Hello.

I'm April Chatham-Carpenter.

and I'm Glen white.

And I'm Glen White.

Welcome to A Braver Arkansas, where we explore how Arkansans are talking across differences, strengthening relationships, and working together to solve the challenges facing our communities.

We believe a stronger Arkansas is built.

One conversation, one relationship, and one act of civic engagement at a time.

Our guest today is the executive director of Arkansas Civic Action Network.

Yeah, Gayle has spent years helping Arkansans become more informed, engaged and connected in civic life.

We're looking forward to hearing what she's learned about helping people move from frustration and discouragement to meaningful participation.

But before we meet Gayle, let's do what we always do and spend a few minutes exploring the bigger idea behind today's conversation.

So, April.

What do you expect will happen in this conversation today with Gayle?

In what way is that going to help us figure out how we're going to build a braver Arkansas?

Well, I keep thinking about the question, Glenn.

What's the point?

Why why do I do this?

The needs are so big.

Why?

What is my one little action going to do that actually makes the difference.

And I think that we were going to hear today that there are so many different ways to strengthen a community.

And, you know, community being the places in which we live and work and worship there.

There's so many different ways to strengthen that.

And I think we've forgotten some of them probably.

So.

One of the things that I think helps shed some light on it for me is actually a Pew Research Center study that I just looked at, just I think last week.

And by the way, I recommend this for people.

Pew Research Center has a lot of really good information about America and politics and our culture and things like that.

But in this study, they were looking at how are Americans in terms of political engagement?

Are they involved?

Are they not?

To what extent?

And from my best understanding of it, there were basically four categories.

One kind of a small category, but is significant number of people who are just totally checked out aren't interested in politics.

They don't look at it, they don't hear about it, they're not involved.

So we'll leave them aside.

The other three, there's a significant maybe somewhere around 10 to 20, more like 10%.

I think that is heavily involved.

They get involved directly in politics by doing things like, volunteering for their favorite candidates, being active members of the party and doing things like that.

Those are very heavily involved.

And they they do a lot of the steering of things that happen in politics.

There's another really significantly sized group that isn't involved that directly in politics, but they are very interested.

What they do is they tend to be involved in the community, which I think in many ways is mirroring.

What we're talking about today is they they are active in their community, they follow politics, they read up their informed, but their actions in the community take place not directly with a political campaign or a party or something, but doing things like, you know, working on projects in their neighborhood or with their civic organization, or perhaps, you know, their church has something going on.

They volunteer and they're actively engaged that way.

And then there's that third group that they rarely are involved directly, but they are interested.

So they try to at least be somewhat informed.

What I don't know, and I wish I knew more about it, was how much of that information comes from what sources.

Right.

We we've talked about media literacy before and will again, but if their main source is social media, I'm a little concerned about that.

But at least they're concerned.

They want to find out more about what's happening happening politically.

So that's a that's some of the things that I thought was helpful to understand what we're talking about today.

So you're talking about that study I think about that's actually really encouraging because, you know, you started out talking about people who were volunteering to help with politics.

And I was like, well, where are you going with that?

Because I think that that's so limiting, right?

I mean, if I have to think about civic engagement as being I'm running for office or I'm, I'm campaigning for someone or I'm passing a petition around that certainly are important things.

But that's not the only way to become engaged.

And one of the things that I've been thinking about recently is we care.

I believe Arkansans care.

So how can we help and how can I, even in my own life, help myself realize that I can discover I have a role to play, you know, in some aspect of bettering my community?

And can that be my focus more than just only about politics in its typical form?

Yeah, that's that's a good point.

Especially now because there's actually been a lot of polling done, probably for several decades now, that shows that there's been a fairly steady decline in the confidence of the American people in their government and in their institutions and in their parties.

And this cuts across administrations in different parties.

So there's been that definite decrease in confidence in, you know, basically what makes our country run.

So I think that declining trust is something we need to address.

And doing these things about getting involved in one's community, that would be one important way to do it, because I sell something else to.

You may be familiar that the a study that says that when you get involved in community efforts and volunteering and do something, you start to have a little bit more of an optimistic view about how things may turn out.

So I think that's an important thing.

That's why we're pushing this.

Yeah, that's a good point.

And I think later in the show we'll probably get into this show today.

Even the idea of civic confidence, so not just confidence in institutions and how confident I am that the government is doing a good job or my churches or or the school systems or whatever the institutions may be.

But actually, do I believe that my work, my role can make a difference in making things better?

And I think that's something that is important.

Now, one of the things that I think about, you know, when people withdraw from from civic life, it really doesn't just affect them.

It changes.

Also, who shows up because the largest part of the population is in the moderate middle, you know, the big middle, whether it be center right, center left, a lot of people in the middle.

But if that big middle doesn't show up, then what we end up having is we end up having the extremes who end up getting the airtime, who end up getting the attention.

And so we believe this is what the country is about, and we forget that there's a whole bunch of us in the middle that are doing really good things.

Or that could be.

Yeah.

And I think the disengagement that naturally can expect.

