Boyte Archives - Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship

Staff Feature: Harry Boyte

Posted on August 20, 2019February 8, 2023

Get to know the Sabo Center!

In each Staff Feature installment, we ask members of the Sabo Center staff to share about what they do, along with some fun facts.

This post features Harry Boyte, Senior Scholar of Public Work Philosophy.

(Pictured above, left: Harry Boyte. Pictured above, right: So Fujieda and Mitsura Fukuhera, staff at Rikkyou University in Japan, showing how they are changing service learning courses into public work and Public Achievement-style courses in the service learning center).

What do you do with the Sabo Center?

I have seen my work for many years as about theorizing about people-centered democracy, a concept that I learned and experienced in the civil rights (freedom) movement. I develop concepts and practices that can translate democratic revitalization for today.

What’s one social issue that is most important to you right now?

Citizenship education, with a political approach.

What’s your favorite place on Augsburg’s campus?

The park (Murphy Square)

If you could recommend one book movie, or podcast, what would it be and why?

I’d recommend two books that give a flavor or the people-centered politics that we’ve largely lost today, and needed among young activists: Freedom’s Teacher: the Life of Septima Clark by Katherine Cherron (the best account of Clark, architect of the citizenship schools, whom King called “the mother of the movement”); and Reveille for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, straight out of the culture, spirit, and politics of the popular movemen tof the late 1930s–and a radical contrast, in crucial ways, with his much more pessimistic and cynical Rules for Radicals, the book most people have read.

What’s your favorite thing to do outside of work?

Walking

What are three words you would use to describe yourself?

Public intellectual, populist

What’s your favorite place in the world?

Right at the moment, Japan.

What’s the coolest thing you are working on right now?

Creating platforms for an international movement on “Civic Studies,” or the theory and practice of people-centered democracy.

Name one spot in the Twin Cities that you would consider a “must-see”?

Speedy Market on Como.

Who would you most likely swap places with for a day?

Chief policy adviser for Pete Buttiegieg (his campaign could soar if he deepened his democracy theme to include Obama’s often repeated insight that real change in America comes to Washington not from Washington). “We the people” is the foundation of democracy and politics; this is what I’m currently talking about with students in Japan, giving a couple of lectures. You can view the PowerPoint for one of my lectures via this link.

Have any last facts/favorite quotes/advice/etc. that you would like to share?

Japan, like the U.S., has some amazing philosophy and traditions of public work-related politics and creation. See, for instance, the Japanese Folk Craft Museum.

Facilitators

Posted on November 27, 2018August 6, 2019

Harry Boyte

Harry C. Boyte is a co-founder with Marie Ström of the Public Work Academy and Senior Scholar of Public Work Philosophy, both at Augsburg University. He also founded the international youth civic education initiative Public Achievement and the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota, now merged into the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg University. Boyte’s forthcoming book, Awakening Democracy through Public Work, Vanderbilt University Press 2018, recounts lessons from more than 25 years of revitalizing the civic purposes of K-12, higher education, professions, and other settings. In the 1960s, Boyte was a Field Secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization headed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and subsequently was a community and labor organizer in the South. Boyte has authored ten other books on democracy, citizenship, and community organizing and his articles and essays have appeared in more than 150 publications including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Political Theory, Chronicle of Higher Education, Policy Review, Dissent, and the Nation.

Elaine Eschenbacher

Elaine Eschenbacher is a civic leadership educator with more than twenty years of experience. She currently directs the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg University which integrates rich histories of civic engagement, experiential education, and democracy-building in a vibrant center with local, regional, national, and international reach. Prior to joining Augsburg University in 2009, Eschenbacher served as associate director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Eschenbacher designs programs and delivers workshops on themes of civic agency, democratic and experiential education, community organizing, and public work locally and nationally so that people continually expand their capacity to shape their communities, futures, and worlds. She is a facilitator and trainer for the National Issues Forum model of deliberative dialogues and a regular facilitator democratic processes aimed at developing civic agency. She earned her master’s degree in leadership from Augsburg University, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota, and teaches in the Leadership Studies program at Augsburg.

