Impact Broward
a Community Conversation
Create a More Vibrant Broward
A severe recession and the collapse of the housing market, civic health is ailing in Broward County, one of Florida's leading public policy experts told the packed house at Impact Broward on February 11. click here to see photos from the event
The county ranks last in community engagement among major metropolitan areas in the United States. Florida itself falls near the bottom in every discernible measure of civic health like voting and volunteering, according to Dr. Douglas Dobson, executive director of the University of Central Florida’s Lou Frey Institute of Politics and Government.
That’s the bad news. The good new is that Broward County has a wellspring of educated, civic-minded citizens that many other communities lack: baby boomers and new retirees who are among the most socially active demographic groups.
“Education makes a difference: well-educated citizens are more likely to be engaged in their communities," Dobson said. "They’re more likely to volunteer and more likely to be involved in governance, more likely to work with their neighbors to help find solutions to community issue.
"And seniors citizens tend to be the most educated and the most involved – an area that can be mined for even more civic engagement by finding citizens who are not yet involved and engaging them,'' Dobson said.
That thinking is at the core of the Foundation’s “Re-Engage for Good” program, an innovative effort to recruit the community’s newly retiring citizens, tap into their experience, and steer them toward efforts to improve Broward.
The key, said Dobson, is to find these citizens before they leave Florida in an exodus that could endanger the state’s already dire civic health. Boomers are the generation that volunteered, engaged, and helped change many of their communities. They are essential to spreading that ethic to the next generation.
Dobson is one of the authors of the 2009 Civic Health Index Report, part of an annual effort by the Frey Institute and the Bob Graham Center for Public Service at the University of Florida to chart the condition of Florida's civic life and stimulate efforts to improve it. His appearance was the latest of the Impact Broward Community Conversations, an effort to bring local leaders together to find solutions for stimulating engagement among citizens.
“If we’re even able to double the numbers of those involved in the community we can accomplish so much more,” Foundation President and CEO Linda Carter Linda Carter told some 50 community leaders gathered at the Riverside Hotel to hear Dobson speak on February 11th. “We’ll gain a better understanding of the problems, find new solutions, and take control of the civic destiny of Broward County and Florida.”
That is no small task. Among the 50 states, Florida ranks 49th in terms of the percentage of citizens who volunteer for charity or other social service work, according to Dobson. It ranks 48th in the nation in the number of residents who attend public meetings, and 34th in voter turnout for elections.
Finally, the number of Floridians who said they worked with other citizens to solve a community problem was low enough to leave the Sunshine State in 37th place for that measure.
And Broward County residents are among the least engaged in one of the least community-minded states in the nation. Miami–Ft. Lauderdale ranked 50th among the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas on three key civic indicators – volunteering, attending public meetings, and working with others in the community.
The news is so bad that Dobson likened himself to a “Dr. Doom."
“Taken together, if Florida were a patient in a hospital for civic health, it would probably be in the intensive care unit,” he added.
While larger metropolitan areas like Broward County have taken a “double hit” economically from the drop in real estate and rising unemployment, that doesn’t fully explain Broward’s lack of a connection between citizens and their government, Dobson said.
Local leaders at the meeting, who disagreed on the level of engagement they see in their communities, nevertheless cited the transience of many residents throughout the region, describing a lack of rootedness even among natives that discourages participation.
"We’re challenged every day to get people more involved, to get them to come to civic meetings, and engaged with problem solving," said Anne Castro, the mayor of Dania Beach. "There's not a strong sense of identity here, and even in this county we have many different cities, different forms of municipal government. There's not a strong sense of unity."
The news isn't all bad, Dobson said. Forty-six percent of respondents told his researchers that they had increased their civic engagement as a result of the economic turmoil.
"All of these problems are solvable," he added. "What's essential is that groups like this, the Community Foundation of Broward, continue to meet and find new ways to stimulate involvement among citizens."
The Community Foundation of Broward thanks our generous partner AutoNation for their support of Impact Broward.
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