Hot Topic: What does civic engagement look like in America today?

Is it what happened during the Arab Spring? Is it Occupy Wall Street?

Today, we are more connected than ever and are using digital technology and social media to create civic action and change lives. However, just having the tools of engagement is not enough.

Today, more than ever, Black community organizations lack a seamless connection from the kind of old school organizing (knocking on doors, marching, and demonstrating) that sparked revolutionary change during the civil rights movement to the kind of social media strategies and sophisticated email campaigns that helped President Obama win the White House in 2008. The 2025 Campaign for Black Men and Boys is the “connective tissue” that strives to bring all the missing pieces together so that organizations “on the ground” in communities across the nation can plug into effective regional and national systems than produce positive change.

The 2025 Campaign is the centerpiece of the Twenty-First Century Foundation’s (21CF) Black Men and Boys Initiative (BMB). 21CF’s BMB Initiative addresses the multiple, intersecting challenges confronting Black males today. These are high dropout rates and low college enrollment, unemployment and underemployment, high involvement in the criminal justice system, inadequate healthcare, and lack of support for engaged fatherhood, to name a few.

The Campaign uses a comprehensive strategy that comprises grant making to community-based organizations to support the development of place-based BMB organizing, the use of media to build awareness of and action on the issues, and the development of the 2025 Campaign for Black Men and Boys.

In January 2011 the 2025 Campaign released "We Dream a World: 2025 Vision for Black Men and Boys" policy platform (4.1MB PDF). This document now serves as the Campaign’s foundation in moving into a phase of “strategic action” through focused civic engagement activities aimed at producing measurable impact and influence in targeted areas of policy and practice important to improving conditions for Black men and boys.

The Campaign will focus its efforts and resources in areas where it, along with its partners, can achieve meaningful results that contribute most to quality of life changes for Black men and boys. The initial three areas of focus for the 2025 Campaign will be:

• Education
• Employment and Workforce
• Fatherhood and Families

Specific policy opportunities have been identified that support the policy recommendations in each of the areas mentioned above.  The 2025 Local Impact Sites (Atlanta, GA; Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA; and New Orleans, LA) are working to drive this progressive policy agenda in their communities.

In 2012, we will launch a strategic civic engagement plan than lifts up the “best of the best” models across the country that are working to make a difference in the lives of black men and boys by the year 2025. We believe we know what civic engagement looks like today and we need your support.

Please join us. info @ 2025bmb.org