Dennis Donovan

Dennis Donovan is the national organizer of Public Achievement at the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Along with Harry Boyte, Donovan was a key architect of Public Achievement, which is a theory-based practice of citizen organizing to do public work to improve the common good. Since 1997, Donovan has worked with K-12 schools, colleges, universities, and community groups locally, nationally and internationally as a speaker, trainer, consultant, and educator. Before joining the Center, Donovan worked in K-12 education for 24 years as a teacher and school principal. Under his leadership, Saint Bernard school in St. Paul won the St. Paul/ Minneapolis Archdiocesan Social Justice Award for work done to improve the North End community. Donovan was also a founder and education chair (1990 to 1997) of the St. Paul Ecumenical Alliance of Congregations (SPEAC). SPEAC has since grown into a statewide organization known as ISAIAH and is one of the most active partners in the national PICO organizing network. Donovan received the 2008 University of Minnesota Community Service Award. He earned a master’s degree in education from the University of St. Thomas and a bachelor’s of science degree in elementary education from the University of Minnesota.

How Americans can reweave our fraying social fabric

Posted on November 5, 2018

Harry Boyte has written a series of article which have been published in MinnPost. Here’s his latest.

How Americans can reweave our fraying social fabric

Power and Hope: Awakening Democracy Through Public Work

Posted on October 4, 2018June 9, 2020

Awakening Democracy Through Public Work: Pedagogies of Empowerment, is a new book written by Harry C. Boyte which tells many stories of Public Achievement and public work in the United States and around the world. Public work is a civic philosophy with deep roots in nonviolent traditions that express a generative power, never more needed than today when power is understood as domination and control.

This event will feature a diversity of voices, an opportunity to purchase a copy of the book and have it signed by the author.

Monday, November 12th,

6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Augsburg University, Hagfors Center, Room 150

700 21st Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55454

Democracy Augsburg Teach-in: Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement

Posted on September 21, 2018October 15, 2018

Join us Tuesday, September 25 at 4:00 p.m. in Hagfors 151 when Harry Boyte delivers the first Democracy Augsburg Teach-in of the year, Addressing the Crisis in Democracy- Lessons from the civil rights movement. Harry Boyte, Senior Scholar in Public Work Philosophy at the Sabo Center, served as a field secretary for Rev. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the southern freedom movement. He will lift up lessons from the movement, including the key role young people played, and relate them to our current crisis in democracy.

New Frontiers in Civic Revitalization: Local Democracy Summit

Posted on July 24, 2018

The Public Work Academy at Augsburg University and the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service are co-presenting a local democracy summit in Wausau, Wisconsin.

New Frontiers in Civic Revitalization:
Local Democracy Summit

November 15, 2018 • 9:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m.

UW Center for Civic Engagement
625 Stewart Ave Wausau, WI 54403

– Register Now! – Registration is limited to the first 75 attendees

The theory and practice of “public work” are transforming civic and professional practice in the United States and abroad. – David Mathews, President, Kettering Foundation

Communities across the nation face fragmentation and polarization. Yet cities and towns, large and small, also have the potential to be the seedbed for a rebirth of citizenship and democracy – providing an alternative to the national politics of blame and gridlock.

This summit at the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service will introduce civic leaders from Wisconsin to the new Midwest Public Work Academy’s Small Cities Democracy Network located at Augsburg University in Minneapolis. Participants will:

Engage in a high-level conversation with thought leaders across multiple sectors – including business, education, government, health care, foundations, and more.
Share perspectives, examples and leading practices in citizen-centered efforts to address public problems and create shared community resources across partisan and other differences.
Learn from case studies of effective citizen-government and cross-partisan partnerships for the common good such as “Clear Vision Eau Claire,” “Better Angels” and “Public Achievement.”
Receive training from internationally recognized leaders in public work, including Harry Boyte, Marie Ström and Mike Huggins.
Receive a free copy of Harry Boyte’s new book, “Awakening Democracy through Public Work.”
Learn about how your organization or community can plug into the growing movement around public work being organized by the new Midwest Public Work Academy based at Augsburg.

