Meet the New Boss: You

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If you want to change the world, start sitting in on county board meetings -- and leave your protest signs at home. That's the advice of Matt Leighninger, who has attended enough school board meetings, city council hearings, and neighborhood gatherings to leave even the most energetic grassroots activist awestruck.

Leighninger is a local government triage worker -- a facilitator called in by nonprofit organizations and government units to help solve problems in communities across the nation. In the past decade, he's helped citizens and local politicians hash out zoning ordinances, launch new schools, and fight crime -- and he's noticed a dramatic shift in the relationships between citizens and their government: Instead of leaving policy and lawmaking to the 'experts,' average Joes and Janes are engaged in the hands-on work of building bike trails, writing education policy, and reforming health care plans.

'Culturally, people are more skeptical and less likely to blindly accept authority,' says Leighninger. 'But it's a funny kind of combination that I'm seeing out there. Citizens have less time for public life, but they bring more skills to the table; they're less connected to their community, but they're better able to mobilize and find the resources they need to make change; they feel somewhat more entitled to what government has to give them, but less confident in government's ability to deliver.'

This shift to what Leighninger calls 'shared governance' emerged from a grassroots, ad hoc desire for a new kind of inclusive politics, and he caught the first whiff of its significance at a mayor's forum in Lakewood, Colorado, where a citizen snapped: 'What we've got here is a parent-child relationship between the government and the people. What we need is an adult-adult relationship.'

In Leighninger's book, The Next Form of Democracy (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), he argues that anyone who wants to make change had better understand this new age of adult conversation. Traditionally, politics has been a game of confrontation and negotiation. Community organizers rallied the politically disenfranchised to confront power and compel negotiation: In the words of Saul Alinsky, whose Rules for Radicals is the bible of community organizing, the goal is to help 'the Have-Nots to take power away from the Haves.'

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