materialized.

Instead, lawmakers find themselves struggling to reconcile a structural imbalance in the state budget year-in and year-out because the revenues our state collects trail what our government spends.

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I don’t mean to disparage experts, because I have no doubt that their knowledge is valuable.

I wouldn’t want for us to make big choices in governing ourselves without expertise. But we should be honest about the limits of expertise to shape our state and country for the better.

offs made explicit, and had used this framing to engage the public, our health care system might now be less of a monster whose out-of-control costs threaten to engulf our economy,” Yankelovich writes in “Wicked Problems, Workable Solutions: Lessons from a Public Life.”

A well-designed health care system or tax plan is only as good as the broader public’s acceptance of what is gained or lost in the process (and there are definitely losses to be experienced in both of the above scenarios). But too often the question of what the public actually thinks or wants gets ignored or glossed over. We often end up holding back from forcing everyday people to confront reality – the tough values choices that lie at the heart of nearly every important issue.

You could make a similar argument for public deliberation on the Brownback tax plan. I do believe our elected representatives gather information and make good-faith guesses about what they think the public really wants. But there are strong incentives for politicians to tell us only the side of the story they want us to hear (or the only side they really know). It’s rarely framed as a choice of competing values.

For instance: Are income tax cuts more important than spending more money on education and social services? Are the benefits of making sure that everyone has health insurance worth changing a system that many people already insured are satisfied with? What is the common good in these situations, and how do I reconcile that with what might be best for me as an individual?

Am I willing to accept the risks and trade-offs inherent in trying something different?

In his 2014 memoir, public opinion analyst and political scientist Daniel Yankelovich bemoaned how supporters of health care reform had erred by not giving the public a more meaningful role in shaping the policy. “If its supporters had taken the trouble to lay out the choices for public deliberation, with their consequences and trade-

As a result, it’s no wonder that so many Kansans and others across the country feel disconnected from politics and government. This is a tragedy, because public voices can be a powerful resource, if we’re willing to take the time and muster the energy to harness them.

A WILLINGNESS TO DIALOGUE

How do we do that? My first inclination is that we need to start small and local. Local governments – city council, county commissions and school boards – remain closest to the people and are already the ones where public engagement in decision making is most likely to occur. Even if just 10 percent of the cities, counties and school boards developed and tried more robust, nontraditional public engagement approaches within the next year or two, it could make Kansas a national leader in connecting people to government decisions. The understanding we could gain would be invaluable.

Discussion Guide 1. Which elements of the challenge described in this story are technical? Which are adaptive?

2. What values do you think get in the way of progress in this situation? How might we reconcile those values?

3. Mayor What Kansas Leadership Wichita Jeff Longwell says Center principles and competencies do you think would be most crucial for members of the public to use in civic discussions? the days of south-central Kansas cities competing with each other to score jobs are over.

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But state legislators and those serving in the U.S. House and Senate would be wise to take notice, too. The issues they wrestle with are often the ones that stir the greatest passions in the most people.

It could be risky, but imagine hundreds of Kansans gathering to have a thoughtful dialogue about gun violence or immigration, one where they are forced to consider all the different perspectives around those issues and perhaps recommend ways forward. While there’s no way to avoid passionate disagreement on such issues, I would be willing to bet that a roomful of respectful Kansans with good, trustworthy information could come up with a good diagnosis of the situation and maybe even common-sense paths to progress. Imagine those prescriptions, say, becoming the basis for a bill that gets filed in Congress or the Kansas Statehouse, and then influences the debate among elected officials.

Giving the public a more direct pipeline to addressing the most pressing issues of the day could be one way of combating the growing levels of disenchantment with our governments – which are measured in everything from low voting rates to a lack of trust in government and elected officials. If more people felt like they have a role in shaping what happens, then those policies might have more legitimacy. Allowing more public input also would give people the opportunity to demonstrate that their voices have real power to effect change, which is supposed to be at the heart of democracy.

Voting rights might not be enough anymore.

We have to provide people with more ways to shape the civic environment in between elections.

As excited as I am about the concept, the obstacles toward robust public engagement are not small. Most efforts to engage the public fail to reach their full potential. It’s time consuming and sometimes expensive work that may require staffing assistance that some government officials (such as state legislators) don’t have. And even those engagement efforts that are well done typically are one-off affairs that may not continue over time. It’s hard to get groups of people with diverse viewpoints together, and existing systems aren’t really set up to be hospitable climates for handing even basic decisions over to the public.

But I also fear our democracy is at a tipping point. If we want to remain a “government of, by and for the people”– to borrow from another president, Abraham Lincoln – then we need to be able to turn more Kansans into active, caring citizens. To make it clear that what they think, say and do truly matter.

Let’s give Kansans the opportunity to have conversations worth showing up for. If people felt that their views and efforts truly mattered to the outcome, would more people become civically engaged? I think it’s time our civic culture in Kansas put a whole lot more energy into trying to find out.

Learn More, Take Action The Institute for Civic Discourse and Democracy and the Department of Communication Studies at Kansas State University are moving in the direction of teaching deliberative democracy. A graduate certificate is being offered in Dialogue, Deliberation and Public Engagement, and Kansas State is also preparing to launch a new interdisciplinary Ph.D. in leadership communication with a significant focus on deliberate democracy.

Find out more at http://www.k-state.edu/icdd/ or http:// commstudies.k-state.edu/ Download a guide to “Making Public Participation Legal” at http://www.deliberative-democracy.net/index.php/resources/ doc_download/46-making-public-participation-legal Learn more about Consensus and its “Civility Project” at http:// www.consensuskc.org/civilityproject/ National organizations that try to boost the public’s role in democracy include Public Agenda (http://www.publicagenda. org/) and the National Institute for Civil Discource (http://nicd. arizona.edu/about).

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Offering a Better PUBLIC MEETING

CURRENT RE A LI TY

Elected officials sit on one side of the room, the public sits on the other.

Public given just two or three minutes to speak at the microphone before a decision is made.

Views are offered but there is no dialogue between the public and elected officials about them.

Special interests and the loudest voices dominate the session.

Members of the public write questions on notecards for elected officials to respond to.

Members of the public give their opinions, then passively observe; elected officials make the decisions.

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Read more about differing visions for public engagement in politics and government at klcjournal.com

NEW APPROAC H

Elected officials share space with the public that is conducive to dialogue.

Public engaged well before decision is made and given multiple ways to provide input.

Officials and the public get a chance to consider multiple views besides their own.

Participants are recruited to represent a diverse range of views and facilitators ensure that everyone gets to speak.

Public and elected officials get to interact, such as discussing their views in smaller groups.

The public is given an opportunity to wrestle with tough value choices and make meaningful decisions.

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Annie Wang of Kansas City participates in the 2016 Asian Cultural Festival.

This year’s event drew 9,000 people to Olathe East High School.

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INSPIRE A COLLECTIVE PURPOSE

Getting Outside the Circle A J O H N S O N CO U N TY W O M A N ’ S E F FO RTS H AV E L E D TO A G R O W I N G F E ST I VA L T H AT E N E R G I Z E S 2 0 D I F F E R E N T G R O U PS A N D T H E B R OA D E R C O M M U N I T Y I N A S H A R E D C E L E B R A T I O N O F A S I A N C U LT U R E

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Photos By: JEFF TUTTLE

Asia is a massive and diverse place. It’s the world’s largest and most populous continent, home to nearly 4.2 billion people and their many different cultures, languages, dress, dance, music and cuisines.

Carol Wei emigrated from China to the U.S in 2007 and now lives in Johnson County, a place where the Asian population has almost doubled since 2000 to nearly 25,000. It’s a growth trend that reflects changes happening across the country. According to the Pew Research Center, “Asian Americans are the highest-income, besteducated and fastest-growing racial group in the U.S., with Asians making up the largest share of recent immigrants.”

Hoping to spark interest in Asian culture and connect, assist and promote Asian-owned businesses in the region, Wei founded the Mid-America Asian Culture Association. She then decided to start an Asian Cultural Festival through the group to showcase all the cultures of Asia in a single place to advance her goal of cultivating “America-Asia friendship.”

Wei became involved in every aspect of organizing the festival. She worked to build support for a joint festival by making phone calls and meeting with other leaders in the Asian community and attending their events. She reached out to sponsors and sought the right venues for the festival. The association launched the Asian Cultural Festival in 2014, drawing about 2,000 attendees. Since then, festival attendance has skyrocketed.

Wei says that attendance at the 2016 event at Olathe East High School, which featured 20 Asian country organizations as participants, reached 9,000. The festival has proved popular with non-Asians and heavily draws attendees from the community at large.

Building up support for the festival has required significant leadership. Wei says that getting people from different cultures to work together comes with challenges: “One of the difficulties to work toward a common goal is that people are not used to getting outside of their one circle, their own community.”

But Wei, the chairwoman of the association, has found success by inspiring participation around a collective purpose – the idea that the Kansas City region’s Asian communities can better promote their cultures through working together rather than alone.

Her efforts to promote Asian culture in Kansas City have been well-recognized in recent years. Wei was selected as the Kansas Minority Business Advocate of the Year in 2014 by the state Department of Commerce Office of Minority & Women Business Development. In 2015, she was chosen Person of the Year by the Kansas City Chinese Association and was also named one of “50 Kansans You Should Know” by Ingram’s magazine.

Bigger goals are on the horizon. Wei says the association’s long-term goal is to build an Asian culture park that people from all over the world can visit. Through her ongoing efforts to organize the festival, Wei says she has learned that the United States is a culturally diverse place that is capable of appreciating differences even while it seeks common ground. “Americans not only preserve their own heritage but are also interested in other cultures,” Wei says.

The Asian Cultural Festival engages visitors with explosions of color, enticing activities and tastes of culture that linger on the tongue and in the memory, including (clockwise from top): a martial arts demonstration by Jae Ho Jeong of Lenexa’s KAT Taekwondo Academy; traditional dress, modeled here by Maggie Zhang and Lauren Tang; excited audience members such as Leo Tang, 8; performances by the Chinese dancers of LeYue Performing Arts; and Joshua Sherill’s exhibition of Kendo, a modern Japanese martial art that descended from swordsmanship.

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Asian Americans are the highest-income, best-educated and fastest growing racial group in the U.S., with Asians making up the largest share of recent immigrants.

Anchitha Honnur of the Nartan Academy of Classical Dances, performs an Indian dance during the festival’s dance competition.

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Members of the Pho Hien Buddhist Youth Association prepare to perform.

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THE PERFECT MIX Infusing leadership into a program that gives high school students a head start in business has paid dividends for Corey Mohn and the Blue Valley CAPS program.

By: PATSY TERRELL

Corey Mohn’s personal mission is to help people get aligned with their passions. As executive director of the Center for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS) in the Blue Valley school district, he attempts to live his mission every day, all the while blending in leadership ideas that have greatly influenced him with the opportunity to give students a head start in lending their skills to the workforce.

