Harry Boyte, Co-Chair Braver Angels Civic Scholars Council

Talk to the St. Paul Forum October 2, 2026 (edited October 3)

Many thanks to Jim Scheibel, my long-time friend, colleague, and citizen mayor of St. Paul, for his introduction. Thanks to John Manillo, convenor of this venerable and well-known group of civic leaders, for asking me to speak here today. The St. Paul Forum is an ideal venue to discuss courageous citizenship, the focus of the Braver Angels Civic Scholars Council.boy

For ten years Braver Angels has been the leading organization in America building respectful relationships across partisan divides. Minnesota has nine local chapters, called Alliances, in the state and 2,750 members, the highest per capita membership in the country.

William (Bill) Doherty, Emeritus Professor the University of Minnesota’s Family Social Science Department, is a co-founder of BA and has been a leader from the beginning. Doherty played the leading role in designing the depolarization workshops which have proven so successful.

Today I highlight another extraordinarily important piece of his history: his development as a “citizen therapist,” and his founding of the pioneering Citizen Professional Center at the University of Minnesota.

In September, 2025 Braver Angels, with leadership of the new CEO, Maury Giles, expanded its mission to stress promotion of “courageous citizenship,” willingness to take risks for action with public-spirited purpose. It involves culture change, the intention of making courageous citizenship again an honored norm. It also involved creation of a Civic Scholars Council of twenty members bringing together leading scholars and reflective practitioners to define, challenge, and shape its meaning and practice in modern American life

We commissioned several dozen papers on what courageous citizenship means this year, the nation's 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, sorting them into three traditions of active citizenship: community service, deliberation and public work. All have much to contribute to renewal of citizenship in America (the papers are listed in ppendix one).

Today I’m speaking from the vantage of public work philosophy, which the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the UMN and Augsburg developed and promoted. I argue that for courageous citizenship to become an honored norm, citizen professionalism, translating public work into the professions, is crucial.

Discussion of citizenship brings us back to the nation's founding, when the idea of the free and equal citizen created an electrifying alternative to subject of the crown. Alexander Dallas, an immigrant to the new society, captured the appeal of citizenship, contrasting with subjecthood, allegiance to the crown:

Citizenship…is a substitute for allegiance…Citizenship is the effect of compact; allegiance is the offspring of necessity; Citizenship is equality; allegiance is the badge of inferiority; Citizenship is freedom; allegiance is servitude.

In 2010, the Library of Congress discovered stunning evidence of the shift from "subject" to "citizen" in Thomas Jefferson’s thinking. Painstaking scientific analysis of Jefferson's July 2^nd working draft of the Declaration of Independence showed that his text originally addressed fellow “subjects.” Then Jefferson thought about it, crossed out “subjects” and replaced it with “citizens.” It signaled his recognition that the people of the emerging United States were no longer subjects of a king but free and equal citizens of an emerging democracy which they would build and govern.

Courageous citizenship speaks to the crisis today. People across the political spectrum are doubtful that government, politicians, or markets, alone, can fix wicked public problems. Worry is a global pattern as the Financial Times reported. Braver Angels is addressing this crisis but we need to acknowledge the largeness of the task. People are divided and disempowered. And as you can see from the materials I sent out before this meeting, skepticism about citizen and citizenship has been growing especially among progressive professions in settings like schools, higher education, government, nonprofits, health care, and the media. Appendix Two gives the timeline.

Why is this? What can be done? Today I address these questions in several ways:

• I give a short history of Minnesota’s energizing citizenship understood as the public work of building a commonwealth. Citizen professionalism was central.
• I analyze how shrinking citizenship partly results from professionals’ training in which they come to see themselves outside the general citizenry.
• Finally, I argue that citizen professionalism is essential to renew courageous citizenship.

Commonwealth citizenship

As we discussed at an earlier meeting of the St. Paul Forum, the political scientist Daniel Elezar, leading analyst of state political cultures, describes Minnesota as the prime example of a “commonwealth culture.” He called it moralistic and I agree it has strong moral dimensions. But ideas of public work and citizens as co-creators add other elements.

For the nation’s founders, commonwealth meant responsive government, a democratic republic. This descended from the English Civil War of the seventeenth century when

Parliamentary forces overthrew the king in 1649 and established a Commonwealth. John

Adams argued that every state should be called a “commonwealth.” Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky officially became commonwealths. Other states were often described as commonwealths.

Benjamin Franklin, who helped make Pennsylvania become an official commonwealth, stressed the importance of another dimension: everyday citizens’ self-organizing. His group Junto (Leather Apron Club), established in Philadelphia in 1727, included artisans and small businessmen who built the nation’s first lending library, created schools, developed a postal service and many other public goods. They can accurately be called citizen professionals.