Cost: $75 per person (includes lunch and book) For information, contact info@wipps.org or call 715-261-6388.

In a Season of Rage, Populist Lessons From the Movement

Posted on January 18, 2016August 24, 2023

The media casts Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as populists. But a civil rights activist reminds us that the great populist movements of the past channeled people’s anger into a force for constructive change.

BY HARRY BOYTE | JANUARY 15, 2016

Coming back to the US after time in South Africa, anger in the election is like a blast furnace. I’m also struck by the ubiquitous use of populism as a framework of analysis.

“Trump and Sanders: Different Candidates with a Populist Streak,” reported Chuck Todd on NBC News. Most reporters and commentators use “populism” to mean inflammatory rhetoric. Thus Jonathan Goldberg, writing in the National Review, argues Trump and Sanders are “Two Populist Peas in a Pod,” stirring up “millions of people [who] are convinced that the system is rigged against them.”

Continue reading “In a Season of Rage, Populist Lessons From the Movement” →

The Fight For America’s Soul

Posted on January 8, 2016January 24, 2024

One side pits winners and losers against each other in a race for the American Dream, while the other wonders what might be possible if we work together to form communities, build schools and create a culture of mutual respect.

BY HARRY BOYTE

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Continue reading “The Fight For America’s Soul” →

Educating, Organizing, and Thinking Democracy (pt. 2)

Posted on November 4, 2015June 14, 2018

Education Week
Bridging Differences
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/
by Mike Miller

In the final piece of the rich “Educating, Organizing, and Thinking Democracy” Education Week blog exchange between Deborah Meier and Harry Boyte, Deborah says about her work in New York City, “…[I]n the early 1990s we invented a possible answer [to how to do democratic education] that, alas, we were never able to test out…If we hadn’t been stopped by a new chancellor and a new state superintendent we’d have learned a lot.” Observing a similar experience in Boston, she writes of a similar democratic effort, “[T]hose in power seemed remarkably uninterested in this public solution, and preferred to put their money into charter chains or vouchers.” She notes a similar experience in 39 NYC high schools, “Again with relatively little attention. Amazing.”

She is, she says, “desperate” to broaden understanding of these efforts, presumably so they can be expanded upon in public schools systems. She notes one consequence when they aren’t, “Some of the young admirers of these efforts feel stymied and turn to opening ‘mom and pop’ small charters with more autonomy…” and she asks, “How can we break through the silence by making these public alternatives more visible before they die off as their autonomies are chipped away?”

Continue reading “Educating, Organizing, and Thinking Democracy (pt. 2)” →

Educating, Organizing, and Thinking Democracy

Posted on October 30, 2015July 19, 2018

Education Week
Bridging Differences
by Deborah Meier and Harry Boyte

Dear Harry and friends,

So what do I know from experience, observation and research about the essentials of schooling for democracy? I know that education which prepares the young to join and even surpass the adult world, where learning sticks with them, happens best (maybe only) when the novice is in the company of experts who accept the child as is and takes it for granted that she will become an expert over time. It requires that the adults demonstrate their expertise in action, and the novice can observe, ask questions, and try out new knowledge in a setting where he/she can fail without shame. That’s the setting children find themselves in at birth, with a ratio generally of several experts per novice.

What are the special features of such learning? The novice is accepted lovingly, is assumed to be able to become an expert (an adult), has many chances to observe and to experiment, and has good reason to trust the setting and the people there. Adults delight in children’s early mistakes because we can see the beginning of understanding and competence. We even cherish their mistakes.

Most rarely reach such a space again in life which rich and poor share. Continue reading “Educating, Organizing, and Thinking Democracy” →