Launched in 2009, CAPS is a partnership between education and the community. But it’s not a typical partnership in which businesses provide just funding. It’s a hands-on experience in which students collaborate on projects with business partners who in turn mentor the students.

“It’s them providing work that’s on a real to-do list somewhere that’s real-time and relevant,” says Mohn. “At CAPS, every student is on a self-discovery journey.”

The program has grown dramatically in the past two years, with a 50 percent increase in the number of students. But even success creates challenges.

“Scaling a program like CAPS is more adaptive than in a traditional classroom,” says Mohn.

“We cannot simply order more textbooks; our curriculum involves partner projects. Keeping up with demand and ensuring quality custom experiences for students is our primary focus.”

An example of the kind of projects that students get the opportunity to work on is C.H.A.S.E. (Community Help for Autism Spectrum Everywhere) in Olathe, a nonprofit that works with children with autism. CAPS students worked with C.H.A.S.E. on some graphic design and branding help.

C.H.A.S.E. founder Amy Wilkinson says she was impressed with the quality of work the students were able to deliver. “The lead designer was a senior, but the manner in which she worked and managed tasks, you would have thought she was in the real-life workforce,” Wilkinson says.

Wilkinson was surprised that the student was so engaged. “I think it can be challenging to find a high school student that not only possesses the talent, but also the management side of things. This student exhibited both amazing leadership and project skills,” says Wilkinson.

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Corey Mohn, director of the Center for Advanced Professional Studies in the Blue Valley school district, aims to provide high school students with a head start by helping lend their skills to the workforce.

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She also had students working on a promo video and was pleased with how it worked out. No one in her organization has video experience, but she says a student was able to take thoughts and sketches and turn them into video. “He was willing to take the lead on the project and even shot video outside of his school hours,” she says. “He went the extra mile for our video, and the end product was superb.”

In addition to dealing with rapid growth, another challenge for the program is helping clarify the scope of the students’ projects, so they’re something that can be accomplished using their available time. Mohn says the process creates a great dynamic. Businesses are getting real tasks completed, and students are getting an experience they couldn’t have otherwise. “To see them become confident and empowered – you can’t put into words how amazing that is,” says Mohn.

Wilkinson says her experiences with the students illustrate the point. “I often tell people CAPS students conduct themselves better than some I have seen in my professional career. It is refreshing to see young adults care about their projects, go the extra mile for clients and truly deliver a quality product. In addition, I feel the staff at CAPS cultivates that type of mentality.

They have trust in their students, and it shines through when the students deal with their clients.”

Mohn loves having a chance to work with students at such a formative time in their lives, helping them explore and discover what they enjoy. “My experience is that when people are aligned to passion, they don’t see work as work.

They are driven, and the end result is that they are very productive in whatever they do,” says Mohn. “The world becomes an amazing place if everyone is aligned to passion.”

It has certainly worked for him. “I can’t remember a time when I thought, ‘I hate to get up and go to work today,’” he says. “This is where I want to be.”

INSTILLING THAT LEADERSHIP IS AN ACTION

Mohn has been with CAPS since the 2014-15 school year. When he applied for the job, he was contemplating how the program could be expanded. A veteran of Kansas Leadership Center training, Mohn began to think about introducing KLC competencies to students.

He asked the question, “How do we instill in students that leadership is an activity? That anyone can lead from anywhere at any time?”

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Once he started working at CAPS, Mohn realized many of the principles were already in action, but the language just wasn’t there. “They didn’t have the validation of divorcing leadership from authority,” says Mohn.

That was the case for student Isaac Rominger.

“Most of the competencies … diagnosing situations, managing self, intervening skillfully and energizing others, were behaviors I already did before my work with KLC,” Rominger says.

“I just was not conscious of them. KLC gave them a name, and gave me something to be aware of when going about my daily life.”

Mohn says KLC leadership ideas impact the way students work with businesses, too. “Once students see themselves as people that can lead from anywhere at any time, our work with business partners becomes much more meaningful and enriched. Students learn to diagnose situations, manage themselves, intervene skillfully and energize others on their project teams and with their business clients. The only way to make progress, expand their learning and deliver quality products to clients, is to grow together and take initiative. Putting language to the challenges they face is powerful,” says Mohn.

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To get the program started, KLC representatives spoke to Blue Valley staff and students at the invitation of Mohn. They began to develop the idea of incorporating leadership principles into the CAPS program. “What’s the harm in trying?”

Mohn says. “We experiment all the time. We tell our students to learn from failure. We should do the same thing.”

Mohn says the concepts have merged into the program well. CAPS is about giving students an experience, not just learning from a book, and leadership principles help create a full understanding.

“Leadership is an all-encompassing value,” says Mohn. “While many schools create separate courses and tracks for leadership curriculum, we see the principle that ‘leadership is an activity, not a position of authority’ as a key approach to life regardless of career field. If anyone can exhibit leadership, why confine it to one course?

This presents an opportunity to experiment on new ways of embedding the KLC competencies and strategies.”

Some students embraced the idea immediately, including Chloe Ortbals, who became the

FAR LEFT: The Blue Valley school district launched CAPS in 2009. The center’s impressive home will serve 550 students per semester from the district’s five high schools in 2016-17, up from 125 per semester in 2009-10. LEFT: CAPS instructor Scott Kreshel, here with student Robin Bajpai, was an early adopter of using KLC ideas with students.

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“ M Y E X P E R I E N C E I S T H AT WHEN PEOPLE ARE ALIGNED T O PAS S I O N, T H EY D O N ’ T S E E W O R K A S W O R K .”

COREY MOHN

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Corey Mohn has been able to successfully merge leadership concepts with the CAPS program, benefitting students such as Ethan Osterhager (left) and Shane Logwood (right).

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student liaison in the program’s first year.

“Most students don’t see themselves as leaders and would rather look up to one person,” says Ortbals.

It’s not only students who have that challenge, but faculty and staff as well.

Schools are built on a hierarchy. “I have a master’s degree in school leadership,” says Scott Kreshel, a CAPS instructor. “I was taught leadership was an authority trying to solve all the problems.”

But he was an early adopter of the leadership principles. He says it came at the right time for him. “Recent situations I’ve been put into are more demanding, and I’m realizing I don’t have all the answers. I needed more than just me,” he says. “Maybe earlier in my career I didn’t realize that.”

He presents the principles to the students when possibilities surface for hands-on experience. “I’ve tried to formally teach it.

I have a great lesson plan put together, and we have great tools,” he says. “But they don’t hold a stick to the moment of informal teaching when they really need it.” He integrates the KLC curriculum when students have issues with group projects or other difficulties.

Mohn says the KLC competency cards are frequently in use by students and staff.

Although some staff were slow to accept the ideas, Mohn says change is happening.

“We’re at the very beginning of this. By no means do we have it all figured out. But we’ve started to see signs that it’s really starting to get embedded into our culture.”

The pilot program has pointed out this is not a one-size-fits-all situation. “Pushing the KLC principles and competencies down to youth taught us that language matters and format matters,” says Mohn. “While materials like the KLC Quick Guide may work well to synthesize learning for older generations, students need resources that speak to them.”

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Medicine and health are among the six strands Mohn’s center offers students such as Olivia Swyers (left) and Hannah McCarthy (right).

This year’s student liaison, Jenna Felsen, created graphics for the school’s video monitors that put leadership principles into a design that would appeal to students. “I strongly believe that KLC’s lessons should be integrated into the CAPS curriculum because it applies to every student,” Felsen says.

It keeps the principles in front of the adults, too. Everyone being engaged is essential, says Kreshel. “If this is going to work with students, it has to work with role models.”

It takes time to apply the ideas in a new way.

Although he was a veteran of KLC training, Mohn realizes in retrospect that when he first began trying to incorporate KLC principles into CAPS he wasn’t thinking properly about it.

“It’s ironic and funny to me now that I hear myself say it. We were trying to embed a leadership framework based on the idea of making sure that you identify adaptive challenges, and we were applying a technical solution to an adaptive challenge. We were falling into the trap on our

own.” Mohn is looking at the next steps. CAPS is now in 17 school districts in eight states. It’s possible KLC principles could be offered as part of the CAPS programs everywhere. The model might also be used in other schools.

But they’re still working on it. “We continue to learn and grow through experimentation,” says Mohn. “There are many discoveries yet to be made.

For example, we still do not know how to provide consistency across all students in showcasing the application of resources around the KLC frameworks. This is our adaptive challenge: to build the KLC work as an overarching professional development strategy and embedded part of our culture at CAPS.” A side benefit of the KLC training has been some unexpected growth opportunities for faculty and staff, Mohn says. He says as the adults and the students all learn the language of leadership, it becomes second nature to use it. “When you get a building full of people doing that, it’s naturally going to become part of the culture,” says Mohn. “It’s like Jedi language.”

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ALIGNING PEOPLE WITH THEIR PASSION Leadership Lessons from Corey Mohn and Blue Valley CAPS

1.

ANYONE CAN LEAD, ANYTIME, ANYWHERE.

Sure, the students who participate in Blue Valley CAPS are top-notch. But adults often don’t give even the best high school students enough credit for being able to exercise leadership on what’s important to them. Here, students have readily embraced KLC leadership ideas.

They practice them on a daily basis, and they have added to their learning.

2.

START WHERE THEY ARE – AND LET THEM SHAPE THE WAY FORWARD.

Early efforts at the center showed that youth needed leadership resources that spoke to them. In response, students such as Jenna Felsen have taken the lead in putting leadership principles into designs that would appeal to students.

3.

ALWAYS BE MINDFUL OF YOUR BLIND SPOTS.

Even people who know a lot about leadership make leadership mistakes from time to time.

Corey Mohn readily admits that CAPS officials fell into a trap of seeking a technical solution to the adaptive challenge of embedding a leadership framework into the curriculum.

4.

EMBRACE EXPERIMENTATION.

Mohn and CAPS face plenty of unanswered questions going forward in terms of how leadership fits into the program and whether the KLC framework will be implemented in other CAPS frameworks across the country. These are questions that can only be answered through continued learning and growth.

Discussion Guide 1. What challenges does Blue Valley CAPS face in adopting a shared language of leadership?

How has it responded to those challenges?

2. What difficulties have you faced in trying to explain KLC principles and competencies to others?

Mayor How have you responded Wichita Jeff Longwell says to those challenges? the days of south-central Kansas What benefits do you see in being able to communicate with a shared language of leadership? cities3.competing with each other jobs Are there any downsides to having a shared language that must be overcome? to score are over.