Franklin’s emphasis highlights a second meaning of democracy in Ameria, not only as a republic but as a “commonwealth.” Here, commonwealth refers to the civic infrastructure, the commons, a democratic way of life depends on. For many immigrants, America was a chance to recreate commons destroyed or privatized by elites in European societies. The labors of settlers who cleared lands, built villages, schools, libraries, meeting halls, roads, and local government itself generated what the historian Robert Wiebe has called a portable democracy. Such citizen labors created the “we the people” language of the Preamble to the Constitution. As the historians Oscar and Mary Flug Handlin observed, “For the farmers and seamen, for the fishermen, artisans and new merchants, commonwealth repeated the lessons they knew from the organization of churches and towns . . . the value of common action.”

The country became an arena for self-organizing citizen efforts around creating and caring for public things, which Alexis de Tocqueville described in his classic book Democracy in America. These included commons of many kinds. David Mathews, President Ford’s Secretary of Health Education and Welfare and then president of the Kettering Foundation, describes.

“Nineteenth-century self-rule . . . was a sweaty, hands-on, problem-solving politics,” he said: 

The democracy of self-rule was rooted in collective decision making and acting— especially acting. Settlers on the frontier had to be producers, not just consumers. They had to join forces to build forts, roads, and libraries. They formed associations to combat alcoholism and care for the poor as well as to elect representatives. They also established the first public schools. Their efforts were examples of ‘public work,’ meaning work done by not just for the public.

In Minnesota, the commonwealth built through public work and commonwealth-minded citizens continued as a public idea through the mid-twentieth century, crossing economic divisions of rich and poor. “The Cooperative Commonwealth Program” of the populist FarmerLabor Party in 1934 helped elect candidates for governor, the state legislature, Congress, and many local offices. It was populist, not socialist, calling for a state-owned bank and public utilities but also having a strong emphasis on protecting small farms and small businesses. The cross-partisan educational and cultural Farmer Labor Association (FLA) at the heart of the movement had deep and pluralistic cultural roots. Participants in the FLA were diverse, including Scandinavian socialists, rural populists, trade unionists, temperance activists, and conservative German Catholics. Educational and cultural activities were designed to intentionally create common purpose. The FLA citizen organizers and citizen educators built an enormous network of ward and neighborhood clubs. At its peak, almost 40,000 dues-paying members were in the FLA, and tens of thousands more participated in its activities. It ran workshops on cooperatives, fighting evictions, counteracting foreclosures, and organizing the unemployed. FLA sponsored dances, rallies, and multi-ethnic gatherings. Music was a constant presence. Local clubs staged theatrical performances which dramatized the struggles of Iron Range miners, timber workers, and farm families fighting corporate monopolies. The FLA brought traditions of Minnesota's immigrant populations into Minnesota’s political culture.

Commonwealth was the term also used by many civic and business leaders with a strong citizen orientation. Minnesota’s early European-American settlers came from New England Yankee backgrounds. Stewardship of the commons was central to what they understood civic leadership to mean. “Second Generation Devoted to Pursuits of Culture,” wrote Bertha Heilbom of the Minnesota Historical Society in the seventy-fifth issue of the St. Paul Pioneer Press commemorating statehood. “Those who grew up in Minnesota during the period immediately after the Civil War saw Minnesota emerge from a frontier state and grow into a modern commonwealth.” Leading citizen professionals helped to build libraries and schools, colleges and universities, orchestras, art galleries, and theaters that complemented the growth of business and industry. Until the 1970s, the norm among businesses was to give back 5% of their profit for civic improvement projects. Embodying these traditions and meanings, Lotus Coffman, the University of Minnesota’s President from 1920 to 1938, entitled his inaugural address, “The University and the Commonwealth.” Coffman was a leader in a higher education movement that grounded colleges in the civic life of communities and emphasized the need to develop civic-minded professionals as contributors to communities who would work with other citizens to develop communities’ own capacities for collective action, not do the work for them.

The idea of citizen as an equal and free self-governing agent was exhilarating for the immigrants arriving to Minnesota in the late nineteenth century. One described his escape from “caste” and discovery of “democracy”: a condition in which “everyone was a landlord and servants sat down to table with masters.” Another described it simply but powerfully: “I am my own master, like other children of God.”

This conception of citizenship as egalitarian, respectful interaction across differences to build the commonwealth and citizen professionals who contributed shaped Minnesota’s political history. In the middle and late twentieth century, some major politicians were citizen politicians, modeling an ethos of civility, reciprocity, and collaboration—not only among themselves, but toward their fellow citizens outside formal government. As former Democratic senator and U.S. vice president Hubert H. Humphrey told the legislature in January 2, 1973,

“The caliber of government is pretty well measured by the quality of citizenship.”

