Democracy is in crisis around the world. At this crucial time, the Kettering Foundation welcomes a new leader to the work of strengthening the power of citizens. |
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Sharon L. Davies to Lead Charles F. Kettering Foundation
Former Spelman College Provost, Led Kirwan Institute at Ohio State
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The following is a lightly edited version of a press release that the Kettering Foundation sent to the media and members of our network March 21.
The Board of Directors of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation has chosen Sharon L. Davies, J.D., as its president and chief executive officer. This is the first change in leadership since 1981. David Mathews, the current CEO and president of the Kettering Foundation, will become president emeritus when Davies begins in April.
The Kettering Foundation was founded in 1927 by Charles F. Kettering, noted inventor and philanthropist, who received a degree in engineering from The Ohio State University. Davies brings to her new role broad experience in academic, public service and the non-profit spheres. She held a variety of leadership posts at Ohio State during 22 years of service on the faculty of the Moritz College of Law, including as associate dean of the law school, executive director of The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & Ethnicity and vice provost for diversity and inclusion and chief diversity officer for the university.
At Moritz, Davies held the Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, named in honor of the law school’s first African American dean. At the Kirwan Institute, named after former OSU president William “Brit” Kirwan, she led multidisciplinary research for communities located around the country to promote civic engagement and increase understanding of barriers to social and economic well-being. Davies left Ohio State in 2017 to become provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Spelman College, a historically black college for women in Atlanta. She remained in that post for four years until last fall.
“It is an honor to build on the legacy of David Mathews, who has firmly established the Kettering Foundation among the ranks of the nation’s finest operating foundations, with a distinctive agenda for strengthening public democracy,” Davies said. “It is hard to imagine more important work than ennobling the role of citizens in their own self-governance at this particular moment in global affairs. Throughout his life, Charles F. Kettering modeled good citizenship and the importance of innovative and open-minded engagement in the great challenges of his time. To have the opportunity to lead the foundation that he began almost 100 years ago is a personal and professional privilege for me.”
Davies was born in Springfield, Mass., and grew up in South Deerfield, Mass. She has an undergraduate degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a law degree from Columbia University School of Law. Before becoming a law professor, Davies worked as an assistant U.S. attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York.
She is also an accomplished writer and public speaker. Her work includes “Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race, and Religion in America” which recounts a 1920s religiously motivated murder that occurred in Birmingham, Alabama. Davies has two adult children.
“After an exhaustive search, the Kettering Foundation Board of Directors is delighted that Sharon Davies will lead the organization at this critical moment for democracy,” said the chair of the Kettering Foundation Board of Directors, Sherry Magill. “She thinks creatively and in the most practical terms about problems facing democracy for communities, the nation at large and internationally. We are excited to see her bring her vision and energy as she leads the Kettering Foundation’s efforts to understand how democracy might work as it should, for everyone.”
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March Dayton Days: A Talk about William James and Democracy |
Our speaker for March Dayton Days, Trygve Throntveit, is director of Strategic Partnerships at the Minnesota Humanities Center, global fellow for history and public policy at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, cofounder and director of the Institute for Public Life and Work. He teaches history at Minnesota State University-Mankato.
In our conversation, Throntveit spoke of the perspective of 19th-century psychologist and philosopher William James, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience. James believed that science was limited in its ability to help humanity find the answers to some important questions. Both “James and John Dewey saw uncertainty, at its center, as a liberation,” Throntveit said. Yet James was also a pragmatist. He wanted to expose and break down impediments to democracy and believed in the ability of a democratic approach to collaborate across differences. “If the world is not fixed and if decisions have consequences—if it is not as it should be—then it can be changed by human beings,” Throntveit said. James' view, said Throntveit , was that everyone could play a role in bringing about change. Dewey and James, and later, President Woodrow Wilson, believed that aggrandizing behavior stymied the development of knowledge and moral development. “By excluding the views of others, the powerful blinded themselves to the consequences of their own behavior. The solution was to engage them more deeply in working across differences,” Throntveit said.