Why it would be if our country and our citizens have, for a period of time, started to lose confidence, it would be easy to give up and become disengaged.

But the problem is, is that if we start giving up and not getting engaged in our communities and in our country, then it's not going to help with the polarization.

It actually deepens it.

So we need that to do what our founders talked about.

You know, that they have mentioned this before, but the founders said, if you want to keep this healthy republic, the citizens need to be involved.

And they they need to be doing things and working in their community, basically taking responsibility for their communities.

So that's a question of clarification for you.

You mentioned that if we disengage, that it actually can increase political polarization.

That piqued my interest.

What what do you mean by that?

Well, if you are disengaged, then probably the only way you're not going to hear a lot of nuance.

You're not going to be talking to different people.

You'll just hear about the people that are in your bubble.

And so you're going to hear one side of the story, and you're not going to hear a full range of opinions, And you'll probably get more and more of a distorted view, and you'll be influenced by kind of the what's going on in the current culture at the time.

And unfortunately, what goes on in the culture these days and what's covered in the media and has talked about in social media.

is highly polarizing.

And so that's the kind of thing you'll be exposed to most.

That's kind of what I was getting.

Reminds me of a concept that I know we've talked about on our podcast before, Echo Chambers.

Yes.

You know, the whole idea that I end up hearing the things that I'm listening to all the time, I'm my news sources, the the people that I'm around.

So if I'm not engaging with people who are different than me, even, you know, in my church or in my community, that I end up starting to hear only a particular perspective.

And I think that's another reason, at some level, why civic engagement is so important in our, in our communities.

You know, what is civic engagement?

If you were to define that for me, what would you say it is?

I would say it would be it could be any number of things.

But it's basically getting involved in your communities directly.

It might be you'd go to your school board meetings.

It might be that you attend the city boards meeting.

Just you could just go to listen, you might have something going on in your neighborhood that you have an opinion about, and you decide to actually go and voice your opinion and, and appear that it could maybe it's through your neighborhood association or you volunteer through your club and organization that is most representative of your particular interest.

There's so many things and so many opportunities in one's community.

But that's what I mean by civic engagement in, the more people do that, the more they become a part of their community.

And as we mentioned before, the more they get around people who may have different views politically, but we're all focusing on a similar shared interest.

And so that makes the the political differences less important.

It helps build our relationships, and it helps us get more of an awareness of how different people are thinking, and that these people are decent people to even if they have different politics.

Yeah, that's that's a that's a good point.

And you know, those things that you were talking about, they don't they may not be, you know, be on the news, those zoning meetings, their neighborhood cleanup or, you know, back to school drives or food pantries, those those are ordinary moments that people can potentially be helping and communities are, are built.

We've heard about some of those and some of the stories that have been shared on other episodes that we've had.

I, I think about the work that the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute has been doing in terms of civic Arkansas, and they talk about the concept of civic commitments.

And I actually was looking at their their website recently, and they say that civic commitments are small, intentional actions that lead to stronger communities, better dialog, and greater civic confidence.

I'll read that again.

They're small, intentional actions that lead to stronger communities, better dialog, and greater civic confidence.

When I first read that, I thought, what in the world are those civic commitments?

So then I looked further on their website and they have a whole calendar this year.

They did it last year.

Two 2026 Civic Arkansas Civic Commitment Challenge, a 12 month initiative that you can complete the challenge.

And they are things like going to a museum with a friend, writing a letter to show your appreciation to a local school board meeting, volunteering for a local cause, you know, tracking and reducing your water usage for the month, inviting a friend to explore and visit a state park in your area, checking your voter registration status and registering to vote.

So many different things.

And as I was thinking about that, I thought it is not just about sometimes the things that some people would say, oh, I don't want to go to a school board meeting or I don't want to run for office.

So many other things they can do.

The thing that I think about this kind of related to that is the one of the new concepts that Brave Angels talks about is courageous citizenship.

I mean, that's the idea of getting involved, and they call it courageous, because I guess it does take a little bit of courage to initially do that.

And I may have some comments on that later, but I'm thinking that's important to at least take that first step, however small it is, in whatever way you're most comfortable with.

Get started.

Just do something.

So it's really maybe not whether we participate, but how we participate.

We can think about that, maybe.

But for some people it might be whether you participate as well.

I would argue that the first step is just to make the decision to make the choose to take that one small step.

But yeah, it is important how you participate, you know, are you going to be respectful in your engagement or are you going to model civil behavior that is important.

Yeah okay.

Okay.

So I'm going to ask you a personal question, Glenn okay.

How do you do?

How are you civically engaged?

Well, how about this program, which I didn't plan on, but it was invited and said, but through Braver Angels before.

That's really been most of my thing.

I do some things through my church before that, you know, before I retired, I did things like worked with my professional association for years.

I worked with Sierra Club, and I was active in an officer there and led outings and things.

So I've always done things like that.

I don't know why, but it just well, one of the reasons, and I think the reason I asked this question is because I knew this about you.

Right?

The Sierra Club is something you love being out in nature.

Yeah.

And so you were already pursuing something with people.

And the Sierra Club is not not a Partizan organization.

