Slow Democracy — Rediscovering Community, Bringing Decision Making Back Home
Susan Clark
RiverRun Bookstore, 142 Fleet Street, Portsmouth, NH
Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2012
7 pm
Free and open to the public
Reinvigorate your community by reconnecting with democracy. Just as slow food encourages chefs and eaters to become more intimately involved with the production of local food, and slow money helps us become more engaged with our local economy, slow democracy encourages us to govern ourselves locally with processes that are inclusive, deliberative, and citizen powered.
In Slow Democracy, community leader Susan Clark and democracy scholar Woden Teachout document the range of ways that citizens around the country are breathing new life into participatory democracy in their communities. Readers learn the stories of residents who gain community control of water systems and local forests, parents who find creative solutions to divisive and seemingly irreconcilable school-redistricting issues, and a host of other citizen-led actions that are reinvigorating local democracy and decision making. This book features a case study of our very own “Portsmouth Listens”.
Along with real-life examples of slow democracy in action, Clark and Teachout also provide twenty simple guidelines for communities, and citizens, to use as ways to reinvigorate their local democratic process. With a future more and more focused on local food, local energy, and local economies, Slow Democracy offers strategies to improve our skills at local governance and to reinvigorate community democracy.
For more information: www.riverrunbookstore.com