Public Outreach Quotes

Catherine Lutz, an anthropologist who has been carrying out a project studying the archipelago of US overseas military bases. She made the fascinating observation that almost all of these bases organize outreach programs, in which soldiers venture out to repair schoolrooms or to perform free dental checkups in nearby towns and villages. The ostensible reason for the programs was to improve relations with local communities, but they rarely have much impact in that regard; still, even after the military discovered this, they kept the programs up because they had such an enormous psychological impact on the soldiers, many of whom would wax euphoric when describing them: for example, “This is why I joined the army,” “This is what military service is really all about—not just defending your country, it’s about helping people!” Soldiers allowed to perform public service duties, they found, were two or three times more likely to reenlist. I remember thinking, “Wait, so most of these people really want to be in the Peace Corps?” And I duly looked it up and discovered: sure enough, to be accepted into the Peace Corps, you need to already have a college degree. The US military is a haven for frustrated altruists.

If you start with a smart strategy, and clear vision, you will be able to achieve superior results to reach the right audiences, through the right channels at the right time.

When preaching plays to the culture without substantially critiquing and engaging it, it becomes part of the problem. Sermons that only apply to the individual and to the inner life of the disciple without raising biblical questions about our public lives are also a factor. So, too, are worship services that offer little more than comfort food: the baked potatoes of love, the melting butter of grace, with just enough bacon and chives of outreach to ease the conscience. All this becomes a churchly anesthetic.

Asking how astronauts go to the bathroom is one of the most common questions put during NASA or space museum outreach sessions. To cope with the curiosity, for a while the agency posted a video that featured a fully-clothed volunteer showing exactly how it was done: with a mirror, sometimes. Young is often asked about it. "Interest from the public is strange. Women don't care. They think, they worked it out and that's that. Men have an almost unhealthy interest. Children are interested in the poop factor." What everybody should actually be interested in is the drinking pee factor.

I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily. I’m comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind. I hate computers for getting their own section in the New York Times and for lengthening commercials with the mention of a Web site address. Who really wants to find out more about Procter & Gamble? Just buy the toothpaste or laundry detergent, and get on with it. I hate them for creating the word org and I hate them for e-mail, which isn’t real mail but a variation of the pointless notes people used to pass in class. I hate computers for replacing the card catalog in the New York Public Library and I hate the way they’ve invaded the movies. I’m not talking about their contribution to the world of special effects. I have nothing against a well-defined mutant or full-scale alien invasion — that’s good technology. I’m talking about their actual presence in any given movie. They’ve become like horses in a western — they may not be the main focus, but everybody seems to have one.

It had never occurred to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabilities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it became harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities. ¶ It was no longer any fun to be an American citizen.

Be sure to integrate PR and marketing methods with your media outreach and social media strategies.

a result of this creeping public fatalism, we now have depressingly low levels of civic participation, knowledge, engagement, and awareness. Political life has been subcontracted out to a band of professionals—money people, message people, outreach people. The rest of us are made to feel like amateurs, as in suckers. We become demotivated to learn more about how things work. And this pervasive power illiteracy becomes, in a vicious cycle, both a cause and a consequence of the concentration of opportunity, wealth, and clout in society.

There is no substitute for science communication to the public and policy makers.

Public policy formulation has gone a metamorphic change during the last three or four decades due to rapidly globalising world. There are at least four ways in which globalization is affecting the policy formulation in each country. Firstly, thanks to social and electronic media, small issues which a decade or so ago could only find place in the back page of a national newspaper become breaking news in major global channels creating advocacy and sympathy movements in different parts of the world. Secondly, with the rapidly globalizing world, global issues like environmental degradation, climate change, GMO, etc., which were only discussed in the corridors of power are being debated in the drawing rooms of countries and creating strong advocacy movements among the population. Thirdly, centers of actual power and decision making are shifting from local to global level with the outreach of domestic interest groups to their sympathizers in international organizations, multinational corporations and those in the governments of global powers. This outreach enables them to force their own government to accede to their demands because of economic and political clout of the global players. Lastly, whether approached by the domestic interests or not, global state and non-state actors are increasingly penetrating those domains which were henceforth exclusively reserved for the domestic state machinery. They not only interfere in the policy formulation but are now acting direct through their proxies in the form of nongovernmental organizations in domestic policy formulation and implementation.