No.

It's got people from all different kinds of political entities and beliefs and religious beliefs.

And so it's another place where you've gotten to have a chance to meet people that are different than you and to humanize the differences.

Yeah.

And I remember the first time I in little Rock when I came to Sierra Club there, and the met, the people who were active.

And I'll I'll mention his name.

He he didn't care Ray Handley.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

Right.

And Ray was you know, he's he's on the radio side but you know, and so were others.

But the point is it's not necessarily a political, you know, one sided kind of thing.

But I think we need to move on.

So let's probably do well.

We're going to be welcoming a guest today that's going to give us lots of options.

And Gayle has spent years helping Arkansans move from frustration to participation.

And I'm really interested, Glenn.

And and hearing what she's learned about what actually helps people get motivated to take that first step of getting involved and then what keeps them engaged when they do.

Yeah, well, I'm also excited about having Gayle on the show.

I believe her work does a lot to empower everyday citizens.

What I'm most curious about is what Gayle has learned about, you know, what actually moves people, what shifts people from lacking participation and thinking it doesn't matter to decide they're going to engage anyway.

Because I think one of the most important questions we can ask right now, that's what I want us to do.

So let's bring her in.

Okay.

Sounds great.

welcome back.

Joining us is Doctor Gail Choate, a political scientist, educator and civic activist based in little Rock with years of grassroots experience and a PhD in comparative studies.

Gail brings both scholarship and practical know how to the work of building strong participatory communities.

So we are very excited to have her with us today.

Gail, welcome to a braver Arkansas.

Thank you.

It's a pleasure to be here.

So I know that you were you created the Arkansas Civic Action Network.

And I'm curious as to what in the world was going on for you.

You were an educator like me.

So what?

What happened?

Well, I think that's one of the things that you'll appreciate, and that is really true to this story, is that I had spent years studying both grassroots organizing as well as political behavior.

So why do people act the way they do?

What is it that are the ways they interact with the system?

And as a result of that, really wanted to see if some of the things that were in the theory and that I experienced were true, and could they be resolved in new and different ways.

So myself and Davis Hendricks started Arkansas Civic Action Network, because we're both educators, and we believe that everything starts with education.

In 2022, I had the opportunity to be traveling around the state.

I was doing research very specifically around gubernatorial campaigns.

So I spent a lot of time in Georgia and in Arkansas.

And as I traveled with the candidates here as well as in Georgia, but especially here in Arkansas.

I heard from people that they wanted to reengage.

They had felt a little bit cut out or or let behind or closed off during the Covid years.

But in 2022, they started to say, we need to be back, right?

We need to be part of this, but we don't know how.

We don't know what to do.

And people were rusty.

Their skills were rusty.

So Davis and I talked about it and thought that starting a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization was really important to the process so that we weren't concerned about candidates.

We weren't concerned about issues, but rather we could be concerned with the people who wanted to reengage.

So that's really where the organization started.

And since then, that's kind of what we've been doing, is trying to help folks have tools so they can be fully engaged in their communities.

Okay.

So you mentioned the term re-engagement.

So what do you what in your research, what did you find that they were talking about when they talked about we wanted to be reengaged.

Well, I think it's one of those things that during Covid especially right people isolated and they became very clustered, right, very small groups.

And there was this overreliance on social media as a way to try to form communities.

You know, that year, that two years, I think, played a really significant role in what we see today in terms of civic involvement, because people lost their connections.

And so they're sitting there now trying to figure out how to re organize themselves, right, how to reconnect with each other.

And between, I think Covid and then some other changes that have happened within our communities.

We've seen some of our traditional civic spaces disappear or become less accessible.

You know, for example, we talk a lot about school choice in Arkansas.

And while school choice does provide parents and families the opportunity to align their kids education with institutions that best meet that need.

One of the things it also does is that it has kind of eliminated or short circuited the opportunity for schools to be civic hubs, right?

In the past, like, for example, when maybe we were growing up or even 15 years ago, everybody went to neighborhood schools, right?

So when you went to the same school as everyone else, you all got home at the same time so you could get on your bikes and go for a ride or play kick the can in the street or whatever it was you did in your neighborhood, or you all belong to the same sports groups, right to the same little league process.

Maybe different teams, but the same process.

So not only were you as a child running into other kids all the time, but your parents are running into each other.

That's where civics happens.

Civics happens in the everyday interactions that we have.

Well, when those things have gone away, because now with school choice, you might have four kids in your own household, all going to different schools.

So now instead of mom hanging out or saying hello when she walks the kids to school, to the rest of the neighbors, she ends up carpooling from school to school to school to school.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, and she said, it takes her an hour just to drop her kids off in the morning.

So we lost some of those those loose kinds of connections.

And so I think that's really an important part of it is trying to rebuild that.

So that's what I think people are looking for.

Where are those places that they can find community.

Where are those places that they can have just off the cuff conversations?

Everything doesn't have to be a deep dive into policy, right?

It can be just what do you think about this?

Well, the other thing that you've mentioned, I understand, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

Confidence you talk about it's important for people to feel confident in order to participate in the democracy.