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opting By:

BRIAN WHEPLEY

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in

ABOUT 45 PERCENT OF ALL ELIGIBLE VOTERS FAIL TO SHOW UP TO THE POLLS FOR GENERAL ELECTIONS IN KANSAS. A DIAGNOSIS OF WHAT ’S WRONG WITH OUR D EMOC R A C Y POINTS TH E WAY TO MORE THAN JUST TECHNICAL FIXES TO THE PROBLEM.

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F

rom the age of 15, Kasey Anderson

knew she wanted to become an

accountant – “What 15-year-old

ever decides, ‘Hey, I want to be an accountant?’” she jokes – and waitressed full-time during college to pursue that dream.

This August, the Wichita native graduated from Kansas State University with a double major in accounting and finance and a minor in economics, and this fall she’ll move to Georgia with her boyfriend, who’s in the military, and plans to go to grad school before working in her field. Some of her views are Republican, some Democrat, and she’s spent a good bit of time talking politics and voting – a “hot topic” – with friends. “I think it is very important to vote,” she says.

Still, Anderson doesn’t plan to go to the polls to vote in the November general election. “I just finally decided that no matter how many people tell me I’m a bad American for choosing not to vote, it’s my own personal decision, and it doesn’t mean I’m not going to vote forever,” she says.

“I don’t hear anything good about the frontrunners,” she says, listing one reason for her decision. “I don’t want to go in voting for the person I dislike the least.”

Her reasons extend beyond distaste for presidential candidates Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and others long departed from this year’s often toxic White House race. With the Electoral College, complicated caucus and primary systems, and a political “money game” where the candidate “with the most money can buy the voter,” she’s concluded that “the way the system is set up, it does lead people to feel like they don’t actually have a voice.”

Our frequently ugly, hyperpartisan electoral process is increasingly an insiders’ game. Those of us with strong beliefs or partisan loyalties need little incentive to show up to cast ballots each cycle. But if you’re one of those who falls in the middle of the political spectrum, who doesn’t feel like your views fit neatly into a major political party or who doesn’t follow politics like a sports fan, sitting on the sidelines can seem increasingly attractive.

For many who don’t vote, it’s not a matter of just not caring. Instead, it’s a feeling of being disconnected from the system or turned off by its tone. “Oh, I don’t want to get involved in politics” is what Burdett Loomis, a political science professor at the University of Kansas, hears from students. “It’s not like the energy isn’t there; there’s energy, but there’s also this unbelievable distrust or unhappiness with the political process.”

Millennials, in particular, are often described as a generation willing to put their time and energy into civic pursuits where they feel like they’re having an impact. “Among college students there’s a very high level of engagement or volunteerism,” Loomis says. “They will go to a soup kitchen; they will help in a clinic; they will work for Habitat for Humanity.”

Volunteering, donating or standing up for a cause you believe in via a hashtag can feel good and meaningful, without forcing you to compromise your values in the process. If you can do that, why wade into the dirty trenches of politics?

Facing that question, many young Kansans are choosing to opt out of politics rather than join in.

In fact, the gap in engagement between young and old voters in Kansas has been one of the widest in the country. Young adults turned out at a rate of 38.3 percent in 2012, the last time Kansans voted for president. Those age 30 and over turned out at a rate of 70.3 percent, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

But an aversion to politics – as messy and unsatisfying as it often is – comes with a cost. It may actually limit the amount of change you can create on a given issue over time, no matter how much personal energy you put into a cause.

“It’s great to pound some nails and help build a house, in no way am I disparaging that,” Loomis says. “But if you got involved in the process in

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your town and worked on affordable housing, instead of building one house, you might be able to build 50 houses or 100 houses by working through the policy process.”

M

Who are the missing 45 percent?

illennials are by no means the

only Kansans wary of politics.

Many Americans, in general,

dislike the conflicts and compromises that come along with democratic governance. But the problems of voter disengagement and dissatisfaction are increasingly drawing more attention. Are voters such as Anderson – reasonably informed, inclined to vote but either so turned off or just plain unmotivated to do so – canaries in the coal mine when it comes to the health of our democracy?

Year in and year out, millions of eligible Americans pass up the chance to vote – the participation rate has been dropping since 1964. In Kansas, nearly half of the state’s eligible voting population has stayed home on average over the past seven general elections. The vast majority of the state’s citizen nonvoters – an estimated 640,000 people in November 2014 – are not registered to vote. Another estimated 391,000 Kansans were registered but didn’t turn out to cast a vote, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

If those estimates for 2014 are accurate, then the state’s pool of nonvoters – both registered and unregistered – exceeded the number of actual voters by 69,000. That’s right – Kansas may have had more eligible people not voting than voting that year. That’s likely to change in 2016, a presidential election year, in which nearly 60 percent of the state’s eligible population votes on average.

But that still means that as many as 700,000 Kansans who could vote this November may not.

(By comparison, the state’s suspended voter list -- people who tried to register but did not meet the state’s documentation requirements – numbered more than 26,000 in July.)

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Voting in Kansas by the Numbers

69,000

The estimated number by which eligible nonvoters exceed voters in Kansas during the 2014 General Election.

26,228

The number of names on the 515-page “Kansas Voter Suspension List” released by the League of Women Voters of Kansas in July 2016.

700,000 The estimated number of eligible Kansans likely to skip voting in the 2016 General Election, if past trends hold true.

38% vs. 70% The turnout for young adults compared to those 30 and over in Kansas, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

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Considering the sheer numbers of nonvoters, it’s worth asking the question: Why do so many people opt out of one of the most basic ways of shaping our democracy and our lives?

And is there anything we can do to persuade more of them to opt in?

I ran into people who reflected those sentiments in just a brief walk through the Fairmount neighborhood.

Want to find pessimism and ambivalence? Just ask

I

When Northwestern University researchers looked at nonvoters in 2012, they found that some are pessimistic about politics and government, others are too busy or overwhelmed by economic concerns, and others have simply tuned out and turned their attention elsewhere.

f you’re looking to understand the state’s nonvoters, Wichita’s Fairmount neighborhood is as good a place to start as any.

“Everybody says it counts, but it doesn’t count,” says Joe Brown, a Wal-Mart employee in his mid-50s who won’t vote this year.

Fairmount is a diverse, lower-income neighborhood just south of the campus of Wichita State University, part of a census tract with low voting rates. On a sunny spring day, I walked the neighborhood, along with an editor, to interview a handful of people about whether they vote – and if they’ve opted out, why?

Standing outside Fairmount United Church of Christ, the first house of worship in the city to serve as a polling station, Brown discussed this year’s crop of candidates and how he’s come to believe that those elected either lie from the start or change after entering office, leaving him wondering, “Why did I vote for you?”

From national research, I knew that nonvoters are likely younger, come from minority populations or have lower incomes. But the research also tells us that there’s not just one type of nonvoter.

There’s no single reason for people choosing not to vote, nor is there just a single barrier that can be eliminated.

Several blocks away, Theodore Reed, an elderly African-American, shared his opinion on candidate Donald Trump – “He doesn’t like Hispanics, and he probably doesn’t like black people either” – and his view on voting. “I don’t care to have anything to do with that,” Reed said. “I don’t see anybody who can do anything.”

Types of Nonvoters Pessimists 27% Too busys 20% Strugglers 19% Tuned outs 16% Active Faithfuls 11%

Doers

8%

Source: Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communication, Northwestern University for 2012 election.

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Nearby neighbors who do intend to vote expressed ambivalence. Joseph Graybill, a young engineer with Textron Aviation who’s lived in the neighborhood since attending Wichita State, is concerned about pro-life issues and intends to make 2016 his first presidential election, but he’s not overly excited about his choices. Eleanor Brown, taking a break from preparing a flower bed next to her front porch, said she always goes to the polls because “if you don’t vote you don’t get a say.” But this year, though she’ll make a choice, the selection isn’t “clear-cut” like past ones.

Pessimism, cynicism and ambivalence, to name just a few sentiments, appear to be driving Fairmount residents away from politics, or at least making them far less excited about taking part in it. And while each nonvoter’s story is unique, what these individuals say seems in line with what’s going on with nonvoters just about everywhere.

But the antidote to their disengagement remains elusive.

States with high voter turnout – such as Alaska, Maine, Minnesota, Oregon and Wisconsin – do tend to share some common characteristics.

First of all, as political scientists like Michael P. McDonald told The Christian Science Monitor in 2012, they make voting easy in terms of registration and turning out. They put conscious efforts into educating residents about voting and how to do it. They often tend to have deeply rooted political traditions for voting and civic participation. And finally, they hold interesting, competitive elections that people actually want to turn out to vote in.

But there’s no magic formula to change a state like Kansas – which ranks near the middle of the country in turning out eligible voters – to a high participation state such as Minnesota, where twothirds of eligible voters have turned out on average in recent elections.

Changing the equation will require us to wrestle with conflicts over competing values and deal with fears that changing who votes will, instead of improving democracy, give a particular party or political ideology a decided advantage at the ballot box.

The factions: A pinball game of perspectives

W

hat you want to do about

the problem of low voter

participation depends a lot

on what values you hold the highest. What do you see as a greater threat to democracy? The lack of enough voting? Or too much of it (by uninformed or ineligible voters)?

Some operate under the assumption that more people voting is a good thing, while others ostensibly believe that the voting system is easily corrupted by fraud or best directed by the most informed and partisan voters. Let’s sift through those two broad groups and take a closer look at some of the perspectives on voting and turnout.

One will find techies and structuralists, individuals and groups who advocate for technical changes designed to boost turnout, such as more voting by mail, choosing your own polling station, longer Election Day hours and perhaps even online balloting. For this faction, increasing voting is a technical challenge that can be addressed with policies that make the simple act of voting more convenient. Colorado, for example, went with a mix of approaches in 2015, when it began mailing ballots to registered voters, who can mail or drop off their ballots at any polling center in their county.

Then there are security guards like Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who advocates for more controls on voting to prevent such activities as voter fraud (which, although apparently rare, remains a significant concern for many conservative Republicans). Among the guardians’ approaches are requiring registered voters to present picture IDs at polling stations, tightening

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rules for advanced ballots and obtaining the ability to prosecute voter fraud, a power Kobach has that is held by no other secretary of state in the country. Kobach’s efforts so far have yielded at least four convictions, all misdemeanors. So far, none have been noncitizens.

There are also registrars, who focus on the importance of getting people signed up to vote, and increasingly want this to happen by default.

They often seek such policies as same-day registration, early registration for 17-year-olds and automatic registration, where if you get your driver’s license you must opt not to register to vote instead of having to consciously say, “Yes, I do want to register.” Oregon instituted the approach in 2015, adding as many as 400,000 potential voters to the rolls.

One will also find overhaulers, who see the problem in terms of improving the choices that voters have and advocate steps to increase the candidate pool and the number of options available. That can include steps to foster third parties or institute multiple-official districts, as the Illinois Legislature had for more than 100 years. A top-two primary system – in which the top two vote-getters regardless of party advance to the general election – is another overhaul effort, implemented in states such as California.