Humphrey worked closely with his friend Albert Quie, long-time Republican congressman and later governor of the state, on multiple policies to involve the people of

Minnesota more meaningfully in government. A major cause and consequence was

Minnesota’s well-earned reputation as the most civically engaged state in the nation, which our

Center discovered when we did a study on the state’s civic health with the National Conference of Citizenship. Minnesota topped state league charts in volunteer hours, involvement in neighborhoods, charitable giving, voter participation, and many other measures.

Two stories of citizenship and citizen professionalism

This slide is from the Civilian Conservation Corps work in Lake Itasca. Young men created much the park. It depicts their work creating a dam at the mouth of the Mississippi.

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) offered work to young men with few employment prospects. It resulted in a lasting legacy of forestry, soil, and water conservation, as well as creating much of Minnesota's park system. Enrollment was open to men ages eighteen to twenty-five. To qualify, candidates had to be healthy, out of school, unemployed, unmarried, and on public assistance. Each received thirty dollars per month. Enrollees sent twenty-five dollars home to their families and kept five dollars for personal use. In 1933, the government extended enrollment to older men known as Local Experienced Men who certainly were citizen professionals. They had knowledge of places where camps were located and offered more advanced skills for tasks such as stone masonry and forestry. Large numbers of unemployed veterans of World War led to Veterans Conservation Corps in May 1933 with an enrollment goal of twenty-five thousand men. On June 19, 1933, the Office of Indian Affairs within the Department of the Interior established the Civilian Conservation Corps-Indian Division (CCC-ID). Based on Minnesota's Native American population, the government set a quota of four hundred workers for each enrollment period in the program. In less than one month, Minnesota's first CCC-ID camp opened at Nett Lake. The Bureau of Indian Affairs administered the CCC-ID camps, instead of the U.S. Army, and provided work projects both on and off the reservations. In line with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, tribes had a voice in deciding projects, and many focused on preservation of Ojibwe and Dakota culture, including management of wild rice habitat and teaching modern methods of maple sugaring.

CCC men (called “CCC boys,” or simply “3 Cs”) built roads and cleared diseased trees in local forests. The Grand Portage camp completed an archaeological study and reconstruction of the North West Company Fur Post site on Lake Superior. Minnesota had sixty-one camps with a total enrollment of six thousand men. The first Minnesota camp, Company 701, opened at Lake Gegoka May 8, 1933. Other camps quickly followed.

Each camp had barracks to house two hundred men, a kitchen, a mess hall, and a canteen that sold personal items. Other camp structures included tool sheds, an infirmary, a reading room, and a recreation hall. A typical work day was eight hours, starting at 6:00 a.m. with exercises and breakfast. Morning and afternoon work sessions allowed for breaks for lunch and supper. Noon meals were often served at the work site. Evening hours provided free time. Every camp had a citizenship class and most had opportunities for C’s to hear about vocational opportunities. Together meant that CC veterans learned to think of themselves as citizens through their work and professions, as I discovered when Nan Kari and I interviewed veterans in the 1990s.

Men in forest camps cut and cleared brush to help conserve existing forests and planted 123,607,000 trees. They participated in tree disease prevention programs, built roads, strung telephone lines, and fought forest fires. Fire prevention efforts included clearing deadwood and building water towers, ranger stations, and firebreaks. Park projects focused on lasting "rustic style" structures of local stone and logs following National Park Service guidelines. The CCC built and improved campgrounds, picnic areas, parking lots, and scenic overlooks. They worked to restore historic structures. Severe drought conditions in southeastern Minnesota, made soil and water conservation an important part of the work of the CCC.

Settlement houses

The second example is the settlement house. Citizenship needs schools for citizenship, what we call free spaces, places where values of neighborliness, free thinking, responsibility and contribution can take shape. And free spaces need citizen-minded professionals to sustain them. One of my students, Stephanie DeWitt chronicled the efforts at Northeast Neighborhood House, the settlement for Eastern European ethnics which suggest how many kinds of staff professionals were involved:

An activity log of Northeast Neighborhood House listed efforts in youth education, adult education, a circulating library, and personal services…a nursery school for children age 2-5, parent education for working mothers, pre-school for children age 4-5 and those needing “social adjustment,” and a “student training project” and “research center” for social work students from the University of Minnesota. Youth classes included music, art, drama, crafts, social dancing, athletics and organized play, festivals and pageants. Similar adult clubs and classes were also offered. Additionally, the adult education programs featured forums, discussion groups, citizenship and English classes, homenursing, household arts and crafts, gardening, art and folk exhibits, music and drama.

Northeast fostered a civic culture in the neighborhood and was a meeting ground.

Settlements had an explicit goal described by settlement pioneer Jane Addams, “connecting all sorts of people” in ways that would develop civic values, knowledge, and talents of each one. Twin Cities settlements worked across racial and religious divides.

Northeast Neighborhood House was one of 11 settlements in the Twins Cities Federation of Settlements, whose mission included promoting “a spirit of civic righteousness and [cooperating] with other agencies in bettering living, working and leisure-time conditions.