Tell me more about what you mean by that.

Well, I think one of the things that we know, right through a lot of research that's happened over the years, and you mentioned my my degree is in comparative studies.

And what that means is that I look at political science literature specifically about political behavior, but also sociology and social movements.

And one of the things that we know is that the first thing that has to happen in order for you to be involved, right, is to be engaged.

Right is to be exposed to it.

Once you're exposed, you have to be you have to be educated.

And then once you're educated, you have to practice it.

Right.

And if you don't get that practice time in, it becomes difficult.

Well, again, many things in our society have changed where things that we maybe would take for granted just don't happen anymore.

For example, in many states in the K through six curriculum, social studies has been eliminated, right?

Because they have to spend time on reading, writing and arithmetic.

Right?

So because of the way our curriculums have been done, social studies was lost.

Well, if you lose social studies, then where do you have the chance to practice looking at history through different lenses, looking at the way that different groups of people interact with their society or interacted at points in time?

You lose those skills.

So when I say confidence, I mean giving both the background education to folks about how civic engagement can work, but then also just giving them a chance to practice it.

Yeah, I know you also talk about voter confidence to that.

You all do some work in your organization related to that.

And tell us about what that is.

Well, that's a really interesting thing I think, Gabriel, because what we have found is that you'll hear all the time here in Arkansas that we're a nonvoting state, that people say that.

And what that means is that of the people who are registered to vote, somewhere between 65 and 69% actually go and vote on Election day.

But when it comes to first time voters, that number is even less.

It's approaching 50%.

So that caused the researcher in me right to say, why is that?

What is causing that phenomena?

And so we went out and talked to people who had registered to vote recently and said, are you going to go vote?

And if not, why?

And what they told us was I was really surprised by it because the things they said were things like, I don't know where to go.

I'm not sure where to park.

What do I have to bring with me?

I hear a lot about there being intimidation at the polls.

I'm afraid somebody's going to ask me something I don't know or I don't know who to vote for.

Right.

I don't I don't even know who's going to be on my ballot.

How do I research all this?

People don't know.

So when you don't know the tendency, the, the, the path of least resistance is to not do it right.

And so I always liken it to if I, I like yogurt in the morning for breakfast.

Right.

And if I walk in to Whole Foods to buy yogurt, you know.

Right.

There are so many choices of yogurt.

There's, you know, almond and coconut milk and, and and low fat and high fat and Greek and it's overwhelming.

Right.

And so what do I do?

I leave I literally can't make a choice.

I go right to Aldi's where there's only one kind of yogurt.

Always tells me what I want.

Right?

But it makes it easier.

So one of the things we want to do in that voter confidence, right, is to give people the information so that they feel like, yes, I can do this.

Sometimes it's as simple as saying to someone, you don't have to vote for everything on the ballot.

It's okay to skip a race if you don't know what a constable is, much less who's running for it.

It's okay to skip that one if you're really concerned about your county roads.

Right.

And and if that's or your sheriff's local sheriff's department and the county races are important to you.

Research them.

Know what those candidates stand for?

Vote for your quorum.

Court your judge, your JP.

Skip the rest.

It's okay.

And that's part of the confidence level.

So what we do in those workshops is we walk people through where to go, what to expect.

What to bring along all of the basics so they can feel like they can do it without fear.

Right.

We had a gentleman come to a workshop we did a year ago, and he said, I'm 53 years old.

I've never voted before.

I want to make sure I do it right.

Those are the folks that we're trying to help, and that's where voter confidence comes in.

Afterwards, he said he used the tools we gave him that we accumulated from a variety of sources.

You know, it's not all our own work.

We work in conjunction with a lot of other local organizations that have information available.

We make that available to our participants.

And he said that that made a difference.

And he walked in and he confidently, you know, held his sample ballot in his hand.

And he cast that vote and felt really good about what he did.

So that's what we're trying to do.

So that's one of the reasons for staying on the sidelines.

If you're lacking that confidence.

Are there any other major reasons that you've run into what keeps people from from participating?

Well, I think there's a couple of things.

I think one is that lack of experience, not just in terms of they've never done it, but they may be come from a, a line of folks or a family of folks who haven't participated in the past.

Now, that could be just that.

Their families haven't been civically engaged, but it could also be that their first time, right, that they come from a family of of immigrants and their first their newly allowed to be citizens and have that right to vote or exercise that right to vote.

So sometimes it's that sometimes it's also just not having the education here in Arkansas.

Right now, our kids only receive civic education one semester in the ninth grade.

So if that's all you're exposed to in ninth grade, when you're, what, 13, 14 years old you're not really thinking about, right?

When I, when I turn 18, what's going to happen?

And so we end up with a lot of college students who are now eligible to vote, who just don't even think about it.

Right.

Or if they do think about it, they don't realize the mechanics.

And so sometimes they won't be prepared to exercise that.

Right.

That's interesting.

Well, let's get a little bit beyond voting.

A recent Pew study found that we actually engage as Americans in civic life in a variety of different ways.

