New Voices at the Civic Table: Facilitating Personal and Social Change
This article describes six pilot initiatives of the Alliance for Children and Families — New Voices at the Civic Table (New Voices), a philanthropy-funded effort to challenge human service organizations to integrate civic engagement as a permanent part of their infrastructure. All six New Voices models included common elements: leadership training, civic education, experiential learning, participatory decision-making, networking, and reflective evaluation. Each also reflected one of four primary variations to civic engagement based on their community needs and demands: self-efficacy, constituent involvement, mobilizing, and organizing. Results demonstrate that civic engagement in human services not only produces a means for promoting social change but also changes the way participants see themselves in the community.
Civic Participation as a Component of Service Provision
This is section 2 of the “Integrating Civic Participation Strategies into Service Delivery Organizations” Toolkit, which was created by the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) in order to create a participation continuum that links constituencies to a variety of civic opportunities such as citizenship promotion and engaging in issues. This section focuses on expanding the traditional role of service providers to affect decision-making authority, changing the systems that create the need for services.