Settlement houses staff typically lived in the buildings’ quarters “in order to ensure that those employed understood the local community dynamics. They began work from that vantage point in order to be with people in ministry, rather than ‘ministering unto.’” According to the Federation, this meant that Settlements did most of their work through “the influence and power of example.” Staff, in other words, had many ways to develop and practice a citizen identity. Settlements also aimed at educating college students to think of themselves as citizens, working with new immigrant citizens from other countries and other parts of the country. Sometimes students from the UMN lived in upstairs rooms.

Phyllis Wheatley provided these for Black students at the UMN, since dorms were segregated. Lori Sturdevant, in her biography/autobiography of Harry Davis, a school board member who was also the first black elected official in Minnesota, describes Phyllis Wheatley settlement house as a civic meeting ground for the African American community in North Minneapolis. “It is fair to say that Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House is what brought the African Americans of north Minneapolis together into a functioning community,” Sturdevant writes. “The Wheatley settlement provided [Blacks] with self-awareness and pride. It fostered relationships. It taught people to help one another and to raise their families in a difficult and challenging environment.”

Boys from the Phyllis Wheatley Neighborhood House (left ) and Cub scouts from Trinity Church (right) demonstrate the spirit of Brotherhood Week. Richard Green is the last boy on the left.

The formative experiences of Richard Green, a leading American educator, growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, illustrated her observations. His experiences revolved around Black churches, extended family networks, and especially the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement, the heart of the African- American community. Green remembered Wheatley as a “community commons,” a center full of public activities and extended relationships that shaped his vision for public schools as commons for the modern age. His vision, in turn, inspired educators and families in Minneapolis, where he served as school superintendent and led him to be chosen chancellor of New York public schools.

Like other commons in Minnesota and American history, Green told Star Tribune reporter Kay Miller, Wheatley was “the focal point” of social life and more. It taught values of hard work, self-discipline, accountability, achievement, and giving back. “Even though we were not a community of wealth, it certainly was a community of cooperation and helping the young people grow up in a healthy manner.” Settlement workers and others who sustained Wheatley “would smack your ass in a minute if you got out of line.”

Professionals losing civic identity

“The ideal [is] society’s best and brightest in service to its most needy, delivering the miracles of social science just as doctors cured juvenile rickets in the past.” Donna Shalala, “Mandate for a New Century”, University of Illinois 1989

Many Americans feel they are powerless subjects of distant elites—political, economic, and cultural—that they cannot hold to account. This includes faculty at the University of Minnesota who tend to see administrators in the same way. The photo above, showing part of the statue depicting a breadline in the Roosevelt memorial in Washington, conveys the idea that the people were helpless and victimized and needed to be saved by government.

When I returned to the Twin Cities from South Africa last January, I was struck by the scale of citizen action. Most adults and many children in my congregation in St. Paul were actively engaged in ensuring that everyone who contributed positively to their community— regardless of their legal status—was treated as someone worthy of respect, support, and opportunity. In other words, they were citizens in the revolutionary, Tocquevillian, freedommovement sense of the word. But when I asked a group of congregants why no one was challenging the Department of Homeland Security’s view that “citizenship” was defined entirely by a few legal documents, most were confused. “What other kind of citizenship is there?” asked a friend. I realized that in popular memory citizenship was reduced to legal status.

This process accelerated under the Trump administration, when legal definitions of citizenship have been used to attack Democrats as the betrayers of “real” Americans and deployed against immigrants to justify deportations of those born elsewhere, however long their residence or whatever their contributions to the polity. But narrowing the meaning of citizenship has come from progressives as well.

Neither the Democratic Party nor the leadership of most progressive nonprofits, faith communities, schools, colleges, or cultural institutions have advanced alternative to legal status with citizenship remotely comparable to the exhilarating shift from “subject to citizen” that motivated the founding generation or the spirit of earlier generations in the state. In fact, the very word “citizen” has become a byword across sectors. Appendix Two gives a timeline for this distancing of progressive professionals from the term citizen.

Here I focus on a factor rarely noted: Professionals, including faculty at institutions like the University of Minnesota, learned to see themselves as outside the citizenry. The historian Thomas Bender described this process in his book, Intellectuals and Public Life, recounting the shift from “civic” to “disciplinary” professionals. Service means, in these terms, what Donna Shalala said in a speech she gave in 1989 when president of the University of Wisconsin: The ideal [is] society’s best and brightest in service to its most needy, delivering the miracles of social science just as doctors cured juvenile rickets in the past.”

Such one-way interactions represented a change from earlier understandings of the “Wisconsin ideal” of the institution she headed, involving reciprocal connection to communities.