And, you know, it might be community organizing or organizations that might be volunteering and by be religious organizations or faith communities.

Yet I think we underestimate sometimes the influence of those kinds of ways of getting involved.

And I'm wondering if you could speak to the value of being involved in a variety of ways, or picking and choosing what works best for a person in terms of civic engagement?

Yeah, I think that I think the Pew study really pointed out some really significant factors for where we are today in terms of creating that idea of civic space, but really, it's always been much larger than just the electoral process.

Right.

I mean, go back to Tocqueville, write in 17 1800s writing about associations in America.

What he was writing about is not the government, but the fact that Americans came together in association in ways that bettered their community.

So I really appreciate you bringing up the point that civic space, civic involvement isn't just interacting with our government system, but it's how do we shape, form and participate in our communities.

However, we define that community to be as small as our household or as big as our world, right?

Or interstellar?

Galactic, maybe?

I don't know.

But you know how ever we wanted to define community?

It's a part of all of that.

So I think you're absolutely right, April, in that there are places where we learn those skills.

Right.

Go back to the idea that we first have to become aware.

Then once we're aware, we need to become educated.

The ones we are educated, we need to practice.

And then once we practice, we can invite other people to come along with us.

Right.

And if we think about that as the four stages of of involvement, then we can kind of see where we need to have these practice spaces.

So Verba, for example, is a scholar who writes a lot about the role of churches in this opportunity to practice.

If we have a church that has community outreach programs, for example, that community outreach program gets you to start thinking about your world beyond you, right?

And into this a little bit larger space.

So beyond your church, into this bigger community.

And when that happens, you then have the opportunity to practice volunteering, right?

Communicating, dealing with people who are different than you.

Like dealing with vocabulary.

They might be different than the way you speak about things.

And all of that contributes to our skill set to be active and involved in our in our civic spaces or our communities, and to make them better.

So I just I missed the fourth one.

You said awareness, education practice.

What was the fourth invitation?

You have to be able to invite other people to come with you.

Right.

It's not it's not enough to do those things on your own.

Somehow you have to come into some sort of community with it.

And I'm kind of interested in the Pew study and the different categories they had of how people engaged politically.

And I wonder how that compares to what you've seen in Arkansas.

I mean, is Arkansas typical of that, or do we move more in some of those other directions than what was in the study?

Well, I think that the study, if you're talking about the the different groupings of people, so being on the outside, being a spectator, then a connector and then being a motivator or a, they don't use motivator is that I don't remember what the M was.

I think it motivated something like that.

But anyway, with those four things in mind, I think that that is very classic.

Right.

That that kind of thing.

That's a social movement theory.

Looks at those same types of things.

They call them a little bit different, but it's the same basic idea.

So I think what we have here in Arkansas is we have a lot of people that are really in that spectator stage, right?

They have a basic awareness of what's going on around them.

They understand what's happening in their neighborhood.

I mean, if we go back to the Arkansas Civic Health Index, that was done a couple of years ago, we know that our Kansans have really strong community ties.

They feel very connected to their local communities.

So I would say they're in that spectator space, but they're not able to move from that into that connector space without having the education and the practice.

Right.

And those connectors then are what creates the webs, right?

The webs that tie us together and allow different groups.

So if we have church groups and and we have for each groups and we have, I don't know, pitas and we have church, all these different groups together.

Those connectors are the people that might belong to more than one that then reach out their hands and join these together as one larger community.

And you can't really have that until you've been able to take those spectators and give them the tools that they need in order to move forward.

So you're talking about education and practice and and the importance of civic spaces in terms of doing that to become the connector.

So give us an example of a civic space in which education and practice might would happen.

Well, churches and schools are are very obvious places, but I think neighborhood associations are another place.

Now, that might not be quite as applicable in some of our rural communities, but in our metro areas like little Rock, for example.

Neighborhood associations are very active, and they create that kind of civic space where people are able to practice volunteerism.

They're able to practice using their voice.

They're able to practice dealing with people who are different than themselves.

In other communities, it might be more based in like the churches, for example.

Or it could be based in sports leagues, you know, is another great opportunity.

Not the big ones, right?

Not the big professional teams.

But if you have like a local little league or you have a local soccer league, right.

What a great spot, right, where people are able to practice, volunteering, being involved, understanding other people's perspective, getting along with people you don't like.

You know, you may not like Little Jimmy at all, but boy, he can kick, right?

So you want him on your team, right?

And so you learn how to deal with things that are different and people that are different from you.

And that's an important part of civic training.

What do you do or what do you observe?

I guess when you see people who have been disengaged and get them engaged in the process and the democratic process, what do you see changing with them?

And maybe in a similar way, also for people who maybe have different political views and then get together with each other?

What are your observations there?

Well, I think those are two different questions, Glenn.

So if you don't mind, I'm going to write.

All right.

So if we start with this idea of how do we get people more engaged.

Right.

How do we again I'm going to say it's that practice piece of it.

So for example, Arkansas Civic Action Network, we have a program for high school students.

It's called engage.

And engage is designed to give kids that opportunity for a little bit of education on civic practices and then a chance to practice it.

