The community in which I seek to facilitate positive change 
numbers 700,000 or 1 million, depending on whom you count.  So the question is, 
at what level do we count "we the people" for purposes of making positive 
change informed by the civic values of the founding fathers?

A few years back at a National Civic League conference I was involved in a 
discussion about the scope of "community."  We recognized that the 
political/structural geographic entities/boundaries of nation, state, and local 
government didn't quite fit.  Instead, we decided that the relevant levels of 
community were global, regional, and neighborhood.

In my case, the 700,000 is the population of Duval County/Jacksonville, a 
consolidated city-county governmental entity in Northeast Florida.  The 1 
million is the population of the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), which is 
a grouping of counties designed to approximate the urbanized region surrounding 
and including Jacksonville.

In the work that "we the people" at the Jacksonville Community Council Inc. do, 
we sometimes find ourselves dealing with issues that must be addressed in terms 
of political boundaries.  Thus, we've tackled several issues aimed at improving 
the functioning of Jacksonville's local city-county government, including a 
recent one that investigated whether neighborhoods across the entire 
jurisdiction were receiving basic public services in an equitable way.

We've also tackled issues that can't be handled within political boundaries.  
Workforce preparation and groundwater conservation are two examples.  The first 
had to be framed in relation to our economic region and the second in relation 
to the geography of hydrogeology in Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia.

Oftentimes, we find that issues we're concerned about can't be resolved at the 
level of our "we the people" involvement.  For instance, our recent study on 
community leadership concluded that the state financial disclosure law, in its 
current form, inhibits the recruitment of effective leaders.  The remedy must 
come from the state legislature.  Sure, we'll meet with our local delegation, 
etc.  But as a matter of reality, we lack the "we the people" base and other 
resources to mount the kind of sustained, effective presence at the state level 
that we have at the local/regional level.

Return to Jacksonville, Fla.