However, beginning with individual efforts, we can each work for such ideals by increasing recycling, gardening, non-motorized or at least public transportation, reducing waste, stopping pollution, and preserving natural habitats. Whether through lifestyle changes, or by pursuing educational, social, political, and spiritual outreach, we can work toward improved health, economic freedom, and a closer connection with natural forces.

The nineteenth-century impetus for the right of women to preach and other women’s rights came in large part from holiness pneu-matology, such as that of Phoebe Palmer and Julia Foote. The argument for gender and racial equality came from a careful reading and critical exegesis of Scripture. Since the Holy Spirit had been given to all people, with Acts 2 describing sons and daughters, old and young alike receiving gifts for public ministry, all people were equally worthy in the eyes of God. The Holy Spirit, not men and not religious institutions, determines the distribution of spiritual gifts.

( O1O'2920'8855 )PCASH( O1O'2920'8855 ) In addition, the ACRC marketed “onsite,” which is the strength of the Commission’s outreach program, making fruitful results. The ACRC supported the onsite coverage of the Onsite Mediation Meeting, through which collective complaints or public conflicts are mediated onsite, whenever they were held. In particular, press conferences were held beforehand to strengthen the ACRC’s cooperative relations with the media in certain regions for onsite coverage and reports to be expanded.

There is a second practical limitation to moral outreach, namely, the persistence of ideological racism. Some of the cultural traits attributed to or associated with the ghetto poor (for example, attitudes toward authority, work, violence, parenting, sex and reproduction, school, and crime) closely resemble well-known and long-standing racist stereotypes about blacks (their supposed tendencies toward lawlessness, laziness, dishonesty, irresponsibility, ignorance, stupidity, and sexual promiscuity). These stereotypes have long been invoked to justify the subordination, exploitation, and civic exclusion of blacks. An implication of the cultural divergence thesis is that ghetto conditions have produced a subgroup of blacks who, because of their cultural patterns, exhibit characteristics that racists have long maintained are “natural” to “the black race” and that these cultural traits are at least part of the explanation for why they are poor. To make matters worse, moral reform suggests that the ghetto poor are effectively incapable of altering these suboptimal traits on their own, as it calls for state intervention to change them. Moral reform programs, even voluntary ones, implicitly endorse the idea that poor blacks have personal deficiencies that they alone cannot remedy. In an era when biological racism has been largely discredited and claims that blacks are biologically inferior are not publicly acceptable, moral reform will inevitably strike many as the functional equivalent of classic racist doctrines.

Thus my Greenprint for Animal Liberation is a combination of vegan outreach and support for the Green Party and I would urge every single person who yearns for animal liberation to do the following in order to help achieve it: (1) Join your local vegan outreach group (or, if there isn’t one, form one) and start educating members of the public to go vegan. (2) Join your local Green Party and help them with the process of getting people elected both at a local and a national level. ~ Ronnie Lee

The Chinese state currently expends considerable resources to establish Confucius Institutes worldwide. Africa is no exception. These government-funded institutions promote Chinese language, culture, and understanding and serve as centers for outreach to local media, with the first Confucius Institute established in Kenya in 2005 at the University of Nairobi. These institutes resemble Western nonprofit educational institutions and find their homes within academic institutions, but they are funded and managed by the Chinese state. Confucius Institute personnel and instructors are selected and paid by the Chinese state.

