• Civic Life in Jacksonville, David Swain--The headline in the Florida Times-Union said "'Antenna lady' constantly in demand".

  Suzanne Jenkins is a working-class, white homemaker. According to her own story, she hadn't been involved in anything until modern technology brought an issue to her backyard. The issue was the proliferation of digital antenna towers, and specifically one located in her older residential neighborhood, which is surrounded by commercial arterials and an interstate highway.

  She says she learned, early in life from her Marine Corps father, about getting your facts together before making a demand. Somewhere along the line she also learned about getting other people together to support your demand. So, more or less singlehandedly, she started a neighborhood movement, working through an existing neighborhood association, to get the antenna removed. She quickly learned a lot about making contacts and getting things done in a community. She says the blue pages (governmentel section) in the phone book are useless. You have to dig deep to find the right people in city government, and the government makes this digging as difficult as possible.

  At any rate, she and her advocacy group won. The antenna was removed.

  And she went home to become a homemaker again.

  But then she was asked to chair the neighborhood association. Activism on one issue expanded into organized involvement in all the issues important to the neighborhood.

  And soon after that, she was asked to become a member of and then to chair the Citizens Planning Advisory Committee (CPAC) in her area. Jacksonville city government has divided its huge jurisdiction into six planning districts, and each has a CPAC of citizens, mostly leaders in neighborhood associations, who advise on public service, planning, and infrastructure issues pertinent to each area of the city.

  And then city government formed a high-level commission to seek ways to make growth management really happen in our community, and she was appointed a member.

  So, she's much in demand. But people have not forgotten her first cause and still refer to her as the "antenna lady." I should clarify that this whole sequence of events has occurred over little more than a year.

  Possible lessons from this:

  • Working-class neighborhoods are not uniformly individualistic and alienated from the concept of civic involvement. There are plenty of "rednecks" in our town, but the stereotype doesn't tell the whole story.

  • Individual activists can emerge from seemingly unexpected places and backgrounds.

  • Relatively small groups of citizens, if dedicated and if they do their homework, can make a substantial difference. The battle over the single antenna led to City Council action to amend its regulatory ordinance on the subject, thereby impacting the location of all such antennas in Jacksonville.

  • Local government can help civic involvement by encouraging networks of neighborhood associations and by inviting civic activists into advisory and decision making processes.

  Does this mean that all is well with Jacksonville's civic culture? By no means. Suzanne Jenkins is clearly the exception to the rule, or she wouldn't have attracted media attention. The question is how can hundreds of people like Suzanne Jenkins be found--or grown--so that the civic culture of urban areas everywhere can flourish?