Finally, there are engagers and educators, who aim to convince people that they have a stake, should vote and could make a difference. They usually have a good bit of techie and registrar in them, as well, but hope that information, newly realized self-interest and belief in the common good can drive people to learn about the issues and the candidates, and then act on that and vote.

Almost all of these perspectives assume that voting is in and of itself good, which is a viewpoint that’s not universally shared. Some believe that there are some eligible voters who shouldn’t be voting because they’re not motivated or knowledgeable enough to make informed decisions. Others contend that when someone chooses not to vote they’re making a choice that’s just as morally acceptable as when someone chooses to vote.

“The conservative argument is usually one about people have the right not to vote,” says Monica Crane Childers, the Lawrence-based director of government services at Democracy Works, a nonprofit voting technology company, giving an example of how different views play out through voting-reminder postcards in California. “Los Angeles County has a fairly liberal county clerk.

Orange County has a conservative one who is one of the most progressive in a lot of ways, but they won’t send a postcard to people who have not registered. They’re saying, ‘It’s your choice and goes to your personal freedom, but we’re here to help you if you want to vote.’”

T

Rethinking the problem

he sheer complexity of changing

voting habits in our country – and

the inadequacy of technical solutions

alone to do the trick – played out in an interesting 15-part series on voter turnout that ran in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, a quarterly publication of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. Enlisting political and social scientists, activists and others from across the spectrum, political and otherwise, the publication scrutinized the issue from a host of angles. The series’ title, “Increasing Voter Turnout: It’s Tougher Than You Think,” said it all.

It’s an issue where technical solutions involving registration and ease of balloting run smack into a wall of people’s motivations and views: You can make it easier for people to vote, but you cannot make them vote, because they first must be convinced it’s worth their while.

“The assumption for a number of years was: if we can just make it easy, if we can just make it quick, if we can just make it convenient, then everyone will do it. And that has helped, but it hasn’t helped a lot,” says Crane Childers. “You see ups and downs depending on whether it’s a presidential election or not or whether there’s a big race, but overall we aren’t moving the needle in nearly the way we thought we were going to.”

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“I don’t hear anything good about the frontrunners.

I don’t want to go in voting for the person I dislike the least.”

17

KASEY ANDERSON

Kasey Anderson, a Wichita native who recently graduated from Kansas State University, says she doesn’t plan to vote in this November’s general election.

Voting Factions

Techies: WHAT DO THEY WANT?

Technical changes to boost turnout.

Security Guards: WHAT DO THEY WANT?

Registrars: WHAT DO THEY WANT?

To get more people signed up to vote.

Protections against voter fraud.

Overhaulers: WHAT DO THEY WANT?

To give voters more choices and candidate options.

Engagers/ Educators: WHAT DO THEY WANT?

To improve knowledge and interest of voters.

Traditionalists: WHAT DO THEY WANT?

Not convinced everyone should be voting.

Are there factions missing? What do they want?

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“The assumption for a number of years was: if we can just make it easy, if we can just make it quick...then everyone will do it.”

MONICA CRANE CHILDERS

Monica Crane Childers, a Lawrence-based director of a nonprofit voting technology firm, says that efforts to make voting easier haven’t done much to help voter turnout.

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Adam Berinsky, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as an example of how voters are drawn to the polls.

“His voters aren’t showing up because it’s easier but because they’re energized,” Berinsky says.

“For a lot of people, politics is something boring and removed from their daily lives,” says Berinsky, who contributed to the Stanford series.

“Most people most of the time don’t pay attention to politics. But sometimes they pay a lot of attention. When times are bad, when there are high stakes, you can create political junkies.

The question is: how can you create that same feeling when we’re not going to war against Afghanistan or in Iraq or the economy is crashing?

In times of crisis, people care.”

But finding candidates or groups willing to consistently put energy into that kind of widespread engagement is rare.

As detailed in books and studies, the level of data available about voters and their likely preferences allow campaigns to microtarget the electorate, allowing them to woo one voter to the polls through a well-timed postcard or doorstep visit while ignoring the neighbor who might get angry and come out to vote against them.

That has likely only exacerbated one of our political system’s big problems: The players pick and choose specific groups they engage with around politics, while others end up getting left out.

Bonita Gooch is editor-in-chief of the Community Voice newspaper in Wichita as well as president of the Kansas Black Leadership Council, which advocates on issues important to African-Americans.

“One thing I have learned from working with our community is that things that are important to them, they step up on,” Gooch said. “I don’t see that the parties or the candidates frame the issues in

a way or put much emphasis on issues that are of importance to the African-American community.”

Gooch cited the 2014 Kansas gubernatorial campaign. Democratic candidates made education an issue, she said, and, while important, it’s one that’s broad. “When you’ve got people that can’t pay their bills, a much more relevant issue would be raising the minimum wage,” she says. “What about payday loan policies? What about prison reform and sentencing reform?”

But individual factors matter, too. Some people are just more willing to sit down and make the effort to understand the issues and the candidates because they have a clear reason why it’s important to them. Others – and there’s a faction of Kansans who simply hate politics and the gridlock that comes with it – can’t be bothered.

“I vote all the time in school board elections, because I have kids in school. I have a stake in it,” says Berinsky, the MIT political scientist. “I learn about the candidates, and I go and vote. For me, the costs aren’t those 20 or 40 minutes (going to the polls). The costs are sitting down with my wife and trying to figure out which of these candidates represents what we want to see.”

But it’s clear that what we’re doing isn’t doing much to solve the problem.

“Of course, we want to live in a world where it’s easier to vote. That’s what we’ve been doing over the past 40 years,” Berinsky says, referring to motor voter laws, mail ballots and similar tools. “But that hasn’t increased turnout.”

In fact, research on such common get-out-the-vote techniques as mailers, phone calls and front-door visits shows that those approaches only modestly increase turnout, and the methods overwhelmingly focus on existing or lapsed voters anyway – not the missing half of the electorate.

“There’s been research done on nonvoters, although not a lot,” Crane Childers says. “That’s actually

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the next phase of where this is going. Instead of just talking to voters about why they vote, talking to nonvoters about why they don’t vote.”

Berinsky’s research has convinced him that – even though he doesn’t have the answers – we need to change how we think about the challenge of low voter participation.

“There are no easy solutions, and that’s why I think the focus on voting costs was not just misguided, but also I think it might have taken us down a bad path. The solution is easy – just make it easier to vote – but we’ve done that, and it hasn’t changed. So clearly that wasn’t the right problem to focus on,” he says.

A

How to talk about voting

nderson, the recent K-State graduate

and future accountant, plans to vote

in the future. She has concerns

about the role of money in politics – “I just want people who actually want to make America great and don’t want to either make themselves more money or do it for the publicity” – and about the complexity of registering and participating in the election system.

But more than anything she wants to have a better grasp of the system before taking part in it. “I want to give myself a little bit more time to mature in my own mind so that I can make educated decisions down the road for our country,” Anderson says.

The problem is that if young voters don’t start showing up from the get-go, they often don’t ever show up. “We know that young people, if they form voting habits, they form them early. From that first election at 18 on through the college years, if you don’t start voting then, then you don’t usually vote later in life,” Crane Childers says.

Getting young people to develop a positive relationship with the political system is one way to bring them aboard as voters. Getting them exposed to government processes early on, and

giving them the civic education they need to understand how and why those processes work, might give young people a sense that politics can actually work and that their voting and participation do matter and can affect their lives and the lives of others.

Jessy McDonald, a 21-year-old Wichita mother who works as a server at a local restaurant and bar, says she doesn’t feel the connection between her vote and what ends up being done in the country. “I feel like I will live my life the same no matter who is president,” she says. “If everyone voted, I’m sure it would make a difference.

I don’t feel like my one vote would matter.”

Yet at the same time, she conceded that if something were to spur her to take part, it would possibly be matters affecting her young daughter, who began walking in the spring and who, along with work, consumes her time and energy.

One way more voters could develop positive views of politics is by getting more involved at the local level first.

“A lot of times, people think they’ve got to participate in state or national politics,” Loomis says.

“If you’re going to have an impact someplace, you might as well have more of an impact locally. You can talk to a city commissioner, you can talk to a school board member and bring your concerns to them. And if you’re not happy with them, you can organize to throw them out.”

Or, he said, residents can approach their commission with an issue they care about and say, “‘I’ve got a project. I want to get it done and get it off the ground.’ You can have success doing that. You’ve got to see that the system works; that’s really crucial.”

Chapman Rackaway, a political science professor at Fort Hays State University, sees a leadership opportunity for those in authority, such as governors

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Hot Spots and Cold Zones WHERE ARE PEOPLE MOST AND LEAST LIKELY TO VOTE IN KANSAS?

Voting turnout patterns across Kansas have remained remarkably consistent over the past six general elections (2004-14).

Turnout spikes in presidential election years, only to drop to about half of all registered voters in mid-term elections.

Cold Zones

Hot Spots

Geary (GE) Labette (LB) Seward (SW) Ford (FO) Cherokee (CK) Wyandotte (WY) Finney (FI) Neosho (NO) Kingman (KM) Doniphan (DP)

72% 72% 72% 71% 71% 71% 70% 70% 69% 68%

McPherson (MP) Logan (LG) Wallace (WA) Wabaunsee (WB) Greeley (GL) Comanche (CM) Sheridan (SD) Decatur (DC) Russell (RS) Shawnee (SN)

47% 47% 48% 49% 50% 50% 52% 53% 54% 54%

Average Voter Turnout by County in General Elections 2004-2014 DC

DP

SD

WA

GE

LG

GL

RS

WB

WY

SN

MP

FI

FO KM SW

CM CM

NO LB

CK

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54% NATIONAL AVERAGE

55% KANSAS

59%

60% COLORADO

NEW HAMPSHIRE

61%

64% WISCONSIN

IOWA

65% MAINE

63%

67.1% MINNESOTA

OREGON

67.3% ALASKA

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Tracking the Pack: Kansas trails the highest turnout states in participation by eligible voters.

On average, slightly more than half of all eligible U.S. voters turn out to vote. But several states have averaged more than 60 percent turnout in general elections since 2000. Here’s how they do it.

1.

2.

3.

4.

They make voting easy. Methods such as same-day registration in Wisconsin, Maine and Minnesota or Oregon’s vote-by-mail system make voting more convenient.

They educate their citizens about voting. Minnesota election officials have focused on educating citizens about the “nuts and bolts” of voting, making a point to visit high schools and bringing voting machines to the state fair.

They value voting. States such as Wisconsin have a long history of political participation and “voting has become almost an expected behavior.”

They have interesting, competitive elections. Rather than resting on any particular law or policy, Alaska’s high voter turnout in recent years has been driven by heated elections that have drawn significant voter interest.

