Common Cause's Susan Lerner questions what civic engagement means for the city
Susan Lerner, Executive Director of Common Cause New York, focuses on the hearing's civic engagement title, citing academic definitions and noting that OME's website emphasizes tenant organizing rather than broader information about accessing city government, questioning whether the city should pick particular types of organizing.
Thank you very much.
I'm Susan Lerner.
I'm the Executive Director of Common Cause New York, and I too want to thank the Chair and the Committee for this hearing, which I think covers a lot of very important areas.
I would like to focus on something that hasn't been fully discussed, I think, in as great detail as I would like, which is the title is the Mamdani Administration Civic Engagement Efforts.
And I think we need to be talking about what does it mean for the city to be involved in civic engagement?
What is civic engagement?
What is the appropriate?
Use of city resources and what is the goal.
Academic definitions of civic engagement say that civic engagement means working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values, and motivation to make that difference.
And I was struck in the testimony from the commissioner of the Office of Mass Engagement of how fluidly she has incorporated
a lot of the terminology about civic engagement, but that virtually all of her examples of the city, her
division, I would call it, her office's civic engagement, were really performed by the smaller agency, the smaller offices within that umbrella.
already existed.
And when I went to the office of Mass Engagement's website, I was struck by the difference in how they are communicating on their website what they do with how she described what they do.
Because rather than talking about basic information of how to access or understand city government, it's very narrow.
It's all about tenant organizing.
And so we're not having the basic discussion of what is civic engagement and what should the city be fostering?
Should it be picking a particular type of organizing or should it be a broader?
Invitation to our residents to understand government and to affect it, whatever policies the individual thinks is a good idea.
And some of that is happening, the Civic Engagement Commission, some of the outreach around benefits, but I would suggest that the outlook of the Office of Mass Engagement is actually different than what was testified here.