Right.

And to connect with each and then connect with the community.

How does that happen here in Arkansas?

All high school students that are participating in public schools have to have 75 hours of community service in order to graduate.

It's a requirement.

The expectation is they'll do 15 hours as a freshman, 20 as a sophomore, 20 as a junior, 20 as a senior.

So what we do is we provide that freshman level.

That first 15 hours is kind of the educational piece.

It's a combination of classroom along with some very highly participatory opportunities.

So for example, if we're talking about levels of government, we might have a city council men come in and talk to the kids and have give them a chance to interview them or to interact with them in some way.

Once they've done that kind of basic education, we want to give them the chance to practice.

Some of that happens within those classes, but most of it happens in the other 60 hours, where they have the opportunity to develop a community service project that they think would make a difference in their community, and we provide them with mentorship.

We provide them with some seed funding, and we provide them with the infrastructure so that they can make changes, big or small, within their community.

That program actually was inspired by a young man that I worked with when I was teaching back in Florida.

I taught at a community college there called Broward Community College, and I had a student in my class who, as part of an assignment, attended a city council meeting.

And he came back from that meeting and he said, Doctor Choate, I had no idea.

I had no idea.

Have you done something like that?

Yeah, yeah.

And he he said, I had no idea that that they met, that I could go listen to it, that people could come up and they could talk, they could sign up and they could they could tell them what they thought.

And I said, yeah, that's how things are supposed to work.

And he said, a couple of weeks later he said, do you think I could go talk?

I said, yes, of course you could.

You have the right to do that.

And.

Yeah, sure.

What what do you want to talk about?

And he said, my neighborhood has gotten really unsafe.

There's a lot of people breaking into cars.

People are afraid to walk at night.

And I want to go bring that up.

And I said, okay, tell me more.

Right.

Have you talked to your neighbors about it?

Is it something that you experience or is it broader than that?

So we kind of talked about this idea of getting other folks involved in in his issue.

And he then came to me one day and he said, Doctor Choate, I really think the solution to this is really simple.

All we need is to fix our streetlights.

Oh, I said, that's so profound.

And yeah, you can go to your city council meeting and tell them you think you need to have the streetlights fixed.

So he did.

He went and he prepared his three minute, you know, public comment period presentation.

And he went and he and he delivered it to them.

And I said to him afterwards, how did it go?

And he said they didn't pay any attention.

They were on their phones.

They didn't listen to me.

And I said, well, you don't seem like that upset.

And he said, I'm not.

You know why?

Because when I was walking out, I got a tap on my shoulder and I turned around and it was the sheriff, and the sheriff said, young man, you're right.

We're going to get those streetlights.

Oh my gosh.

That young man went on to be one of the founders of March for Our Lives.

The organization that arose out of the massacre that happened at Parkland High School.

Wow.

So that was a gateway for him, right?

That's the practice.

That's that opportunity to do things and see things in a different way.

And so that our engage program is, is, was inspired by that because I think if, if, if folks have the opportunity to learn that, yes, we have a voice and yes, I can use that voice, I can either use it directly or I can use it through someone else, or I can use it by voting for a candidate.

Or I can use it by writing a letter to the editor, or I can use it.

But right then we can change.

We can change what needs to be changed and protect what needs to be protected.

Yeah.

What about the the other issue then, of people who come in from very different political sides taking on a common problem.

What have your observations been on that?

I think a big part of that, Glenn, this idea of taking on a common problem is the common problem ends up being the unifier, right?

Because now it's not, you know, Glenn and Gayle, right.

Having difference of opinion about whether or not we should, I don't know, pick up trash three times a week or twice a week.

Right.

Suddenly the problem is we get trash on the street, right?

So it's no longer about you and me.

It's about the issue.

And that allows us the opportunity to focus on what we have in common.

And I don't have to tell you all, you know, you're with braver angels, right?

So you know the importance of finding that commonality.

And I think oftentimes what we need, again, is practice in looking at it from the perspective of what is it.

We really care about.

So like for example, when we do our voter confident workshops, we always start by asking people to identify what are their core values, what's important to you?

What is the most important?

And if we if we align ourselves with our core values and we start to look for candidates or issues or policies that are consistent with that, we find we have a lot more in common.

I had a conversation with the legislator during the last general legislative session where I and we are like, you know, like I testified in some of her committees where she was presenting a bill against her bills, like more than once.

Right.

But afterwards, we had a conversation in the hallway and I said, representative, at the end of the day, we want the same thing.

We want safe, positive places for our children to grow up.

We see how to go about that differently.

But we want the same thing.

Maybe we can sit down and have a conversation about what that would look like if we had safe communities.

And then we can attach policies to it that would work for both of us.

And I think that's a secret.

Okay.

Have you sit down and had the conversation yet?

We have had starts because that's part I was like, yeah, maybe we can do that.

Well, so many things that you brought up there, you know, related to core values and having the common problem being the unifier.

I one of the things that I know that I've seen, that you all also do is you host sometimes civic socials.

Yes.

And I love for you to talk about.

There's a couple of different models for that.