Source: The Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Elections/2012/1106/ Voter-turnout-the-6-states-that-rank-highest-and-why/Minnesota

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and education officials, to elevate the importance of an informed and engaged citizenry. If we want young people to appreciate politics, we have to value it enough to give them a realistic and inspiring picture of what it involves.

“What we really need is for younger people to understand the value of politics,” Rackaway says.

“Politics is complex, and we are not training our young students to handle the complexity.”

One way to do that is not to make our pitch for voting on the basis of lectures and guilt trips.

Just saying “your vote matters, your vote counts and your vote makes a difference does not ring true to people, because they understand how politics and power work,” Childers says. “Just relying on your civic duty, your-vote-matters type of messaging that has been the core of voter engagement campaigns is not resonating with the nonvoters.”

In fact, all of us – especially the most politically engaged – need to take a look in the mirror. The way we engage in political activity – on social media and otherwise – likely contributes to the problem of voter disengagement. Our detest for the other side and an unwillingness to question our own increasingly rigid views contribute to a political climate where there’s little space for nuance or exploration, the very things nonvoters – especially younger nonvoters – might need to be doing right now. With every snarky Facebook post to our choir of friends, we’re contributing very little to the conversation. In fact, it’s not much of a conversation at all.

Striking back at ugliness in politics isn’t something we can wait for the candidates or someone in authority to do. And it isn’t a problem that’s going to be solved by laws, as worthy as they are, that make voter registration easier or by mail ballots or similar changes. Doing things differently could be your own personal act of civic leadership. Maybe our lawmakers will even follow our lead.

So the next time you make that social media post or share a political opinion, remind yourself how important it is to keep an open mind and consider multiple interpretations when talking with friends and family about politics. Be curious about what others think, and, if you can’t do that, be curious about your own opinions and why you react so strongly to certain views.

Sharing political views – and even debating hot issues – in productive ways could help make Kansas the kind of place where voting and politics are more valued and less shunned.

Because the truth is: how we conduct ourselves politically influences those around us.

“People vote when they think it’s important to the people around them,” Childers says.

“So what you see in the Minnesotas and the Wisconsins is this culture where people care whether you voted. If the people whose opinions you value think it’s important and communicate that to you, and you understand that as a community this is how you build political capital and make sure you are represented, that this is how you control what’s going on in your world, then people will do it.”

Discussion Guide 1. What observations do you have about voter turnout patterns in Kansas?

2. What interpretations would you make about why voter turnout differs so greatly among Kansas counties? What factors do you think drive these trends?

3. What interpretations Wichita Mayortough Jeff Longwell says could you make about these patterns? the days of south-central Kansas 4. What sorts of interventions might be needed at the state, county or local level to respond to those tough interpretations? cities competing with each other to score jobs are over.

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Daveed Diggs performs the role of Marquis de Lafayette in “Hamilton,” a musical written by Lin Manuel-Miranda that has become Broadway’s hottest ticket.

Photos by Joan Marcus, courtesy of Sam Rudy Media Relations.

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True Revolution An unlikely triumvirate comes together to achieve an unusually high level of excellence.

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By: ED O’MALLEY

It’s rare to come across true excellence. KLC aspires to be the center of excellence for civic leadership development. Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941 was true excellence. In Wichita, the restoration of Doc, a World War II B-29 bomber that took flight recently, is true excellence taking off. In the Steve Jobs era, new Apple products were true excellence upon launch. The Cuban sandwich at the Wine Dive in my neighborhood is true excellence. My boy, Jack, came close to true excellence when he nearly pitched a perfect game (that’s no hits, no walks and no batter reaching base at all) in fifth grade. (He walked a batter in the last inning and then promptly picked him off first!)

The point: True excellence is rare. Which is why I’m obsessed with “Hamilton,” the Broadway hit depicting the life and times of Alexander Hamilton (“the ten-dollar founding father without a father”).

The story of Alexander Hamilton, the immigrant founding father who exercised tremendous leadership to shape America, is full of leadership lessons that could be dissected and applied to civic life today. In so many ways, good and bad, that Hamilton fella is a great case study to be used by the Kansas Leadership Center.

But truth be told – and even though I have a degree in history and love bringing to life historical figures and events for current learning – I’m drawn more to the idea of “Hamilton” the musical itself than to the historic figure.

I’m listening to it as I write this, at 6:32 a.m. on a Wednesday. I listened to it last night during my run, too. And the day before, it was on at home while our family was cleaning the house.

It’s hard to get too much of true excellence.

I remember where I was the first time I listened to each song. “One Last Time” was while sitting on my front steps after a run. “My Shot” was at my desk at the Kansas Leadership Center. “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” was in my car, driving through the Flint Hills, with a tear trickling down my cheek.

The true excellence that is “Hamilton” is before us today because of three primary characters: Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Hamilton did the work of a passionate citizen: living a daring life, pushing boundaries, leveraging his ambition and shaping our country in so many different ways. He lived a life of true excellence (not perfection, mind you; he was plenty flawed).

Chernow did the work of a purposeful historian: meticulous research, commitment and great writing, all leading to becoming the No. 1 New York Times bestseller “Alexander Hamilton.”

Landing in that No. 1 slot is evidence of true excellence to me.

For those fretting that they missed their chance to see the original cast of “Hamilton,” including Lin Manuel-Miranda (far right of right photo), there is this: two performances with the original actors have been filmed for rebroadcast.

Photos by Joan Marcus, courtesy of Sam Rudy Media Relations.

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Miranda did the work of a pre-eminent artist: being open to creating with whatever fell in his lap (literally, he read Chernow’s book in a hammock on vacation in the Caribbean) and using his artistic expression to push boundaries (using rap, casting historical characters without regard to race. How refreshing and powerful – a black George Washington).

How often do you get close to true excellence?

Rarely, in my opinion, which is why we should cherish the opportunities when we do.

What exactly is “true excellence?” My flippant answer is it’s the Cuban sandwich from the Wine Dive. It’s amazing. But seriously, I think we know it when we experience it or are on the brink of it. Maybe we’ll witness true excellence a few times in our lives. And, if we are lucky, ambitious and committed, maybe we’ll go beyond just witnessing it. Maybe we’ll be a part of it.

If leadership is mobilizing people to make progress on difficult, daunting, adaptive work (which is rare enough), maybe true excellence is a special, supercharged kind of leadership, where you’ve gone beyond mobilizing and toward utter inspiration – the kind of inspiration that leaves a lasting impression. And a lasting impression not for a day, week or even a year, but lasting for a lifetime or more.

in the center of the second row – close enough to see the spit fly when they rapped! I can’t imagine that the memory of being there, of witnessing that true excellence so close up and firsthand, will ever fade.

Striving for leadership is hard enough. The odds are against you. Leadership is risky, and therefore it’s rare. We are trying to make it less so on both fronts.

Striving for true excellence might be impossible.

It might be that we can’t strive for it, and that doing so – focusing on true excellence as the end in mind for whatever your effort happens to be – leads us down a path where we will certainly not achieve it.

It might be that we simply must celebrate it when we see it and be thankful if we are ever a part of it ourselves.

I’m celebrating “Hamilton” all the time. I keep listening to it. I encourage others to do so. I can’t wait to take my kids to see it. Yes, it’s packed full of leadership and lessons, but I’m content to just enjoy and celebrate the excellence of Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow, Lin-Manuel Miranda and the whole cast of dancers, actors and musicians.

Here’s to true excellence!

My wife, Joanna, and I had the opportunity to see “Hamilton” on Broadway. Our seats were

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Turning Broadway rap into a leadership case study Listen to the two songs below and use the reflection questions with yourself or a group.

Let me know how it goes. Share your discussions with me at ed@kansasleadershipcenter.org.

There are skills necessary for leadership, but long before someone asks open-ended questions, raises the heat or speaks to loss, personal passion and a commitment for the common good must intersect.

We see and hear this in “My Shot,” an early number where Alexander Hamilton raps about his life and country. His personal passion (to make something of himself and to rise up from being a poor immigrant) intersects with his desire for independence.

AFTER LISTENING, CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS.

1.

What hunger is deep inside you? How would working for the common good be a way to satisfy that hunger?

2.

Given your answer to question one, what would it mean for you to not throw away your shot?

3.

Leadership isn’t a solitary endeavor. In “My Shot” we are introduced to Hamilton’s friends: Lafayette, Mulligan and Laurens. Who is around you, lifting you up, encouraging you along and proclaiming, “Let’s get this guy in front of a crowd”?

“My Shot” I’m a diamond in the rough, a shiny piece

Of coal Tryin’ to reach my goal. My power of speech: Unimpeachable.

Only nineteen but my mind is older.

These New York City streets get colder,

I shoulder Ev’ry burden, ev’ry disadvantage I have learned to manage, I don’t have a gun

To brandish.

I walk these streets famished.

AND THEN LATER ABOUT THE SOON-TO-BE COUNTRY:

A colony that runs independently.

Meanwhile, Britain keeps shittin’ on us endlessly.

Essentially, they tax us relentlessly, Then King George turns around, runs a

Spending spree.

He ain’t ever gonna set his descendants free, So there will be a revolution in this century.

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The dangers of failing to take care of yourself are real, and KLC could probably do a better job of bringing to light the messy, destructive forces that can be unleashed, allowing an opening for your personal hungers to take over.

In this song, Hamilton is exhausted after trying, unsuccessfully so far, to get his financial plan through Congress. His wife and family leave him in Washington, D.C., for the summer.

And then …

LISTEN TO “SAY NO TO THIS” AND THEN CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS.

1.

We see and hear in “Say No To This” the result of Hamilton’s not taking care of himself.

What personal hunger – fame, money, love, sex – might take over if you don’t take care of yourself?

2.

How do you take care of yourself?

“Say No to This” I hadn’t slept in a week.

I was weak, I was awake.

You’ve never seen a bastard orphan More in need of a break.

Longing for Angelica.

Missing my wife.

That’s when Miss Maria Reynolds walked into

My life …

An affair ensues, leading to the extortion of Hamilton by Maria’s husband. Midway through the song Hamilton sings, “I am ruined.” This affair, the extortion and Hamilton’s cover-up later contribute to his stepping away from public life and the line sung by Jefferson, Madison and Burr later: “Well, he’s never gon’ be president now.”

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WHERE’S THE

LEADERSHIP?

The race for U.S. president generates a national conversation on leadership every four years. Two Kansas political scientists examine where candidates are demonstrating the use of Kansas Leadership Center ideas in their efforts – and where they’re not.

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POINT

YES, WE’RE SEEING LEADERSHIP KLC Principles playing out in presidential campaigns

By: CHAPMAN RACKAWAY

Politics is a perfect test bed for principles of leadership, because in many ways the political world embodies the first of KLC’s first two principles: that leadership is an act and not a position, and that leadership can happen at any time.