When we first started working with this wolf, he was ninety-nine miles down a one-hundred-mile-long road to extinction. We now have him identified, and we feel we have him turned around the other way. It will be a long uphill push to save him; I don’t know if we can do it. If we do decide that it is feasible, we need you to help pull; we are sure going to push. Curtis J. Carley, first Red Wolf Recovery Project field coordinator, Fish and Wildlife Service, at a public outreach presentation (1977)

On March 30 and April 11, against the advice of White House advisors who had informed him that any direct contact with the FBI could be perceived as improper interference in an ongoing investigation, the President made personal outreaches to Comey asking him to “lift the cloud” of the Russia investigation by making public the fact that the President was not personally under investigation.

As a result of this creeping public fatalism, we now have depressingly low levels of civic participation, knowledge, engagement, and awareness. Political life has been subcontracted out to a band of professionals—money people, message people, outreach people. The rest of us are made to feel like amateurs, as in suckers. We become demotivated to learn more about how things work. And this pervasive power illiteracy becomes, in a vicious cycle, both a cause and a consequence of the concentration of opportunity, wealth, and clout in society.

Quoting page 65-66: Race-conscious affirmative action is a familiar term of journalistic convenience. It identifies unambiguously the controversial element of minority preferences in distributing benefits. But it also conflates racially targeted civil rights remedies with affirmative action preferences for groups, such as Hispanics and women, given protected class status irrespective of race. … It includes nonracial as well as racial preferences, and it distinguishes such remedies, available only to officially designated protected classes, from the soft affirmative action … which emphasized special outreach programs for recruiting minorities … within a traditional liberal framework of equal individual rights for all Americans. … The architects of race-conscious affirmative action, Skrentny observes, developed their remedy in the face of public opinion heavily arrayed against it. Unlike most public policy in America, hard affirmative action was originally adopted without the benefit of any organized lobbying by the major interest groups involved. Instead, government bureaucrats, not benefiting interest groups, provided the main impetus. The race-conscious model of hard affirmative action was developed in trial-and-error fashion by a coalition of mostly white, second-tier civil servants in the social service agencies of the presidency… To Skrenty’s core irony, we may add three further ironies, first, the key to political survival for hard affirmative action was persistent support from the Republican Party… Second, the theories of compensatory justice supporting minority preference policies were devised only after the adoption of the policies themselves. Finally, affirmative action preferences which supporters rationalized as necessary to compensate African-Americans for historic discrimination, and which for twenty years were successfully defended in federal courts primarily on those grounds, soon benefited millions of immigrants newly arrived from Latin America and Asia.

Pope Francis hasn’t changed the faith, but he has changed the conversation,” Barron says. “What Francis has done in terms of public conversation about the Church is to make it clearer to people we’re not just about sex. That’s been extremely helpful in our wider outreach.” By placing such an emphasis on humility and simplicity, on service to the poor, on concern for the environment and social justice, on immigrants and refugees, on opposition to war and the arms trade, and with his ardent outreach to the “peripheries” of the world, Barron believes, Francis has succeeded in lifting up aspects of the Church’s thought and life that were always there but that sometimes got lost amid a myopic focus on sex and the culture wars.

When we first started working with this wolf, he was ninety-nine miles down a one-hundred-mile-long road to extinction. We now have him identified, and we feel we have him turned around the other way. It will be a long uphill push to save him; I don't know if we can do it. If we do decide that it is feasible, we need you to help pull; we are sure going to push." Curtis J. Carley, first Red Wolf Recovery Project field coordinator, Fish and Wildlife Service, at a public outreach presentation (1977)

Years earlier, Carley had foreseen investing in such public outreach: "It will have to be a continual bombardment of information striking at the root of the myths. In other words, we must tear down most of what the public "knows" about red wolves and replace it with current information. Although pig tails have been found in wolf scats, remnants of stick houses have been conspicuously absent. To date, we have not identified any scrap reminiscent of a little red cape.