In 1997 the Kellogg Foundation invited our Center for Democracy and Citizenship to assess possibilities for strengthening the public mission of the University of Minnesota. We used the philosophy of public work developed through diverse partnerships including faculty and staff at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota in the early 1990s. In all the partnerships professionals made their work “more public,” meaning more open and visible, more collaborative, and more attentive to larger purposes. Public work philosophy shifts attention to the question of work itself. It poses citizens as co-creators or civic producers of democracy, not simply as consumers of government benefits or off-hours volunteers. This shifts democracy from elections to a way of life built by the everyday labors of citizens in a myriad of settings, including workplaces and institutions. It shifts politics from partisan warfare to public problem solving by citizens who learn to work across sharp differences to make a common life together. It addresses the morale crisis in professions by advancing the concept of citizen professionals. Appendix three is a chart used in African countries to show the connection between citizen professional and the meaning of democracy, by Marie Strӧm,

In the Kellogg study, Ed Fogelman, chair of the Political Science Department and I interviewed several dozen faculty members who were widely respected in different departments and colleges, who were seen to embody the ethos of their disciplines, and who were knowledgeable about the University of Minnesota’s history and operations. A public work approach allowed us to discuss incentive structures, disciplinary and departmental norms, and other cultural dimensions largely missing in most discussion of civic engagement.

The interviews surfaced a painful sense of loss of public purposes in jobs, professions and disciplines, and the whole institution. Faculty expressed alarm about turf wars, the intensifying competitive culture, the “star system,” and especially the incorporation of norms of detachment from the larger society, or “objectivity,” into virtually every field. “When I came to the University of Minnesota in 1959, the Political Science department gave students credit for working in the community and on political campaigns,” Charles Backstrom described.

I thought of my job description as including work with communities…the ‘Wisconsin idea’ of public universities [in which] the borders of the University were the borders of the state. I had examples of rising stars like John Bochert in Geography, who went on to become a world famous Regents Professor. John was working with communities to think through what factors made a small community grow and flourish or fail. John and I worked all around the state.

Backstrom observed what he called a “war of cultures” as soon as he arrived, with “pressure to focus only on publications.” He believed his public engagements were increasingly seen as compromising his scholarship. When I interviewed him in 1998, after his retirement party, he wondered whether his career had been a failure.

Across the University, faculty hungered for deeper and more reciprocal engagement with civic life outside but also felt powerless to change the incentive structures that discouraged public engagements. They rarely discussed these questions with their colleagues. I often thought of C. Wright Mills’ description, in The Sociological Imagination, of people in “mass society…gripped by personal troubles which they are not able to turn into social issues.”

We presented our findings to Robert Bruininks, then provost of the University and he created a task force on civic engagement, charged with renewing the public and citizen dimensions of all the disciplines. We held discussions across the state from 2000 to 2002, including with state legislators, Republican and Democratic. Steve Kelley, then Democratic state senator, chair of the higher education committee, argued: “The university gets public relations and public relationships confused. The problem the university faces is not public relations. It is the loss of public relationships.”

Over several years the Task Force made public and community scholarship more prominent. A new office of public engagement created incentives for public scholarship. We did not achieve the wide-ranging results we hoped for, coming up against the US News and World Report rankings whose variables discourage locally rooted citizenship. But one result had far ranging impact: Bill Doherty, a prominent faculty member involved in the Task Force, founded the Center for Citizen Professionalism to spread the concept.

Bringing professionals back to civic life

Against the grain of conventional professional preparation, Minnesota is rich with examples of “citizen professionalism.” Journalism has not escaped the plague of professional distance, but it has also resisted the problem far more than most fields. Minnesota has a rich history of public, civic, and community-centered reporting, what can be called also "Back to the people" journalism, in which journalists seek to give everyday citizens a voice, building community dialogue, and challenging top-down expertise. Prominent television, radio, and print journalists like Cathy Wurzer, Don Shelby, Mike Burbach, Lori Sturdevant and others have spent decades shaping this tradition. Appendix four lists examples.

Citizen professionals in recent years are also present in politics, against the grain. Jim Scheibel, then mayor of St. Paul, was a strong partner in our work with the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, supporting our youth citizen education initiative Public Achievement and giving advice and support in many other says. In Burnsville, Mayor Elizabeth Kautz exemplified an approach to governing which was “catalytic,” not delivering solutions and services. The account of her work is on the Hoover Institution website in my essay with Nan Kari, “Commonwealth of Freedom.” https://www.hoover.org/profiles/harry-c-boyte 

In academia, new intellectual resources for citizen professionals are appearing. Especially important is the transdisciplinary field of Civic Studies. Launched in 2007, Civic Studies challenges the notion that academics and professionals are outside observers rather than participants in civic life. As field cofounder Peter Levine puts it, “Scholars [are] citizens, engaged with others in creating [our] worlds . . . accountable for the actual results of their thoughts and not just the ideas themselves.” Several resources in Civic Studies are especially important from a citizen professional perspective.