Politics is about leading from any and every position, in fact. The whole concept of democracy is that any person is capable of leading in any capacity, at any time. Not only can any child grow up to be president as part of the promise of democracy, but the entire idea of democratic governance is based on the idea that governing is done as much from the individual as it is from the legislature or executive mansion. Campaign trail rhetoric is important because it cues us as to how a person, if elected, would govern.

Effective leaders on the campaign trail can earn goodwill capital to spend in office as a leverage point for the passage of effective policy. What we see today from candidates is a good predictor of what we will see from their negotiations with Congress in a year.

AN ACTVITY, NOT A POSITION

Government is not just about our elected officials.

In fact, the way a representative democracy is designed, the people we call “political leaders”

are actually supposed to be followers. Elected representatives are intermediaries, there to keep the workload for a busy public down to a manageable level. But the main workload is supposed to stay in the hands of the voting public. American democracy implies an engaged, inquisitive and leading public. We, the voters, need to exercise leadership and guide our elected officials in their decision-making. In other words, the nexus of leadership is in the public: We need to exercise our leadership as an act rather than deferring to an elected class that is supposed to follow our lead.

KNOW THE STORIES OTHERS TELL ABOUT US

The KLC competencies can teach us a lot about our politics. For instance, today’s style of campaigning relates to the concept of knowing the stories others tell about us. We all need to understand that our reputation is capital that can be spent in the achievement of our goals, and political candidates have to be particularly

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well-attuned to the stories people tell about them. Lyndon Johnson famously won his first race for Congress when his campaign manager spread desultory rumors about his opponent.

against them. Trump, despite the darker implications of his rhetoric, knows that his off-the-cuff candor is something the public has been looking for. In short, rather than hurting him, it helps him. Trump is a different kind of candidate.

When we are sensitive to the stories others tell about us, we become more skillful at using good stories to advance our aims and wary of how the bad ones might trip us up. Candidates become very guarded and well-scripted over time as they learn how to not feed the negative stories told about them. In turn, the public has come to see those highly scripted candidates as duplicitous fakers out for nothing but a vote. Donald Trump’s campaign, realizing this, has gone the other way.

Opining that Trump’s bombastic, inappropriate and at times bigoted rantings equate to leadership approaches may be disturbing to some, and that is understandable. But it is undeniable he is acutely aware of the stories people tell about him. In fact, Trump uses those stories to his own advantage, and that knowledge makes him unique as a candidate. Trump knows that people view him as a blowhard, a reality TV star trapped in a candidate’s role. What Trump has done with that, though, is use it in the style of a judo fighter. The weight of other candidates trying to fit themselves into a particular rhetorical box has led to the public’s reacting negatively

ACT EXPERIMENTALLY

Trump is engaging in an elaborate experiment.

Can candidates actually succeed by giving people what they say they want? The concept might seem absurd, but the public has grown increasingly weary of the slick, polished political talk that has come to dominate presidential contests.

Trump took the bold step of deciding to talk extemporaneously. He has no problem contradicting himself, deviating from the script and making proclamations that conventional wisdom suggests would end a person’s candidacy. Candidates, parties and consultants have known for years that a bloc of voters exists that supports some of the harder-edged policies Trump proposes, like building a wall for border security. But most candidates thought that the support they would gain would be offset by the support they would lose. Trump seemingly decided to take the risk that no others would and embraced the rhetoric. While he remains

DONALD TRUMP AND LEADERSHIP

H

PROS H

Uses stories others tell about him to his advantage.

Experiments by talking extemporaneously in unconventional ways for a presidential candidate.

Is his experimental approach pushing him toward spectacular success – or failure?

H

CONS H

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HILLARY CLINTON AND LEADERSHIP

H

PROS H

Constantly takes the temperature of the electorate.

Puts her role above her own individual policy preferences.

H

CONS H

Is she willing to risk enough to be successful?

highly divisive, it seems to have worked for him (at least so far). But Trump’s experiment has been a risky one. Nobody made it work before at the presidential level. Sometimes, acting experimentally yields spectacular results.

Bernie Sanders has done basically the same thing – acting experimentally. A campaign should not be successful that runs on a shoestring budget and occupies an ideological space well left of the mainstream. A candidate with no national campaign experience should not be able to run competitively against perhaps the most prepared individual to have ever run for president. And yet Sanders stayed close to Clinton throughout the primary campaign. While Sanders did not win the nomination for president, he came much closer to Clinton than any other hopeful should.

The Vermont senator has been experimental in his own way, pushing a rhetoric for wealth redistribution that most polls would suggest is political suicide. But Sanders is a true believer, and for fellow true believers he is an iconic leader in a vital area that gets neither adequate attention nor lip service from candidates. Understanding that there are people waiting around for somebody different with a new vision, both Sanders and Trump have flipped the script on our expectations.

Just as leadership is an act, leading is one part carefully scanning your environment and one part taking risks nobody else would. Without the risk takers, those who eschew following the path set out by the stories told about us, we would not know what is possible.

TAKE THE TEMPERATURE

There is no candidate in the field, nor has there been a candidate, who more assiduously takes the temperature than Hillary Clinton. If Trump is a risk-acceptant envelope-stretcher, Clinton is his diametric opposite. Clinton trods a narrow path, constantly looking to the crowd for feedback, approval and applause lines. Notoriously afraid to offend at campaign engagements, Clinton is acutely aware of everything going on around her and has developed mechanisms to keep taking the temperature regularly.

Clinton knows that aggressive federal policy action requires a large amount of buy-in and goodwill capital. To accomplish her goals, she needs to collect for the common purpose, and that leads her to bury even her own preferences as she seeks to determine others’ first. While some, like Trump, would deride her for pandering, what she is doing is an elaborate taking of the public’s temperature to be sure she has the support she needs for significant change.

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COUNTERPOINT

NO, BECAUSE PURPOSE MATTERS IN LEADERSHIP Leadership training, the 2016 election, and the Anakin Skywalker dilemma

By: MICHAEL SMITH

I love leadership training. Before I discovered the KLC, I attended three leadership training sessions at the Gamaliel Foundation, a Chicago-headquartered, faith-based social justice group made famous because a young Barack Obama served there as community organizer and trainer.

For one intense week and two follow-up sessions, I was confronted to identify my values and act on them, know my strengths and weaknesses, make hard choices and agitate underperforming colleagues. I even had one of the same trainers as Obama: a hard-boiled Chicago organizer who had seen it all, Mike Kruglik. Later, I discovered the KLC. The KLC’s Case-in-Point approach is gentler than Gamaliel’s trademark model, which is an in-your-face confrontation called agitation. Yet just as I had experienced at Gamaliel, in downtown Wichita I saw problems get unblocked, issues get faced honestly, and colleagues break down into tears and embrace one another (and me, at one point).

That is why I find it so hard to acknowledge that leadership training, in and of itself, cannot solve our worst problems. Yet it needs to

be said. Leadership training is a tool, and like any powerful tool, the skills and confidence it engenders can be used for good or ill.

If readers will forgive my glib pop culture reference, leadership skills are a bit like the famous Force in “Star Wars.” The Force is present to the good Jedi and the malevolent Sith alike. Only what is in one’s heart can determine the uses to which it is put. The powerful clarifications and tactics of training also contain temptations – like the Sith, new trainees will be tempted to put these powerful new tools to work gratifying ego, seizing power or even eliminating rivals (albeit through job restructuring instead of deadly light-saber battles). As my friend Chapman Rackaway points out, a number of key KLC competencies and principles seem to be at play in some of this year’s presidential campaigns,

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most notably “Leadership is an activity not a position,” “Know the stories others tell about you,” and “Act experimentally.” The question is: Are these principles and competencies being used for good or for ill?

leadership purpose matters. Like Anakin Skywalker in “Star Wars,” we have some decisions to make before moving forward.

The results of these decisions need not be announced; they will be embedded in our behavior.

After I attended the initial training at Gamaliel, I was gushing about the experience to a friend of mine who had also done faith-based, social justice work. He was not as enthusiastic as I, noting that he had worked with organizers who had attended similar training. Unfortunately, the organization in question bogged down into internecine fights, and combatants used the powerful tactics of their training to attack each other, cancelling out one another’s actions and ultimately ripping apart the organization. I was of course crestfallen – leadership training had become my alpha and omega, and I hit the ground hard on my fall back to Earth.

After reading Rackaway’s account of leadership ideas in this year’s presidential campaigns, I am reminded of this with special urgency. Candidates can know the stories others tell about them and use these to great advantage. This is certainly a refreshing break from the over-scripted, no-surprises, consultant-led campaigns of the recent past, but to what end? Are these stories being used to lift up people, to give hope, to solve problems and launch a dialogue that may renew a bitterly divided party system? I have my doubts.

Now I have a new perspective. I still believe in Gamaliel, the KLC and leadership training in general. Such experiences can transform lives, remove blocks to leadership, clarify problems and create new friendships. Yet leadership training can only lead to good outcomes if the trainees are headed for a good place – your

It is worth noting here that counselors who work with bullying and verbal abuse have discovered that bullies, particularly those who use words as their weapons, are highly intelligent. Many verbal abusers have especially well-honed vocabularies. Fine tools, these, but put to the wrong ends they can lead to disastrous results.

Rackaway also points out that the voters themselves are seizing the initiative by nominating

BERNIE SANDERS AND LEADERSHIP

H

PROS H

Develops trust by connecting with other true believers in his causes.

Raises important issues other candidates tend to avoid.

H CONS H Came up short in inspiring enough voters to secure his party’s nomination.

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(or in the case of Sanders, almost nominating) “anti-establishment” candidates who stand the conventional wisdom on its head. Quite so but voters, too, can always brush up on their leadership skills.

As Rackaway himself hints, the immense promises of these new-style candidates sometimes make political scientists like us wonder how wellinformed voters are about the promises and limits of our constitutional system. To use just one obvious example, how many have considered that Congress, not the president, initiates laws and spending programs? Only the vilified “establishment” candidate, Clinton, has put much effort into congressional races so far this year.

If voters want to lead, they’ll need to know the rules of the road, such as how legislation gets passed under the U.S. Constitution. “Leadership is an activity not a position” is a call to lead responsibly, not some sort of secret sauce.

Perhaps it’s time to break out those old copies of “Schoolhouse Rock” and sing along to “I’m Just a Bill” once again, in order to brush up on the three branches and separation of powers.

Finally, Rackaway notes that “Act experimentally” is clearly present in a number of these statusquo-breaking campaigns this year. Yet again, Rackaway, my friend and colleague, is correct.