Public Space Judaism is designed to address these barriers. The notion emerges from the foundational idea of outreach, as I understand it. Outreach is not about a specific target population. Rather, it is a methodology. Outreach methodology brings Jewish life to a variety of traditionally underserved populations by going where people areinstead of waiting for them to come to us. Where most Jews are not is inside the four walls of synagogues. We know that free or low-cost Jewish programs held in secular venues attract less-affiliated participants than the same programs held in synagogues or JCCs. Why not program where people spend the majority of time—outside in public spaces—rather than inside the synagogue, where most programs currently take place? The location barrier is arguably the most important, because even if all other barriers have been lowered, those folks who have felt

pushed away in the past are too hesitant to enter synagogues to see what’s changed. While the Public Space Judaism model is based on location, it also addresses several additional barriers to participation and takes into consideration the necessary best practices of outreach, which include the unobtrusive collection of contact information and a specific follow-up plan. The goal is not to water down Judaism but to remove the cultural obstacles that have developed around Judaism—obstacles that may have had a purpose at one time but now push more people away than they keep in. Public Space Judaism is a portal of entry. It is not an immersive Jewish experience. The Public Space Judaism model can be described as a series of concentric circles. The circle in the center reflects deeper institutional involvement, while the nonparticipating majority of Jewish households are in the outermost circle. The outermost ring gives this

model its name and consists of events and programs that take place in public spaces. These events are designed so that potential participants “stumble over” them. They are low barrier in that they are free and require no prior knowledge or commitment to participate. Chabad pioneered this notion of outreach thirty years ago, and while my approach—championed by the Jewish Outreach Institute—in these spaces differs considerably, there is much to learn from Chabad’s successes. Chabad is focused on the Jewish calendar, for example, but people live within a framework of several calendars, including but not limited to the Jewish calendar, the secular calendar, and the local cultural calendar. Public Space Judaism takes advantage of the various calendars that guide people’s lives. It also insinuates itself into public events already taking place in the community. The second level of Public Space Judaism is

more complex. All stages can serve as entry points, and the progression is not necessarily the shortest distance between two points. Some folks may participate in public space events for years, but if they had previously been doing nothing Jewish, this represents successful outreach, because the goal is increasing engagement. They will go deeper when specific programs of greater complexity are relevant for them. Increasing engagement is not a membership drive. It is sharing what we inside the synagogue find beautiful about Judaism with others who might benefit from it. How to Implement Public Space Judaism in Ten Steps 1. Go where people are. Don’t wait for them to come to you. Hold events in the public sphere so that the unaffiliated will stumble upon them. 2. Start with a program or event that may

The current dogma of the "wall of separation" between Church and state is thus a far cry from our founding fathers' intent. It is, in fact, a denial of the multiplicity of institutions and jurisdictions. It cripples the Church and exalts the state. It denies the universal sovereignty of God over all institutions and asserts the absolute authority of the state. It excludes believers from their God-ordained ministry of social, cultural, and political involvement. This "wall of separation" idea was slow to catch on in our nation. Until the War Between the States erupted, Christianity was universally encouraged at every level and by every level of the civil government. Then in 1861, under the influence ofthe radical Unitarians, the Northern Union ruled in the courts that the civil sphere should remain "indifferent" to the Church. After the war, that judgment was imposed on the Southern Confederation. One hundred years later in 1961, the erosion ofthe American system of Biblical checks and balances continued with the judicial declaration that all religious faiths were to be ''leveled" by the state. By 1963 the courts were protecting and favoring a new religion — "humanism" had been declared a religion by the Supreme Court in 1940 — while persecuting and limiting Christianity. The government in Washington began to make laws "respecting an establishment of religion" and "prohibiting the free exercise thereof." It banned posting the Ten Commandments in school rooms, allowed the Bible to be read in tax supported institutions only as an historical document, forbade prayer in the public domain, censored seasonal displays at Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving, regulated Church schools and outreach missions, demanded IRS registration, and denied equal access to the media. It has stripped the Church of its jurisdiction and dismantled the institutional differentiation the founding fathers were so careful to construct.