What's Democracy School?

At the most fundamental level, our weekend-long Democracy School addresses why democratic self-governance is impossible when corporations wield constitutional rights to deny people's rights, and how we are able to rectify these wrongs.

Democracy School was created by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and Richard Grossman, co-founder of the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD). Democracy Schools were launched with five weekend sessions at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in 2003, and the number of schools is growing rapidly. Democracy Schools have been held in more than twenty locations, including sites in California, Texas, North Carolina, Oregon, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Mexico,  Colorado, Washington, Virginia, the District of Columbia, Ohio, Michigan, Vermont and Alaska.

Democracy School teaches a paradigm shift, a dramatic new way of looking at our role as citizens in a democracy, and how to assert our inalienable rights as a sovereign people. Attendees explore the limits of conventional regulatory organizing and learn how to "reframe" single issues to confront the rights used by corporations to deny the rights of communities, people, and the earth. Lectures cover the history of people's movements and corporate power, and the dramatic recent organizing in Pennsylvania by communities confronting agribusiness, sewage sludge, and quarry corporations. Included with attendace at Democracy School is a 360-page notebook of background reading material. For a historical review of the Pennsylvania work through the end of 2003, see a feature article that appeared in Orion Magazine.

Attorney Thomas Linzey founded CELDF in 1994 with Stacey Schmader to help communities organize to oppose corporate assaults on republican democracy. Richard Grossman and Thomas Linzey authored many of the written materials that attendees receive for the School.

Dedication: Democracy School is dedicated to the memory of Daniel Pennock, a 17-year-old boy from Berks County, Pennsylvania, who died in 1995 after being exposed involuntarily to land applied sewage sludge. Daniel's parents, Antoinette and Russell Pennock, travel across Pennsylvania to end the practice of sludge disposal, by which waste management corporations reap massive profits hauling and spreading sludge on farmland.

Why run a Democracy School in my area?

The most urgent reason for holding a Democracy School is when a corporation wants to put a harmful operation in a community for its own profit and to the detriment of the residents. Democracy School provides tools for communities to bypass the regulatory system, where they are destined to lose, and to learn to defend themselves where they have a fighting chance, on the basis of our constitutional and inalienable rights as citizens in a democracy.

Democracy School can also be a vital component of public education -- where people can learn essential American history that was never taught in our schools, and see how these lessons may be applied to further democracy, and challenge the rule of the very few over the vast majority of us. The Schools help us prepare to confront corporate harms, whether they are imposed by corporations themselves or by our government acting on their behalf.

How do we set it up?

For the most part Democracy Schools are organized by people who have already attended at least one. Under some circumstances we will work with someone who has not yet participated.

The first step towards setting up a Democracy School is to talk with other people in your group or larger community who you think would be interested. If there are activist groups that will be involved, it's important to get at least two people from each group so they can support each other when they go back to their groups to explain the work (and it's usually not possible to explain a weekend of Democracy School in a few sound bites). Note that typically about half of the attendees sign up well in advance, and the other half in the last week or two before the course begins. Feel free to contact Adam if you have questions about how best to approach people or need further information.

The maximum number of participants is around fifteen. If it appears that you can get from ten to fifteen people to attend, the next step is to call us to discuss your proposed Democracy School. We will work with you to set a date -- usually over a weekend from Friday at 7 p.m. through Sunday at noon. Pick at least three possible dates to make sure that there are instructors available for at least one of those times. Upon receipt of the administrative fee (explained below), we will schedule two instructors for your Democracy School, and provide a link from the main Democracy School web page to your website (or, if you don't have a website, we will work with you to construct a web page for a minimal fee).

An important item to consider is how many people, if any, will need overnight accommodations, and to what extent you want to include the accommodations in your tuition. For example, at the Pennsylvania school which takes place in Chambersburg, most participants are from out of town. Accordingly the sponsoring organization, CELDF, arranges for lodging and meals at a local school, Wilson College. In contrast, participants at a Democracy School that you host may live in the local area, and the sponsoring organization can simply refer those from out of town to reasonably priced accommodations.