And yet again, the Anakin Skywalker dilemma presents itself. Tyrants and heroes alike take calculated risks. The question is not so much what is being risked, as for what is it being risked? This year’s candidates have shown us with great clarity that Americans have had it with a political system of gridlock, soundbites, scripted talking points and, of course, endless fundraising. No question, this system is not the best. Yet attacking a tired status quo is not enough. Candidates promising change must also show a compelling reason why their own vision is in fact better. Replacing a broken system with a well-honed machine working toward unhealthy

ends is not an improvement, as all “Star Wars” fans know.

Shortly after 9/11, former President Bill Clinton – himself a flawed leader – insightfully commented that the American people are quicker to embrace a leader who is strong and wrong than one who is weak and right. Well said. The challenge of leadership training – and the 2016 elections – is to find that leader who is both strong and right.

In that spirit, I suggest adding one more point from the KLC’s leadership competencies. A strong leader, whether occupying the White House or organizing in the community, must speak to loss. This strange election year is transfused with anger, worries and doubts about where the country is today, and where we are headed. Blue-collar jobs disappeared in huge numbers during the recent Great Recession, and they are not coming back. Terrorist attacks rattle our sense of security. The division between haves and have nots is the worst in generations.

Year after year, the cost of raising a middle-class family outpaces wage growth. Our nation’s system – if it can be called that – of charging and paying medical bills would put Rube Goldberg to shame.

Problems that once seemed amenable to that great American can-do spirit now seem intractable.

True leaders cannot be too nostalgic for the greatness of the past. Economic, cultural and global shifts have made that impossible. Yet these changes also present opportunities. Our country deserves leaders who will make us great anew, not great again. To quote former President George W. Bush, “I think we all agree, the past is over.” Indeed.

RACKAWAY’S RESPONSE

Michael’s points are salient and appropriate: The very idea of leadership is to do things for the common good. Threads of this philosophy date back to Rousseau, even to Aristotle, but

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are still highly relevant today. Leaders with ill intent could use their leadership skills to subvert the public’s will to their own, becoming demagogues. Leadership is often an exercise in persuasion, but the ability to persuade does not in and of itself guarantee leadership toward the greater good.

And Michael is also right that the public may not be ready to lead. One need look no further than any typical poll conducted about Americans’ information levels, engagement and simply civic knowledge to know that the public can be an unguided missile. But where I deviate from Michael is a return to the concept of using the leadership toolkit we all have to help guide that potential weapon residing in the public. Leaders are not just those at the top of the ticket – they are us! And it is, to my way of thinking, incumbent upon every actively engaged citizen to find

the disengaged and encourage, persuade, lead them to their role as an everyday leader from their own position. Were we to simply discount the public because they are underinformed, disengaged or both, we would embrace the very demagoguery we hope to avoid.

Therefore, let’s raise the heat. To do so, I ask you this question: What are you doing to lead the direction of our country from whatever position you are in?

Chapman Rackaway is a political science professor at Fort Hays State University.

Michael Smith is an associate professor of political science at Emporia State University. Both are alumni of Kansas Leadership Center programs.

Discussion Guide 1. Do you think that political campaigns are more about exercising leadership or gaining authority?

2. How do you think the way a candidate campaigns affects her or his ability to lead?

3. Mayor What acts of leadership Wichita Jeff Longwell says have you seen in this election year? Why do you consider those behaviors to leadership?Kansas What other interpretations might you consider? the days of be south-central cities competing with each other to score jobs are over.

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When thousands of protesters 66 THE JOURNALState Capitol occupied the Wisconsin in February 2011, Wisconsin chief conservation officer Randy Stark served as one of two incident commanders within the building.

Stark will talk about the leadership lessons from his experience at the October Teaching Leadership conference at the Kansas Leadership Center.

Photo by Michael P. King/Wisconsin State Journal

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BUILDING TRUST AMID C H AO S Retired state official shares lasting leadership lessons from massive 2011 Wisconsin protests

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By: KIM GRONNIGER

“ W E B E G A N E AC H S H I F T W I T H A R E M I N D E R T H AT O U R C O L L E C T I V E P U R P O S E WA S T O P R O T E C T P U B L I C S A F E T Y, P R O P E R T Y A N D F R E E S P E E C H ; M A I N TA I N T H E O P E R AT I O N O F T H E G OV E R N M E N T ; A N D C O N D U C T O U R S E LV E S W I T H F I D E L I T Y T O O U R C O U N T R Y ’ S D E M O C R AT I C P R I N C I P L E S .”

R A N DY S TA R K

In February 2011, in between celebrations of the Green Bay Packers’ Super Bowl win and preparations for Valentine’s Day, Randy Stark, then Wisconsin’s chief conservation officer, found himself working to manage chaos inside the State Capitol in Madison.

“We began each shift with a reminder that our collective purpose was to protect public safety, property and free speech; maintain the operation of the government; and conduct ourselves with fidelity to our country’s democratic principles,” Stark says.

A polarizing push by Republican Gov. Scott Walker to limit collective-bargaining rights for 175,000 public-sector workers in Wisconsin brought thousands of people out in protest.

Stark was brought in to serve as one of two incident commanders within the Capitol, along with Sue Riseling, then chief of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department.

The pair, who oversaw as many as 500 officers representing 90 law enforcement agencies per 12-hour shift, faced a formidable leadership challenge: keeping the chaos from stopping the operations of state government while ensuring that people would be able to exercise their constitutional rights.

Walker’s plan to curtail bargaining rights, while requiring public workers to pay more for health insurance and pensions, was included in a budget repair bill. The governor said he had no choice, given the dire straits of the state’s finances.

Union members saw the bill as a direct attack on workers’ rights and an attempt to muzzle their voices in the workplace. A Valentine’s Daythemed student protest at the Capitol evolved to include thousands of people. Daily protests swelled to include an estimated 80,000 people outside the Capitol. About 3,000 to 5,000 protesters occupied the Capitol nightly for nearly a month, building a mini-community of strewn sleeping bags and stressed personalities requiring oversight and order to ensure public safety.

Stark, now the executive director of the National Association of Conservation Law Enforcement Chiefs, will discuss his role in helping to create a trustworthy process in a heated situation in a keynote address at this fall’s Teaching Leadership Conference at KLC.

As the unions’ frustration played out alongside CNN’s split-screen coverage of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Stark and Riseling emphasized restraint in diffusing situations and set expectations that using the least amount of force necessary would be in everyone’s best interests.

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“We desperately wanted to avoid the contentious Vietnam-era protests and dormitory bombing in the 1960s,” Stark says. “The eyes of the world were on us. We knew we couldn’t script everyone’s behavior, but we believed that if they knew and shared a common purpose and perspective, then they could act independently in alignment with our principles, even though they had to make decisions on the flip in a tinderbox environment.”

As groups tend to calibrate to authority, Stark and Riseling tried to exercise restraint in every encounter and build trust. The team worked with protest leaders to manage overcrowded stairwells, fire hazards and broken locks on bathroom windows through which contraband provisions were passed. They used nonverbal communication techniques as well, stationing Stetson-wearing troopers by stairwells and game officers “used to working with armed people in the woods” at the doors.

“We had all taken an oath, and whether we agreed or disagreed with what was going on, we were there to protect public safety and free speech,” Stark says.

Stark says the unions were initially distrustful, perceiving the officers as “minions” for Walker, but “most of them were really nice people who

Randy Stark says he worked hard to exercise restraint and build trust with protesters who were at first inclined to distrust him.

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understood that we were equally impacted and thanked us for doing our jobs.”

For 27 days, throngs chanted, sang and played bongo drums that reverberated off the marble walls day and night. A pizza restaurant received contributions from around the world and delivered thousands of pizzas to protesters, who affixed the empty boxes to the walls as a cardboard tribute to their convictions until they were ordered to remove them to prevent a fire hazard.

“As with any 5,000-person city, we had everything happen – a diabetic incident, a heart attack. Later we had people proudly proclaiming their kids had been conceived during the incident,” Stark says.

To control the crowd each day, Stark’s team monitored capacity levels to prevent overcrowding.

Once capacity was reached, as one person left, another could enter. Many people remained for the duration, creating a palpable stench and potential health hazard.

Stark met with the leaders of the protesting organizations daily. Working across factions resulted in productive give-and-take exchanges, which helped when it became necessary to temporarily evacuate the Capitol for cleaning.

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“Everyone wanted a bath and a break, but some people had been there for 14 days and had a lot invested in the process. They thought they were making progress, they were on national news alongside the Arab Spring conversation and they were worried we wouldn’t let them back in,” Stark says.

Most people complied with the evacuation order, but about 100 remained in the rotunda.

Stark approached reporters with whom he had established rapport and asked them to cover the protesters leaving through the Martin Luther King Jr. Street exit so the protesters could garner attention, benefit from civil rights symbolism and retain their pride.

worked to fix the problem while people yanked at the doors and posted photos and disparaging comments on social media. Although the doors opened minutes later, Stark says they “paid for that mishap the entire day due to the energy in the system.”

Many things went right during the occupation’s oversight, but Stark stumbled on managing self.

By day 17, Riseling insisted he leave for a day as working 18-hour shifts for such a prolonged period had taken a toll. Stark was carrying a notepad to jot things down because his shortterm memory was shot and some days he zoned out during discussions.

Still, the experience was deeply gratifying.

“Because I had been part of their daily conversations speaking to loss, my sense was we could get them out without using 40 officers waiting in the wings – a win for everyone,” he says. “All but two people went out banging bongos and singing solidarity songs. The two who refused got hauled out on stretchers and left at the curb.”

The exodus went smoothly, but the post-cleaning re-entry process hit a snag. A mechanical malfunction prevented the Capitol doors from opening at 8 a.m. as had been promised. Staff

“The beautiful thing about this event was the interdependency of an organic system,” he says.

“The goals of the union and law enforcement were the same – to have everyone emerge safely. On the last day when everyone had left, I walked around and laughed about things that had come up and it sunk in that a collective sense of purpose allowed leaders on both sides to distinguish themselves.”

F O R S TA R K , T H E TA K E AWAY I S T H AT “ W H E T H E R YO U ’ R E I N K A N S A S O R C A L I F O R N I A , W H E N C H A N G E I S A F O O T, T H E R E ’ S G O I N G T O B E E N E R G Y I N T H E S Y S T E M YO U ’ R E G O I N G T O H AV E T O D E A L W I T H O N T H E F R O N T E N D O R T H E B AC K E N D. YO U N E E D T O M E E T P E O P L E W H E R E T H E Y A R E , U N D E R S TA N D W H AT T H E Y P E R C E I V E A S A W I N O R A S A N U N B E A R A B L E LO S S A N D L I S T E N D E E P LY T O O P E N U P O P P O R T U N I T I E S F O R P R O G R E S S .”

Take Action RANDY STARK, retired chief conservation officer at the Wisconsin Division of Natural Resources, will deliver a keynote

address at the “Teaching Leadership Conference” that runs Oct. 5-7 at the Kansas Leadership Center, 325 East Douglas, in Wichita.