It sounds like what I, what I've heard you talk about in the past.

And so these are things that people can actually have in their communities.

It started with, I think some of your, your folks there that actually would gather people again.

So tell us about the models there because it might motivate people to to do this kind of work.

You know, work.

They might be able to say, I'm not going to do that, but I might could do this.

Well, it started April, and I love I love talking about this because it started thinking back to when we were kids.

Right?

And that was a long time ago.

But I still remember it fondly.

Right.

And when I was a kid, we had a very Hodge podge neighborhood.

Right.

And there were some kids in our neighborhood who we didn't really like or weren't exactly like us or we thought were weird, but somehow we all gathered together, right, to play kickball in the street.

Somehow we were able to play Capture the Flag or whatever it was we were playing, and we we were talking about myself and Davis Hendricks and Blake Tierney, who also works with us.

We were talking about it one day and we said, what's the what's the Commons nominator?

Fun.

Maybe what we need to do is quit talking and start having some fun.

Yeah, right.

So one of the things we did, which kind of kicked off the civic socials is we had a dance party.

We we had a dance party.

We told the DJ, think ABBA, right.

Think of think of all that music that just makes everybody stand up and dance.

And we just danced, right.

And, and that kind of led to this idea of, like, maybe we should just be talking to each other.

Maybe we don't have to get into the deep, serious stuff all the time.

Maybe we just need to have conversations.

So we started once a month getting together anywhere between 5 and 10 people, and we just tried to pick a variety of ages, a variety of backgrounds, just people we knew from our social circles, all of whom we know are doing work in civic engagement and civic awareness.

And we just get together for an hour and we just talk in.

The conversation leads into all different kinds of places, depending upon what somebody might be working on.

We've had people attend a civic social that one week we had someone who chairs one of the commissions for the city of Little Rock.

We had an artist who came.

We had someone who was a teacher.

It's all different kinds of folks, and I think we need to have more of that, more of these opportunities to just realize that we're all doing the work together.

I mean, April, this is something you and I have talked about, right, is how do we connect the folks who are doing the work with each other?

And the more we can do that and realize that we're just people trying to do the very best we can.

I think the more opportunity we have to bring those tools, it's one of the things, one of my my dreams.

And I think your dream as well, maybe a dream that we both go after together, actually, Gil, which is to create kind of the sense of resources across the state that people can call on.

You were talking about before we were on set today, even about Clarksville.

I would love for us to end with the story of you talking about what happened with with them reaching out to your organization and saying that they had a need.

And because sometimes we know we need something and we don't have the resources to do it, or we aren't educated or we haven't practiced, so can you end it by telling us that story?

Absolutely.

And I want to preface a story a little bit by saying it's not about the reason they called me write for, say, because I'm going to tell the story and say that it was about the people in Clarksville being quite concerned that data centers were coming to their town, their county, and that they didn't know about it.

So we're not speaking for or against exactly, exactly what we're saying.

Exactly.

That's right.

That's the process of engaging.

Exactly.

Really trying to.

Exactly.

And I really want to point that out because people get immediately like, but it's not about that because it is about a group of people who felt that changes were being made in their community that they weren't aware of and that they weren't a part of, and that how they saw their community was being shifted without them having anything to say about it.

And that was their concern.

And they came to me and said, they came to our organization and said, we don't know how to navigate this.

We don't know what to do.

We don't even know how to begin asking questions.

We know we have questions, but we don't know how to do anything with it.

So what's happening is that people are just complaining right there on social media, and they're just complaining.

And that turns into personal attacks.

And it's just it's going downhill fast.

And so okay, listen, let's start with this.

Get together as many folks as you can, put it out into social media.

Put it out into the community.

Many folks you can we'll meet it.

We'll do it at the library.

Which libraries are great?

Civic spaces.

Right.

We'll meet at the library and we'll just have a conversation about what's going on.

So we did.

They came together.

We had about I think we had about 15 people that first time it came and we talked about when these kinds of changes are happening in your community, how do you ask your questions?

How do you figure out who might have the answers to the questions?

How can you share the load of doing the research?

To find out what it is you need to know to try to to determine truth versus, you know, untruth, right?

Or reality versus unreality.

So we had a conversation about that.

And we put together they put together a little action plan where they decided that they were going to.

They had some people that were really good at research.

They had some people that had connections to people on the city council.

They had people at a variety of different levels.

So they put together an action plan of how they were going to try to get more information.

Their issue at that time was not to stop the data center or to support the data center.

It was to get more information about it.

So they did that for a while, and then they came to me and said, Gail, we have so many questions.

We've identified as many sources as we can, but we really think the next step is we have to talk to our mayor and our city council, and they've not been willing to do that.

We'd like to try to schedule a town hall meeting, but we're afraid if we call a town hall meeting that it's going to turn into a shouting match.

A shouting match, right?

And so they said, would you come over because you have you're not from Clarksville, so you have no personal stake in the game.

You have your nonpartisan organization.

So we know you don't care about political parties or any of that kind of moniker.

And we know that your point of view is not to take a side.

So would you come over and would you just facilitate it?