Throntveit made connections between these ideas and David Mathews’ books Together and With. “People are both centers of power but share physical and social space with others and so have social obligations. And institutions are collections of people doing things together,” he said. Narrating democracy in these terms encourages solutions for all of us, not just a powerful elite.
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Kettering senior associate John Doble’s play, ESP, was one of six plays selected for a live staged reading at Urban Stages in New York City on March 5 and 6. The play is part of a project called the Acronym Plays. Written during the pandemic, these plays use one or more acronyms in the body of their 10-minute scripts or were inspired by an acronym that served as the springboard for the play.
The National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) has brought back its popular Learning Circles. On Wednesday, March 9, round one kicked off with a focus on civic infrastructure and asset-based community development. The session was moderated by Matt Leighninger, head of Democracy Innovation with NCoD. Guests included Kettering senior associate John McKnight and Howard University law professor Harold McDougall. They discussed civic infrastructure as the scaffolding that provides all the ways people engage in public life and how people and their organizations can work together to strengthen it. To view a recording of this event, click here.
Kettering senior associate Maura Casey spoke to journalism students and faculty members at Northern Kentucky University in Covington, Kentucky, on March 14 at the invitation of the Scripps Howard Center for Civic Engagement. Casey discussed the journalism research the Kettering Foundation is engaged in with journalists across the country. She described innovations in reporting and writing stories in ways that increase trust in the media, reduce polarization, help citizens connect with one another, and help them see that they have a role to play in strengthening democracy.
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On March 18, the Kettering Foundation and National Issues Forums Institute were both mentioned in a talk held by the US National Archives called “Working for Suffrage: How Class and Race Shaped the U.S. Suffrage Movement.” The panel was moderated by Page Harrington, former executive director of the National Woman’s Party at the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument in Washington, DC. She spoke about the Historic Decisions issue guide Woman Suffrage and the Great War. As she explained in the presentation, “These issue guides are geared toward adults, and they help to foster the development of deliberative democratic skills through examining the difficult choices Americans faced in the past and linking them to contemporary issues.” To watch the presentation, click here.
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Webinar on Together: Building Better, Stronger Communities
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On March 3, Kettering Foundation associate Cristin Brawner organized a webinar for Initiatives for Democratic Practices around the country. About 30 people attended. The webinar focused on David Mathews’ new book, Together: Building Better, Stronger Communities and how people are using the book to engage communities and citizens. Panelists Ike Adams, Rachel Mosness, Lisa-Marie Napoli, and Erin Oeth discussed how they used Together in reading groups in their own communities. They shared how reading the book with other citizens helped them shift to a learning and experimentation mind-set.
After the panel discussion, leaders of Initiatives for Democratic Practices asked questions and discussed ideas for using Together in their own contexts. You can view the webinar recording here. If you are interested in starting a Together reading group in your community or institution, please reach out to Kettering Foundation program officer Elizabeth Gish at egish@kettering.org.
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New Language Research: Can We Avoid Talking Past One Another? |
Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE) is a member-centric philanthropic laboratory for funders seeking to maximize their impact on democracy and civic life in the United States. PACE’s Language Perceptions Project seeks to understand peoples’ perceptions of the language associated with “civic engagement and democracy” work.
At best, are we talking past each other? At worst, are we furthering divisions and/or disengagement? In 2019, PACE took its first steps of exploration on this topic; since then, the world has changed, the need to understand has grown, and the questions about what we should do have become more urgent. In partnership with Citizen Data, the Rita Allen Foundation, and the Kettering Foundation, PACE fielded a nationally representative survey in November 2021 to poll 21 terms commonly used in “civic engagement and democracy” work and to understand how people perceive and associate them.
On Wednesday, March 23, PACE publicly released this data, early findings, and ways to participate in future phases of this project. The event was hosted in partnership with the National Conference on Citizenship’s Learning Circles initiative. To watch a recording, click here.