You can register for the event here: http://klcjr.nl/teachconf

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C R E AT I N G ORDER OUT O F C H AO S Leadership Lessons from Randy Stark

1.

COMMUNICATE A CLEAR PURPOSE. With more than 500 officers representing 90 law enforcement agencies across Wisconsin entrusted with public safety during the Wisconsin Capitol siege, Stark repeated the collective purpose for the group before each shift, creating unity and enabling independent actions in alignment with the directive – safeguarding people, property and speech.

2.

WORK WITH FACTIONS. By communicating with protest leaders daily and building rapport with the media, Stark was able to empathize with the protesters, acknowledge their sense of loss at being removed from the Capitol, even temporarily, and orchestrate a satisfying, safe-exit strategy that preserved their dignity without compromising the edict to clean the facility.

3.

MANAGE SELF. During sustained periods of leading through stressful situations, Stark underscored the importance of taking time to manage physical and emotional well-being for optimum effectiveness, advice he wishes he had followed early on.

4.

CREATE OPPORTUNITIES FOR OTHERS TO LEAD. In the midst of one of the country’s largest labor mobilizations, protesters and officers shared some common goals, creating an interdependence that enabled people to exercise leadership on both sides.

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1954

1955

1958

1960

The U.S. Supreme Court rules against segregated schools in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education.

The Montgomery bus boycott begins with Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on a public bus for a white passenger.

The first successful student-led sit-in takes place in WICHITA at the Dockum Drug Store in downtown Wichita. The sit-in attracted little media attention and wasn’t sanctioned by the NAACP but led to the desegregation of the entire Rexall chain that Dockum belonged to. It will be recognized in the new Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture opening this fall.

The Greensboro sit-ins lead to desegregation of lunch counters. Serves as a catalyst to a sit-in movement that spreads to 55 cities in 13 states.

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THE EVOLUTION OF

PROTEST A look at the history behind the civil rights movement and racial equality activism today. What parallels do you see? What are the differences?

And what can we learn about the nature of leadership on social change?

1963

1964

1965

1968

Martin Luther King Jr. writes his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail� after being arrested during a campaign to desegregate downtown merchants.

President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.

The Selma to Montgomery marches occur; Voting Rights Act of 1965 is signed into law. At this point in history, marches emerge only after negotiations break down. They are a much smaller aspect of engagement and civic disobedience.

King is assassinated, wave of unrest sweeps the country. Civil Rights Act of 1968 to prohibit housing discrimination is signed into law; civil rights activism begins shift into a new era that will see blacks making political and economic gains although discrimination remains.

AUGUST 28TH The March on Washington (pictured) occurs.

Photo courtesy of The Kansas African American Museum.

2008

2009

2013

2014

President Obama becomes the first African American to be elected president.

Sunflower Community Action, a grassroots social justice group, calls on WICHITA police officers to wear cameras and microphones that would record their interactions with the public.

#BlackLivesMatter movement begins with a hashtag on social media after George Zimmerman is acquitted in the shooting death of African American teenager Trayvon Martin.

The movement is marked by a nontraditional structure that doesn’t have traditional centralized leadership and where women and members of the LGBTQ community play significant organizing roles.

Street demonstrations follow the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York.

Two Wichita pastors, Junius Dotson and Kevass Harding, help organize the #NoFergusonHere community forums, which result in all Wichita police officers being equipped with body cameras.

The First Steps Community Cookout included a question and answer session with Wichita Police Chief Gordon Ramsay, which allowed attendees such as Edith Knox to discuss race and policing in the city.

2015 The death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore sparks increasing activism. Protests begin at the University of Missouri and other college campuses.

July 2016 About 400 protesters march in northeast Wichita near Interstate 135 to demand fair treatment from law enforcement after the fatal shootings of black men by police officers in Louisiana and Minnesota.

Once a last resort, today’s marches seem to be used to get factions to the table.

Five Dallas police officers are killed by a sniper targeting white police officers; three police officers are later killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Local organizers and the Wichita Police Department host the First Steps Community Cookout to bridge divides between the police and the community. The cookout replaced a protest and received nationwide attention.

Wichita activists were criticized by a national founder of Black Lives Matter for agreeing to the barbecue.

But the move significantly lowered local tensions. It remains to be seen how the next steps will take shape.

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FEATURED POET

Strip Pit Fishing By: THOMAS REYNOLDS

Thomas Reynolds is an English professor at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park. He has published poems in various print and online journals, including New Delta Review, Alabama Literary Review, Aethlon-The Journal of Sport Literature, The MacGuffin, Flint Hills Review, and Prairie Poetry. Woodley Press of Washburn University published his poetry collection “Ghost Town Almanac” in 2008.

His chapbook “The Kansas Hermit Poems” was published in 2013, and a sports-themed chapbook “Small Town Rodeos” will be published by Spartan Press in 2016. His work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes.

I remember the leave-taking most of all, Sitting in silence, mildewed vests Snug against our chests, boots sloshing In a half-inch of water, as the boat backtracked Through dynamite-blasted canyon walls Then in shadows. All was abandoned.

Several pieces of rusted-out machinery Loomed out of thick brush and stone Like petrified praying mantises, Frozen in the act of reaching out As if to examine something, pull it Close and turn it over and over to determine If it was edible, and if so, then to eat it Slowly, precisely. A twisted cottonwood Sapling stood at the top of the north wall After our last turn, a hunched, ragged Local with rifle over shoulder, Making damn sure we were clearing out, Right arm stunted, swinging Uselessly in the wind. Down there not a breeze Stirred. Nothing to dry the cold sweat On our foreheads that formed despite The chill in the air, thick as wool.

The sloshing water was pungent as ether In the bottom of the boat, with a tadpole Rolling back and forth beneath my feet. Bass And carp dangling on two stringers Thumped against the side of the boat.

Ahead, we saw the truck impatient in grass, Wheels dug into damp earth.

My dad powered down the outboard.

I lifted the stringers out of the water, As the fish came to life again, thrashing Against the chain links, gills heaving.

What compelled anything to fight to stay In such a place, only the dark can say.

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THE JOURNAL

FEATURED ARTIST

barn with dark sky By: BRUCE EDIGER

I am always drawn back to my roots when I paint. The variety of the Midwest landscapes seems to be constant yet changing ever so slowly. There is a subtleness in the Midwest landscape ﹘ the beautiful sunrises, sunsets, spring thunderstorms, beautiful fall colors and the harshness of the cold, sometimes snowy winters. These things always present a sense of creativity in me.

Some of the biggest changes to the Midwest landscape, yet sometimes less noticeable, are the iconic structures of the farmsteads. I have become fascinated with the barns, elevators and outbuildings on the homesteads where they once served such an important purpose. These structures have become expensive to maintain and less functional over time. What interests me most is not the dilapidated state they are in now, but rather how they must have looked in their newest form.

I develop each painting through photographs and sometimes my imagination, or both. I enjoy the challenge of conveying my interpretation of what I see, and painting it into a new form. In other words, laying down correct architectural lines, forms, shapes, colors, light and shadows adds an intriguing look to the old structures. The ever-changing weather conditions are an important part of the land and these homesteads. The fun for me is to put all these aspects together in a somewhat realistic form, yet bordering on the unrealistic and sometimes glorified form.

I enjoy traveling and finding these interesting homesteads. Part of the fascination in this is finding the unexpected in buildings and figuring out how they must have fit in with the time in which they were built.

Bruce Ediger grew up in Buhler and spent much of his life in Kansas. He graduated from Bethel College in North Newton and spent 40 years in the building industry as a general contractor in Hesston, where he and his wife, Sherry, raised four children. He became interested in painting about 10 years ago: “After I retired, my interest turned into something I wanted to pursue much more seriously.”

Long a lover of the outdoors, he retired with his wife to a cabin they built in Chalk Creek Canyon near Buena Vista, Colorado.

WWW.CARRIAGEFACTORYARTGALLERY.COM/BRUCE-EDIGER

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THE JOURNAL THE BACK PAGE

Ali: Speaking to a loss shared by many By: MARK MCCORMICK

Muhammad Ali often made surprise school visits in Louisville, Kentucky, his hometown and the place where I began my journalism career.

One particular visit prompted a hasty assembly.

“Who’s the baddest kid in the school?” the Champ rasped, biting his bottom lip, bouncing slightly and stirring the air with his fists.

The children pointed to a boy seated next to his teacher. Ali waved him down from the bleachers for some playful shadowboxing.

The first thing you noticed about Ali was his size. And if Ali loomed physically and figuratively over adults, he must have looked like a mountain to that child. A slight Ali feint sent the boy scrambling back up the bleachers and into his teacher’s lap.

We heard at the newspaper that Ali felt terrible about the incident.

He asked if the boy was OK and learned his birthday was coming up. So Ali invited him and a couple of his friends to Ali’s mother’s home for a private party.

As the Saturday reporter, I got the scoop.

Ali had baked the boy a cake.

He magically pulled ribbons from the boys’ ears. He stood before us and appeared to levitate.

As the boys and the guests left the house buzzing, he shook my hand, brushed my cheeks with his and said, “Asalam Alaikum.”

When I returned the greeting, “Walaikum salam,” he seemed stunned.

“Are you a Muslim, brother?”

“No, but I know the greeting,” I said.

As I stood up, though, he produced two of his boxing trading cards. He signed them, folded a handwritten list of Bible verses for me to study around them, and handed me the entire trove.

“Wait here,” he said, and disappeared down a hallway.

Since his death, many people have surfaced with Ali photos and stories.

I cherish my story because it aligns so perfectly with his generous life.

He returned with a Quran and a Bible, sat me down for about an hour, and pointed out small discrepancies between Bible passages.

Drawing people to him. The shadowboxing and playful overbite. Baking a cake for a child.

Throwing a private birthday party.

Performing a magic show.

He then asked why Christians constantly tamper with their Bible.

A King James version. A New King James version. A Good News Bible. A New International version.

This is the foundation of your faith, he said, and you alter it several times a year?

Then, in the quiet of his mother’s dining room, he took the time to share the wonders of his faith with a stranger and then sent that stranger off with a cherished gift.

Ali gave the world so much.

“The Quran is the same today as it was when Muhammad brought it down from the mountain,” he said.

No wonder so many of us – the once-frightened boy, me and a billion others – feel such loss at his passing.

This had never occurred to me.

It felt profound. He seemed so sincere.

I broke character and told him he was my hero, that I’d forever appreciate this meeting and while everything he’d unveiled felt compelling, I wouldn’t be converting.

He smiled.

I told him I needed to go. I desperately wanted an autograph but just couldn’t ask.

Mark E. McCormick is the executive director of The Kansas African American Museum.

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