So I did I went over and we facilitated it.

The, the the good news was over 100 people showed up to have a conversation and to get their questions answered.

Almost that same 100 people submitted 83 questions that were given in advance to the mayor and the city council of things that they were concerned about, questions that they wanted to know, and they were presented to them ahead of time.

Now, the unfortunate part is that only two members of the city council came.

So there ended up to not be quite as much information as people had hoped for.

But there was some information.

But we also learned something really interesting that night.

And and that is there was a city council meeting before the town hall, and I attended that.

And one of the people that was there was the gentleman who represents the the AI company, whether it's going to put in the data center.

And I went up to him and I said, I understand you've been invited to this town hall.

I'm going to be moderating it.

I'd love that if you came, because I know you have answers.

I know that we sent you the list, so we know you have the answers to these questions and it would be so helpful.

And he said, I've told everybody that already.

I've been doing this work for two and a half years.

I've been here.

I've been discussing it.

People didn't pay attention.

They didn't care.

Then I don't care.

Now I what what would ever change?

And I said, you know, two things can be true at the same time.

We are not living in a world where there is a single truth.

There can be more than one truth.

You are absolutely telling the truth when you say that you did everything you thought was right to communicate what was going on, I believe that, but I also believe that people don't have the answers to the questions that they have, and those two things can happen simultaneously.

So that's where we need to find those bridges, right?

That's right.

I appreciate your time.

We're probably well past our time, but that's okay.

We weren't stopping because we love what you have to say.

Maybe we hear it again sometime.

Thanks for being on with my question.

How do people contact your organization if they want to get educated or have some practice or get involved?

Because we're always looking for volunteers and people to bring these into local communities.

So our website is w w w dot arc aka Action Net okay.

And that's the best way.

And thanks for having me.

Thank you.

Thank you for all the work that you're doing.

This is a great very energizing to me.

So good.

Thank you.

Well, Glenn, I just think this whole idea of confidence and building confidence in ourselves as citizens is so important.

And I got that from Gail's perspective, her idea and the idea of focusing on being educated and practicing to build that confidence so important.

Yeah.

And you mentioned practice.

That's the key thing.

Practice means getting out there and doing something right.

You don't have to solve every problem.

You just have to start somewhere.

And to me, that's that's what the civic confidence is about.

And that's what really struck me.

You get that confidence by practicing.

That means you have to start participating sometime.

So what that reminds me of, you know, is, is my career as a psychologist.

One of the key things we did, we learned over and over was treating things like anxiety and fears and stuff.

There's just a really strong body of evidence has been for decades, that the single best thing you can do, because when you're anxious, are afraid, you tend to avoid something.

Well, the way to overcome avoidance is to face it.

Basically, face your fears.

Expose yourself to the thing that bothers you.

Now, that's true for anxieties, phobias, and different things, but it's very powerful if you can find a way to do that.

So to me, it parallels what we're talking about here with civic confidence.

You may start off reluctant to get involved in your community because I don't do things like that.

I don't feel comfortable being in front of people and trying to take a role in there.

But if you'll just go that first time, pick something that's not too difficult that you think I might be able to pull this off and just not run screaming out of the room, you know?

Then what usually happens is it goes much better than your imagination said it would.

And so that reduces your fear and anxiety and increases your confidence, which is there's something similar in the in the speech and communication field when students are practicing speeches.

Right.

They don't want to just go out and go give the speech in the high, high stakes situation.

First.

They actually have to practice them in class, where they practice doing things in in a lower stakes environment.

And it reminded me of the story that she told about her student from that community college and how he started with something.

And then he saw some success.

The street lights.

Right.

And then he doing some other things.

And it's that that civic confidence, like a civic muscle that's being built over time that we really need to be thinking about.

And I think about that in terms of courageous citizenship.

We sometimes in, you know, have to do the research before and learn some things before we actually engage.

And but we believing that what are we going to be doing makes a difference is really important.

So just do it and then repeat.

Yeah.

So here's something to think about this week.

Where in your community have you been sitting on the sidelines.

You know, where could you get educated?

Where could you practice?

What's one small step that you could take this week to become more involved?

And you don't have to solve everything.

You don't even have to know everything.

You don't have to have any of the answers, really.

Maybe the first step is just decide your vote matters and your voice matters.

And choosing not to sit this one out, go do something.

As we've seen today, a stronger Arkansas's built one conversation, one relationship, one act of civic engagement at a time.

And that's really what this show is all about.

Inspired by the work of Braver Angels, we created this program to encourage ordinary Arkansans like you and like us to move beyond divisions and strengthen relationships, to work together to solve the challenges that we face.

And these small steps can become stronger.

Communities help us, our communities become stronger, and our state becomes stronger.

So if today's conversation has inspired you to take one of those small steps, we invite you to join us.

Learn more about Brave Angels Arkansas at Arkansas Angels.

And if you'd like to continue conversations like this one, then listen to our podcast.

On the other hand, wherever you get your podcast.

Thanks for joining us on our Braver Arkansas, where we talk across differences and encourage each other to build solutions together.