We would like to get some public participation going on this blog. Tell us something about an All-America City you know and love. It could be your hometown or a village, town, city, county/region you’ve spent time in and know a thing or two about. Leave a comment on this blog or e-mail a paragraph to aac@ncl.org.
Link here to pull up a PDF of past AAC winners listed by state.
In the last post we gave an example of a community (Somerville, Mass.) giving a ten-minute presentation at the 2009 All-America City event in Tampa. Here is an example of a question-and-answer period that follows a presentation. The questions are coming off-camera from the AAC jury (stage left). Members of the Statesville, NC delegation have just given their spiel and they are about to answer some questions from the jury.
If you have never been to the All-America City Award, you may not know what to expect. So keep reading this blog.
Here’s a video of a presentation from from Somerville, Massachusetts, a winner in 2009. Every delegation gets ten minutes to make a presentation to our jury of civic experts, then ten minutes to answer questions from the jury.
The National Civic League is offering communities a new opportunity this year. We are holding our first “All-America Stories” competition. This multimedia award is separate from the annual All-America City Award, but its purpose is the same—to spread the word about your stories of positive community change.
Who is eligible?
Anyone and everyone. We want AAC finalists and winners (past and present) to enter, but also people from other communities as well. So even if your community has not participated in the All-America City Award program, we encourage you to enter the contest if you have a good story to tell.
What do we mean by multimedia?
For the purposes of this contest, we are talking about a video or a photo essay or slideshow. These multimedia presentations (video or photographic) should tell your story of positive community change. We give you a free hand to use the power of multimedia to create your story. Also, keep in mind, the entries don’t need to be the highly polished videos or pictures – the story, and way to tell it, matters more.
In other words: It is great if you have a capacity to produce documentary quality content, but it is equally great if you don’t have that capacity: some of the best videos these days are being shot by iPhones or other cell phones. We want to encourage you to tell your All-America Story and not let the lack of technology prevent you from doing that.
What Kind of Story?
It could be a change in the community as a whole, or a specific community improvement project, say, an effort to revitalize a particular neighborhood. It could be a program to improve local schools or promote youth civic engagement. For AAC participants, it could be a story about your community’s effort to compete in the AAC program or a story about what it meant to be named a finalist or an All-America City.
How do we enter the contest?
There are two ways to submit entries.
1) You can send a copy of the multimedia file on a compact disk to the National Civic League at 1889 York St., Denver, CO, 80206.
2) You can use YouTube to submit your video entry, and Flickr to submit a photo collection. Use your own/organization’s YouTube and Flickr accounts for submission.
Send an email notification about your submission to the email address aac@ncl.org, with the submission date and the name of the Flickr or YouTube account where the content can be found. We will add the content on All-America City Awards’ Playlist on YouTube, and to All-America City Awards’ Flickr Favorites.
When submitting your videos and pictures, please tag the content with the following tags: “allamericacityaward” and “nationalcivicleague.” Please do tag your pictures and videos, because that is how we are able to find your content.
On YouTube, the maximum length of the video is 10 minutes, and the size is 2GB. You’ll find more information how to upload videos on YouTube, and what formats to use under this link http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/topic.py?hl=en-uk&topic=16560
More information how to upload pictures on Flickr in this link http://www.flickr.com/help/photos/
How will the contest be judged?
There will be two winners: the winner chosen by the National Civic League, and another winner chosen by the public by voting at the All-AmericaCityAward.com blog. In the latter case, readers of the AAC Blog will vote on the best multimedia entry. The top vote winner will be the winner.
What criteria will be used to select the winner?
The multimedia entries will be judged on the basis of creativity, story-telling ability and personal impact. The beauty will be in the eye of the beholder, but we hope the voting audience will keep this quality in mind when they choose—the best, most vivid and most engaging use of media to tell a story.
What is the deadline for the All-America Story?
The deadline is June 1st. After that, the community voting will start, and will last until June 14.
