Cay Borduin said she thinks there are too few people interested and involved in politics. Instead of complaining about the lack of involvement, she acted on it.
In January 2005, Borduin, her husband Scott Borduin and their associate Mick Mortlock founded Democracy Talking, a nonprofit organization focused on educating people about politics and getting people involved in local democracy.
”There just aren’t enough people involved,” Borduin said. “Our whole objective is to get people involved in the democracy. If people don’t step forward, it’s not going to happen.”
The organization orchestrates the formation of “democracy circles,” groups where people within the community gather to discuss the details of local political issues, and what they can do to get involved, according to Borduin.
”What it really takes is for more highly motivated individuals to step forward and say, ‘I really want this to happen,’ and they form a group out of their acquaintances,” Borduin said.
Borduin said that anyone could start a democracy circle in their community. For no charge, interested individuals will be provided with a course and training on how to run their democracy circle.
The course was developed after the organization ran several pilot projects in the summer of 2005. “One thing we discovered from that was that the level of knowledge to have a discussion about what our government was up to, and what politics was up to, was lower than we had hoped,” Borduin said.
A Democracy Talking discussion course, Political Malaise, involves about an hour of reading for each individual before the first meeting of the circle and six sessions (six weeks) of discussion. “They get to know each other and they learn a whole lot of basic stuff,” Borduin said.
Borduin said the discussions often lead to a lot of participants expressing the fact that they are unhappy with politics. “It just looks like a big mess. Everybody is angry, everybody is partisan,” she said.
”We really think being nonpartisan is the best way to do the kind of work we want to do – of getting people involved,” Borduin said. The Political Malaise course does not focus on the ideas of Democrats or Republicans, but instead includes data and published articles from a variety of organizations and groups, so that a large cross-section of viewpoints is expressed.
”This doesn’t go into what the Democrats and the Republicans are thinking. It talks about how the government system works. How is money really fueling our government right now? How does the media really interact and share information with us about government and all elements of society? It is about the basic underpinnings, and how the system works,” Borduin said.
Borduin and her associates created the structure of their courses using the example set by another organization, the Northwest Earth Institute. She said they met with the founders of the institute, which has been in Portland for over 10 years, and discussed how to establish Democracy Talking.
Though they have been in existence since 2005, Democracy Talking recently had their “kick off” event, according to Borduin. The group held an event open to the public at the Governor Hotel on Sept. 21, where Scott sat on a panel with former and current Oregon politicians, discussing the place of democracy in Oregon.
Democracy Talking is currently still organizing and training facilitators to start democracy circles in the Portland-metro area this fall.
Borduin said she hopes that in the future, Democracy Talking will be given the opportunity to branch out in a way similar to the Northwest Earth Institute. “The way they grew, and I hope this is the way we grow, was in some cases taking advantage of situations that occurred,” Borduin said, adding that people farther away approached the Northwest Earth Institute wanting to become involved, enabling them to branch out.
For now, Borduin said she hopes for a more opportunistic, rather than deliberate growth for Democracy Talking. In the future, she said a more strategic plan might develop.
Visit www.democracytalking.org for additional information.