The first is the research and theory of the late Elinor Ostrom. Her pathbreaking work with colleagues challenged the fatalistic assumption, dominant in academic literature before their work, that the “commons,” symbolic and material foundations for a shared life, were destined for “tragedy.” Ostrom and her colleagues around the world looked at actual cases of commons, including forest management, irrigation, inshore fisheries, and, more recently, the Internet. They found that decentralized governance with high civic participation has advantages over both centralized and unregulated approaches in terms of efficiency, sustainability, and equity. Ostrom argued for a mix of decentralized and centralized governance “where citizens are able to organize not just one but multiple governing authorities at different scales.” Such mixed systems may be messy, but in studies of local economies, they “significantly outperformed metropolitan areas served by a limited number of large-scale, unified governments.” In 2009, Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Two years before, in 2007, she cofounded Civic Studies, joining governance of the commons with public work. 

Beginning in 1987, the Center for Democracy and Citizenship and its predecessor, Project for Public Life, developed public work philosophy to address the challenges of privatization, eroding civic life, and the shrinking of democracy. The philosophy sees citizens as co-creators of a democratic way of life, not simply as consumers of benefits or helpers on the side. In this view, work and work sites are vital sites for civic contribution. Bill Doherty and colleagues at the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development picked up and further developed the framework. As Doherty put it, “The public work model argues for a new role for professionals in a democracy: catalyzing the efforts of ordinary citizens, with professional expertise ‘on tap, not on top.’” Years of work through the Citizen Professional Center included partnerships with many different groups—Native Americans concerned about diabetes, Black men wanting more positive portrayals of their roles as fathers, suburban families alarmed about hypercompetitive achievement cultures, and others. 

In 2016, Doherty addressed the problem of deepening polarization, co-founding Braver Angels and creating their process for depolarization. Doherty and his colleague Tai Mendenhall summarized their scholarship and case studies in Becoming a Citizen Therapist, which includes this idea of citizen professional: It “moves beyond the late twentieth century notion of the professional as a detached expert who informs other citizens but is not informed by them, who critiques social systems but does not act to change these systems, and who tends to see patients, clients, and communities in terms of their needs and not their assets, capacities for individual and collective action.”

In the Center’s work, the Jane Addams School for Democracy, a twenty-year partnership with new immigrants, renewed the older settlement house tradition of citizen professionalism based on working with others rather than working on them.

Jane Addams School for Democracy: A different kind of service

From 1996 to 2015, a partnership called the Jane Addams School for Democracy (JAS), inspired by the tradition of Hull House settlement in Chicago and citizenship schools of the civil rights movement generated shared power and democratic learning possibilities in the Twin Cities among new immigrants and college students from seven schools.

JAS was initiated by Nan Skelton, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, Nan Kari an associate of the CDC and professor at the College of St. Catherine, Sandy Fuller of Neighborhood House settlement, Seng Yang, See Moua and others from the Hmong community, and John Wallace of the University of Minnesota’s philosophy department. All played various roles as professionals who used their authority, skill and resources to create equal partnerships with Southeast Asian, East African and Latin American immigrants.

Over twenty years JAS involved several thousand college students and native-born adults in work and learning with thousands of new immigrants, including preparing many to pass the citizenship test. It was based on the pedagogical principle that “everyone is a teacher and everyone is a learner.” Of central importance, every student participating in JAS went through an orientation which stressed their experience would not be a traditional “service project” to help needy immigrants but a public work project in which they would learn with others. I thought of this as an introduction to careers as citizen professionals. As Nan Kari described, “learning associated with public work involves the co-construction of knowledge from multiple sources – lived experience, disciplinary knowledge from academic fields, as well as cultural knowledge.” Kari, a professor of occupational therapy at the College of St. Catherine, said she felt “both liberated and fascinated with the impact of wholehearted learning that acknowledges the fullness of the learners experience.” Jane Addams School had a commonwealth mission: “To free and cultivate the talents, cultures, and interests of ordinary people of diverse backgrounds and traditions in order to add their energy and wisdom to the common public wealth.” Eduardo Jurado, a new immigrant from Peru, explained that his ineligibility for voting for several years did not limit his public work for democracy. “In my country you pay a fine if you don’t vote. Here, people inherit this wonderful democracy…promoting democracy for those who are indifferent is crucial.”

The JAS orientation session taught high achieving, individualist, upwardly mobile college students that they were not doing service projects to “help the needy,” but public work of many kinds throughout the West Side neighborhood. Many students in JAS also had experience coaching the youth civic empowerment initiative developed by our Center in partnership with Jim Scheibel when he was mayor called “Public Achievement,” which develops young people’s civic agency as they work in teams on public work projects of their choosing, from community gardens to efforts against bullying.

