Marybeth Bates
Civility is the topic of the Democratic Club of Quail Creek’s meeting on Oct. 19, at 3 p.m. in the Silver Room of the Madera Clubhouse.
An online dictionary defines civility as “courtesy or politeness”, and the thesaurus includes “comity, propriety, and tact” among others. The Democratic Club of Quail Creek’s Oct. 19 meeting is all about civility. In our current political climate, there is a very evident lack of civility. We have name calling and slurs from the president of the United States, as well as members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. What is being done, if anything, to ameliorate the current atmosphere?
In May 2011, after the Tucson shooting that killed six and injured several, including Gabrielle Giffords, former Congresswoman, at a “Congress on Your Corner” event, the community came together to create the National Institute for Civil Discourse (NICD). NICD is a non-partisan organization based at the University of Arizona. Its goal is to promote healthy and civil political debate.
Keith Allred was recruited to lead NICD because he had recently launched CommonSense American, a new organization that brings Republicans, Democrats, and Independents together from across the country to find and champion solutions with broad support. Impressed by the successful five-year state pilot, leadership invited Keith to make NICD the platform for CommonSense American and to integrate it with NICD’s other programs to revive civility and enhance problem solving across the partisan divide.
The Common Interest, the state-level pilot organization, operated in Idaho from 2005 to 2009. Its major legislative achievements led the Idaho Democratic Party to make the unusual move of asking him, as an independent, to be their nominee for Governor in 2010.
Prior to returning home to pilot the citizens’ group, Keith became the first professor of negotiation and conflict resolution hired by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He started his academic career as a professor at Columbia and earned his Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from UCLA and a B.A. in American History from Stanford.
Not to be overlooked, Keith has also served in a variety of business leadership roles in various fields and he is a fifth generation Idahoan who spent summers growing upon the family cattle ranch. In 2017, he finished eighth in the world standings of the National Cutting Horse Association!
We invite the community to hear Keith Allred on Saturday, Oct. 19, at 3 p.m. in the Silver Room of the Madera Clubhouse.