What Works: June 2002

Greetings. Citizen Works started a year ago to advance justice by giving people the tools and opportunities to build democracy. We mark our first year anniversary with this brand new newsletter, “Citizens Working.” Citizens Working gives you information, tips and ideas to participate effectively in power.

We are excited to share the projects here at Citizen Works, but we are even more excited to tell you about the incredible citizen campaigns all over the country as well as the good works of other nonprofits that educate, organize and harness people power for more justice. We want Citizens Working to be a newsletter where you feel free to share your campaigns, your tools and opportunities to get others involved, and the lessons learned from successful or not so successful attempts to participate in power.

In this issue, we introduce you to our Give it Back campaign to build coalitions for national corporate reform in the wake of Enron. And we spotlight a citizen activist who took our call to protest the bad practices of Big Business on Big Business Day, April 6, 2002, one step further. Beth! Orcutt hosted Big Business Week and learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. More than 100 other activists also planned events around the country to get citizens thinking about how corporate power affects communities. In D.C., Jacob Harold, Denis Moynihan, Ali Arace, Katie Cafferty and many volunteers put together a giant shredder on the mall to show how corporations are shredding our values from privacy rights to economic security to truth. Representatives from ACORN, Public Citizen, the United Electrical Workers, The Institute for Policy Studies, The Project on Government Accountability, The Pension Rights Center and Citizen Works all participated to talk about corporate reform.

In the spirit of sharing tools in this issue we would like to introduce you to one of our tools to keep you informed on the corporate reforms (or lack thereof) in Congress, the widely praised “Corporate Reform Weekly” ­ a free weekly service that summarizes what’s happening on Capitol Hill, what’s being written on corporate reform, what needs to be done ­ and what hasn’t happened yet. You can sign up for it right now on our updated site at http: //www.citizenworks.org.

Please share with us your ideas on what works by emailing the newsletter editor, Lee Drutman at ldrutman@citizenworks.org. And keep up the good work…. As Ralph Nader is fond of saying, “The only place that democracy comes before work is in the dictionary.”

Check out more columns in "What Works" archive