A tale of two brothers
Monday, May 8, 2006
(The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation)For Dan and Don Blom, brothers who are
attending the Spring 2006 Harwood Public
Innovators Lab, engaging in public life and
politics is something that is part of their
DNA.
Dan, a civic engagement consultant
leading the effort to create a new community
organization to foster public participation in
public issues in Kansas City, Missouri, and his
older brother Don, the associate executive
director of the National School Boards
Association, are both coming to the Lab with
their own unique challenges. What they share in
common is the pathway that has led them to join
The Harwood Institute in Baltimore May
21.
The Blom brothers were raised in the
small Midwestern town of Logansport, Indiana
– an old railroad town situated on the banks
of the Wabash River and home to a hand-carved
Gustav Dentzel Carousel, a national historic
landmark. A sense of duty was instilled in them
early on; their great-grandfather founded a
small newspaper, and their mother left an
indelible mark on their lives.
"Our
mother was a quintessential volunteer, but in a
quiet way,” Dan said.
Dan was several
years younger than his brother and often looked
up to him. During school, he followed in his
footsteps. Both brothers, for example, were
heavily involved in the Indianapolis-based Key
Club International, the oldest and largest
service organization for high school students
in the world.
“I was basically
involved because of Don,” Dan said. “We are
probably the only brothers to ever both serve
on the international board,” added
Don.
In 1961, Don went from school
straight into working for associations, which
at the time was unusual, and eventually worked
his way into a leadership position with the
National School Boards Association in
Alexandria, Virginia. Dan chose a career in
journalism and ultimately found his way to
Kansas City, Missouri.
It was during
his journalism career that Dan first interacted
with Rich Harwood, who then was president of
the for-profit Harwood Group. Harwood was
leading journalists from major newspapers
around the country in an initiative called the
Journalism Values Institute.
Dan later
reconnected with Rich and The Harwood Institute
when the Institute launched a partnership with
the William Allen White School of Journalism
and Mass Communications at the University of
Kansas, to harvest the Institute’s knowledge
of covering communities and create tools that
can be used in both the journalism classroom
and in newsrooms. Dan was taking a class with
Peggy Kuhr, the Knight Chair of Journalism and
head of the partnership initiative for
KU.
Dan is now based out of Kansas
City’s Mid-American Regional Council and is
working to create a new organization that will
foster norms for meaningful civic engagement
throughout the community.
He said he
hopes the Public Innovators Lab will help his
partners and him create a community culture
that makes engagement a part of the way people
do their public business. “Our partners
determined that the problem in the community is
the closely held decision making,” he said.
“There is plenty of public participation in
many of the neighborhoods on neighborhood
issues, but the public is excluded from
decisions that have broader scope. The
community is missing an ethic of participation
that would cause decision makers to think first
about how to get public participation early in
the process. The public doesn’t see a path of
influence except to complain and
confront.”
Dan added that the Lab will
allow him to take advantage of other people’s
experiences and insights. “No point in us
feeling our way along a path that’s been
carved out over the last 15 or 20 years,” he
said.
For his part, Don only became
aware of The Harwood Institute’s work a few
years ago but was then able to meet Rich
Harwood when he spoke at NSBA’s annual
conference this past April.
At that
time, Dan had already registered for the Lab,
and through their conversation, Rich and Don
were able to “connect the dots.” In fact,
because Don lives in the D.C. metro area, Dan
was actually planning to stay with him and
commute to and from the Lab site in Baltimore.
Among Don’s myriad responsibilities,
he is working to build up a new program at
NSBA, the Center for Public Education.
“Currently it is essentially a Web site, but
the goal is to create a very rich program that
will have as its core purpose developing a
broader base of support for public education
among the general population,” he
said.
One of the key ways to increase
this support is to foster more engaged school
boards. The challenge in his work, Don said, is
moving beyond the initial excitement that
“big bang” events might cause and actually
getting people to dig down and think deeply
about their efforts to work with the
public.
“We have a lot of Rich
Harwoods come out and speak from time to time,
and that invigorates people,” he said. “But
that’s not enough. You have this great myth
that school boards are connecting with their
communities … our challenge is learning to
help school boards engage their communities
effectively – not just in ways that sound
good but in ways that actually
work.”
Dan and Don both agreed that
moving from broad ideas to implementation is
often much more difficult than it seems. For
example, Dan said, “no one would argue with
our mission statement. They’re great
platitudes.”
The Harwood Public
Innovators Lab will take place May 21-25 at the
Pier 5 Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland’s
historic Inner Harbor District. If you would
like to attend as a late registrant, please
contact Mike Wood of The Harwood Institute
directly at mwood@theharwoodinstitute.org
or 301-656-3669.