I’ve been sifting through the All-America City projects for the 2010 finalists. Here’s what I’ve come up with:
The big winner was projects that improve recreation opportunities for community members. Many of these were related to parks. There were nine in all.
Seven projects to improve education. This was predictable. At least one project for each community has to be about youth.
There were six projects focused on downtown revitalization—still a big issue for communities. Five projects were focused on economic development and job creation. No surprise there, given the economy. Or, perhaps, I might have expected more. There were five projects to foster various forms of civic engagement. Five for neighborhood revitalization.
Four projects were related to health care and healthier communities. Four related to technology—three of which came from one community.
Three for affordable housing. Three focused on diversity and inclusion. Three planning projects.
Only two for environmental sustainability, which was a surprise. I would have expected more. Two for the arts. Two to ease traffic and two focused on public safety.
More on the 2010 projects in a later post.
Statesville, North Carolina is a 2009 All-America City. Read about their award winning community projects here.
In 1949, a reporter named Jean James was assigned to cover the then National Municipal League’s National Conference on Government in St. Paul, Minnesota. James approached league officers, including pollster George Gallup, and explained that she wanted to write a feature article about the best-governed cities in America. Gallup suggested that such a judgment was too complex, risky, and difficult to make.
“Well,” she replied, “it is football season. How about naming an All-American team of the eleven best-governed cities—a team that could be selected every year.”
Intrigued by the idea, league officers countered with a proposal, as Gallup later described it, “to name eleven cities in which they knew the citizens themselves had initiated and completed some action of major benefit to the entire community. And so the All-America Cities contest was born.”
The league formed a partnership with James’s employer, the Minneapolis Tribune, which sponsored the award for two years. The idea of the award program was simple. Each year cities would request a formal application from the program. The applications would be filled out, sent back to the league, and reviewed by a team of judges. From all the applications, up to twenty-two finalists would be selected. Each of the finalists would then send a representative to the annual National Conference on Government. At the conference, the finalists would make presentations to a jury made of leaders from civic, business, and labor organizations. The jury would select eleven winners of the award.
The award-winning community projects of the first All-America City winners were described by reporter James in a feisty, muckraking style. “Their stories,” she wrote, “are tales of real fighting, bitter battles against fat and placid political machines, against bosses with more power than men should have, against corruption and against genuine grassroots inefficiency.”
Reflecting the league’s focus on municipal reform, the first group of All-America City winners tended to be communities that made inroads against political corruption and incompetence. Boston, for example, received the award for not electing the political boss and felon, James Michael Curley, to a fifth term as mayor. San Antonio, Texas, had adopted a new charter with a city manager form of government. Grand Rapids, Michigan, had forced a mayor to resign after he had fired the city manager for not hiring a political crony. Philadelphia had broken the “hold of a corrupt political machine” that had ruled the city for half a century.
One of the most interesting things about the All-America City Awards is the way applicants for the award define the challenges their communities face. Doing so is part of the application process. I’ve been reading the finalist applications to look for trends and patterns. Here’s what I’m seeing so far. The most frequently cited challenge, not surprisingly, is the sorry state of the economy. How each applicant describes that challenge is a little different. Some see the challenge as finding jobs. Others view it terms of providing adequate services to the community in tough times. One community describes its as an obstacle to keeping taxes low.
The second big challenge is the issue of how growth is affecting the community. This may seem odd, given the sagging economy, but many of these applications are describing problems in the past, in other words, before the economic downturn. The growth problem is defined in a number of ways. It is noteworthy how many communities are trying to hold on to a sense of identity, often this is expressed as a desire to preserve a “small town feeling.” Others see it as a problem overcoming divisions within the community, the old parts of city versus the new. The third most common challenge is downtown revitalization, followed by the need to preserve or increase the amount of affordable housing. Other concerns include childhood obesity, homelessness and community engagement.
The National Civic League named 27 communities finalists in the 2010 All-America City Award competition. They are:
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