Both involvement in JAS and in Public Achievement had strong impacts on students as well as positive benefits for immigrants, as I saw among my students at Humphrey. They prompted sometimes profound reflections about the meaning of success, the importance of family and community, the nature of democracy and the nature and purpose of work, with immigrants often serving as the teachers. “What struck us most forcibly was the clarity and seemingly higher value many new immigrants place on the ideals of freedom and democracy,” said Kari and Nan Skelton. “For them the ideas are attainable, tangible and worth risking everything.” Meanwhile immigrant young people, caught between culture of elders and pressures of American culture, found they could integrate contending messages. “I don’t have to choose between being Hmong and being American,” said one. “I am Hmong-American.”

Learning pairs, story circles, cultural exchanges, work in a nearby urban garden, and projects like a national campaign for passage of the Hmong Veterans’ Recognition Bill created a vibrant culture of discussion and public work. For some students, it was life changing. Terri Wilson, then student at the University of Minnesota who got her graduate degree at Columbia and is now a professor at the University of Colorado, reflected on her several years involvement at JAS. “When I first came to Jane Addams [School] I thought of it as a place to connect the political philosophy I was studying to real and meaningful experiences,” she said. “This experience – connecting ideas to work – is still so important. But [other] qualities of this experience are what have captured my time, commitment [and] passion.” Most important was the enlarged sense of purpose. “The structure of Jane Addams [School] has given me space and the responsibility to do things I never thought I could do, like be a leader and facilitator, share laughter with a 74-year-old woman across language and culture.” Wilson concluded that “The space of Jane Addams is a space where my contributions are seen as valuable; a space that recognizes rather than overlooks people’s diverse talents and creativity.” JAS created experiences of what we call generative power, power with others and power to create, nor power over others. It also used everyday politics, negotiation of differences. “With such immense diversity in JAS, the only way it works is for people to learn a different kind of politics to negotiate different interests and perspectives,” said Kari.

Citizen Professionalism: From Expert on Top to Expert on Tap

Citizen professionalism challenges the dominant model of professional identity. It allows us to see ourselves “first as a citizen with special expertise working alongside other citizens with their own expertise in order to solve community problems that require everyone’s efforts,” as Doherty described. Traditionally, professionals are trained as outside experts who diagnose problems and provide solutions for clients. Expertise remains important, but this framework can unintentionally reinforce dependency and hierarchy. Citizen professionalism puts experts “on tap not on top.”

Renewing citizenship professionalism is crucial to a broad movement for courageous citizenship. Several members of the Civic Scholars Council are already committed to the idea.

It is challenging but also a work for our time.

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¹ I draw on several sources: Community Is Possible: Repairing America’s Roots Harper & Row, 1984;  CommonWealth, Free Press, 1989, Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life University of Pennsylvania 2004; and The Citizen Solution, the Minnesota Historical Society, 2009; Awakening Democracy through Public WorK, Vanderbilt 2018. I also use my lecture, “The Making of Citizen Journalists,” at Ball State University, September 24, 2026, and an essay coauthored with Trygve Throntveit, “Reclaiming Citizenship,” forthcoming in the Christian Science Monitor Weekly Print Edition.

Appendix One Braver Angels Civic Scholars Council Courageous Citizenship Papers

Follow the link to read all the papers in this collection.

Appendix Two: Growing skepticism toward citizen (Google)

When did the word "citizen" begin becoming a negative word among educators, city managers, city planners, health providers, media leaders and other progressive professionals?

The shift away from the word "citizen" toward more inclusive alternatives began gaining significant momentum in the mid-to-late 2010s, specifically around 2015 to 2017.

During this period, progressive professionals—including educators, city managers, healthcare providers, and media leaders—increasingly viewed the term as exclusionary, nationalistic, and legally restrictive. Style guides and internal language policies across these sectors began quietly removing "citizen" to avoid alienating non-citizen immigrants, undocumented individuals, and marginalized communities.

Los Angeles Review of Books

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐

│ THE LANGUAGE SHIFT │

│ Legacy Term │ Progressive Replacement │

│ Resident │ Citizen │ Community Member │

│ Citizen │ Neighbor │

│ Citizen Engagement │ Public Engagement │

The evolution of this linguistic shift spans several key phases and sectors:

Timeline of the Linguistic Shift

• Early Roots (1970s–1990s): Initial academic and feminist critiques argued that "citizenship" historically separated the public and private spheres, implicitly favoring a specific demographic while ignoring marginalized groups.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy +1

• The Tipping Point (2015–2017): Spurred by heightened national debates around immigration, deportation, and borders, social change organizations and prominent media columnists began publicly questioning the word's utility. A notable Los Angeles Review of Books essay in 2017 tracked how institutional style guides were actively purging the word to preserve inclusivity.
• Institutional Codification (2020–Present): City councils, public health departments, and major university systems officially banned or discouraged the term in public-facing documents, cementing the transition from "citizen" to "resident" or "constituent."

