“We know from experience that looking to new national leaders or Washington. DC alone to solve our trust problem will not work. Instead, we must look to each other to rebuild trust, beginning with taking responsibility as citizens to work to better our own communities. As Pamela Scott Johnson, provost at Spelman College, exclaimed at a recent forum The Citizen Service conducted at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, ‘We must expand our own definition of a neighbor and push people past their fears and into action.’
As Johnson and other forum participants noted, this takes knowledge. Specifically, it means enlisting people to learn about and embrace a new dimension of American citizenship — one that goes beyond the traditional roles of voter/spectator to one that embraces problem-solving — identifying evidence-based solutions and working toward adoption of those solutions with others whose ideology and partisan preferences we may not share.”