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NIFI Fostering Ongoing Learning and Collaboration |
More than 180 people from 143 organizations in 43 states and several other countries participated in the National Issues Forums Institute’s workshop on February 17 on moderating deliberative discussions in communities, on campuses, and in classrooms—in both in-person and online settings. The workshop served as an introduction for new moderators and as a refresher and deeper dive for those who are experienced. In addition to providing an overview of what has been learned about effective moderator practices, a wide range of materials were shared that can be adapted for use in locally organized workshops.
Participants explored insights gathered from practitioners throughout the National Issues Forums network in a format designed to increase learning from each other’s work. Experienced moderators from the NIF network led small-group breakout discussions to provide time for reflection, discussion, and deeper exploration. Although not all who registered were able to attend the workshop, NIFI is following up with each of the more than 350 who registered to offer a range of future workshops and provide resources to support their local work.
The online workshop can be viewed here and below, and slides and materials for local use can be downloaded here. If you would like to participate in future online learning opportunities, please complete this brief (two-minute) survey to indicate areas of greatest interest.
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News from Initiatives for Democratic Practice |
The Chronicle of Philanthropy has published a new article that highlights Kettering research from the report Beyond the Clash: How a Deliberative Public Talks about Immigration. This report, written by Kettering senior associate Keith Melville, focuses on the 2018 National Issues Forums on immigration. It offers a powerful demonstration that typical Americans with differing views can exchange ideas on immigration and that, as they listen to one another, their views become more nuanced and pragmatic.
The author of the article, Wendy Feliz, attended the Washington DC release of the report. She makes the case that “philanthropy and the movement for immigrant justice must invest in work that shifts culture at least as much as labor to shape immigration policy itself,” and one way to do that is by gathering “people with diverse ideas about immigration to talk.”
From the article:
It’s effective to hold problem-solving conversations in community settings that feel safe and respectful of divergent views but focus on advancing common-ground solutions. The Kettering Foundation, for example, hosted a series of 86 immigration forums in 28 states before the pandemic, asking participants to consider options for addressing immigration and to spell out concrete actions and trade-offs. The foundation described the forums as a “powerful demonstration that typical Americans with differing views can exchange ideas on immigration and that, as they listen to one another, their views [can] become more nuanced and pragmatic.”
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Coming Soon: With: A Strategy for Renewing Our Democracy
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Most Americans now agree that democracy is in extremely serious trouble in a divided United States and worldwide as authoritarian regimes contest its value. However, there is absolutely no agreement on what is causing democracy’s problems in our country or what to do about them.
The latest book from the Kettering Foundation Press responds to this turmoil. With: A Strategy for Renewing Our Democracy was written by David Mathews, long-time president of the Kettering Foundation, who was also secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Ford administration and president of the University of Alabama. Although With doesn’t promise solutions to all our problems, it does offer a different way of thinking about renewing our democracy. Maybe Abraham Lincoln’s ideal of government of, by, and for the people needs another preposition. Perhaps all the institutions involved in governing the country should work more with the people, seeing them not just as voters and volunteers in good causes, but also as citizens who are producers of much that makes life better for everyone. Americans have underused abilities and untapped resources that they can employ to make the difference they don’t think they have the power to make now.
Our governing institutions range from those in the three branches of government to nongovernmental ones in such fields as medicine and education, and in the media. The public lacks confidence in nearly all these institutions; despite their professional expertise, many people don’t trust them.
The book includes actual cases in which there were opportunities for institutions to benefit from what citizens as independent producers could provide. However, these opportunities weren’t always acted on. A with strategy faces obstacles, and the book is candid about them. What With has to offer isn’t a message about what should happen, but a pragmatic assessment of what Americans can do now, where they are, and with what they have.
A limited run of advance copies of With is now available. If you are interested in using the new book, please reach out to withbook@kettering.org.
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See KF or NIF in the news? Please let us know. |
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We try to cast a wide net in seeking out how people share what they learn through their exchanges with the Kettering Foundation, but we are bound to miss some things. That's where you come in. We would love to hear about experiments you are trying, connections you are making, references in which you may have mentioned the foundation, or actions that further our shared work. Please send information to newsandnotes@kettering.org.
Sincerely,
The News & Notes Team
Maura Casey, Melinda Gilmore, and Kenny McGuane
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