Sector-Specific Motivations

City Management & Urban Planning

Local governments shifted from "citizen engagement" to "civic engagement" or "community participation". City managers recognized that a significant portion of tax-paying municipal residents were green-card holders or undocumented immigrants. Using "citizen" was seen as a barrier to receiving full feedback on public transit, zoning, and neighborhood safety infrastructure.

ScienceDirect.com

Education & Academia

Educators and public school districts moved away from the phrase "good citizen" to prevent alienating students from immigrant or mixed-status families. Instead, the K-12 and university sectors adopted terms like "global changemaker," "community member," or "scholar" to foster a sense of belonging for all students, regardless of legal status.

Healthcare Providers

In public health, the phrase "citizen" was flagged as a barrier to equity. Health professionals noted that undocumented populations might avoid public clinics, vaccination drives, or mental health resources if communication materials relied heavily on citizenship-coded language. They swapped the term for "patients," "clients," or "community members."

Media & Progressive Advocacy

Many media leaders and progressive non-profits altered their internal terminology because "citizen" implies a strict legal status granted by the state. To describe grassroots organizing or human rights advocacy, writers shifted toward terms like "denizen," "people," or "the public" to prevent reinforcing legal borders in social justice contexts.

Appendix Three: From democratic state to democratic society

Marie Ström (Institute for Democracy in South Africa, 2006), Harry Boyte (BA Civic Scholars Council, 2026)

Appendix Four

Citizen (Back to the People) Journalists in Minnesota history (Google)

Minnesota has a rich history of public, civic, and community-centric reporting. "Back to the people" journalism in the state is defined by a commitment to giving everyday citizens a voice, building community dialogue, and challenging top-down expertise. Prominent television, radio, and print icons like Cathy Wurzer, Don Shelby, Mike Burbach, and Lori Sturdevant have spent decades shaping this tradition alongside trailblazing Black, Indigenous, and ethnic journalists who established crucial independent community forums.

Here is a list of print, radio, and television journalists in Minnesota history who exemplify the "back to the people" philosophy, organized by their core impact areas.

Icons & Public Affairs Leaders

Cathy Wurzer (Radio/TV): As the host of MPR News Morning Edition and Twin Cities PBS's Almanac, Wurzer connects deeply with Minnesotans across rural and urban landscapes to ground statewide policy issues in everyday human experiences.

Don Shelby (TV/Radio): A legendary longtime anchor for WCCO-TV, Shelby pioneered investigative environmental reporting and community-engaged advocacy journalism, frequently bringing citizen concerns straight to local authorities.

Mike Burbach (Print): (Often referenced colloquially as "Bob Burback") Burbach served as the executive editor and vice president of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, fiercely steering the newsroom through major structural shifts while protecting its focus on local opinion, civic forums, and hyper-local storytelling.

Lori Sturdevant (Print): A distinguished retired columnist and author for the Star Tribune, Sturdevant spent decades traveling the state to analyze public policy and write about the intersection of grassroots citizens and state government.

Racial & Ethnic Pioneer Journalists

Cecil Newman (Print): A true giant of the Black press, Newman founded the Minneapolis Spokesman and St. Paul Recorder (now combined as the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder) during the Great Depression. He used his platform to unceasingly expose job discrimination and advocate for Civil Rights.

John Quincy Adams (Print): From 1885 to 1922, Adams was the editor and publisher of The Appeal, a foundational St. Paul-based African American weekly that grew into a massive regional voice for Black business owners and citizen organizing.

Marvel Jackson Cooke (Print): Born in Mankato, Cooke broke barriers as a pioneering African American woman journalist, working closely with labor and civil rights movements to amplify marginalized worker struggles.

Tracey Williams-Dillard (Print): As the current CEO and publisher of the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, Williams-Dillard carries on the "voice for the voiceless" legacy established by her grandfather, Cecil Newman.

Georgia Fort (Broadcast/Digital): A recent Emmy-nominated reporter and Bush Fellow, Fort founded BLCK Press to empower a new generation of diverse storytellers and bring true representation to community-level journalism across the Twin Cities.

Civic & Public Insight Journalism Innovators

Leonard Witt (Print/Radio): A key modern architect of Minnesota's civic journalism movement, Witt served as the editor of the Star Tribune Sunday Magazine and Minnesota Monthly before becoming executive director of Minnesota Public Radio's Civic Journalism Initiative.

Gary Eichten (Radio): The beloved, longtime host of MPR's Midday, Eichten regularly turned the airwaves over to everyday citizens, anchoring live radio summits and town halls that forced state politicians to answer public questions directly.

Michael Skoler (Radio): As a former managing director of news at MPR, Skoler pioneered the concept of "Public Insight Journalism" and built the Public Insight Network, treating the listening audience as active knowledge partners rather than mere consumers.

Joel Kramer (Print): The former editor and publisher of the Star Tribune who went on to found MinnPost, a reader-supported, non-profit digital news site built to keep serious civic and community public policy reporting alive.