How You Can Get
Involved
It is a truism of our society that
many (if not most) citizens, across the political spectrum, believe
that our democratic processes could and should work so much better
than they now do. The goal of the Civic Union is to validate that
belief by educating citizens about the feasibility of real change,
and then channeling that belief into a grassroots movement for
implementation of the Civic Foundation's program.
This process begins by showing how
what seems to be the most difficult part of the program - the
quantification of agency performance - is in fact well underway, at
the federal, state, and local level, across the country and,
indeed, throughout the world.
Organizations as staid as the
Governmental Accounting Standards Board have called the idea of
governmental performance measurement "an idea whose time has come",
yet there is a distinct lack of public knowledge about what that
means and how it works. That is because citizens now have no direct
incentive to review such information, and almost zero incentive to
compare different performance results among different agencies -
and that is because they have no way to act on that information,
other than through the existing channels of voting for
representatives who oversee the agencies in question (along with
dozens of other agencies). With no ability to influence the
process, it is no wonder citizens have little knowledge about
it.
The best way to create interest in,
and demand for, citizen involvement in the performance measure
process is to compile and standardize this kind of information - a
kind of Consumers Union® for taxpayers. (After all, it may be
harder to rate child welfare agencies than to rate new cars, but
what, ultimately, is more important?) To do this, the Civic Union
will collect as much existing performance measure data as possible,
including the performance measures themselves and the results of
the measurements. We will then use that information to educate
citizens about what their agencies are already doing - sparking
demand for more accountability from the agencies that do not
participate, more appropriate measures from agencies that do not
measure well, and better actual results from those agencies that
are already measuring the right things.
The Civic Union will also (1) show
citizens that the implementation of the rest of the Civic Exchange
system is feasible within today's financial, accounting, and tax
systems, (2) work with existing nonprofits and to show that that
the system is an opportunity, not a threat, and (3) work with
financial institutions to structure pilot programs and develop the
appropriate market mechanisms to implement the Exchange.
And while new legislation is not
necessary for pilot and demonstration programs, the Civic Union
will also work for adoption of the necessary implementing
legislation at various levels of government. The legislation would
(1) authorize agencies to register with the Exchange under
specified conditions and (2) allow for citizens to direct their tax
payments to registered agencies. It is a truism that change does
not happen without clear popular support, but that is doubly true
where, as here, the change involves getting legislators to give up
some of their existing power to spend taxpayer's money.