Guest Blogger - Toronto Civics 101 Final Session: Grassroots

~ Guest Bloggers can submit posts to this site - the opinions of the authors are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the postion of the City of Toronto, Civic Engagement Toronto or Toronto Civics 101. ~

The following post comes to us from Adil Dhalla:

Do you demand more from your government?

I do and I have often felt that by demanding more, I was doing my leaders somewhat of a service. Having high expectations, after all, may be considered foolish by some but it can also be a flattering indication of one's perceived potential. I know my city is consistently ranked among the world's best but like many, I have this prevailing feeling that we can be better. It’s for this reason why I originally applied for Civics 101 - to determine whether or not my expectations were flattering or in fact foolish. It turns out that they were indeed flattering but rather than finding myself demanding more from City Hall, I'm now demanding more from us.

I thought that Civics 101 would provide me with the answers I sought about how my government worked so I could ostensibly derive some comfort from my newfound information base. But in reality, I completed 101 feeling slightly less comfortable about our prospects, because I now fully understand the full gambit of the activities and challenges City Hall faces. It’s not as if I was fully ignorant to these things before but where 101 was most successful was in encouraging me to truly consider the challenges our local leaders face. This left me with a new understanding of the difficulty to create change especially when it involves many stakeholders. Thus, while I might have begun 101 thinking tax raises were bad for me, I left wondering if they were in fact a needed reality for us.

The reason for this, of course, is related to our fiscal imbalance and that is merely one area (albeit a very big one), where I’m now convinced that the city requires help from those in the grass roots. Not only can our elected leaders not be everywhere, but it’s inconceivable to think that but we need to demand more from ourselves to pick up the slack where they cannot. This is the only way that it can work.

At the last 101 session, the word engagement came up a lot and for good reason. The purpose of this initiative was not just to inform, it was to activate. It was to hammer down the idea that our shared vision could only be accomplished if change was coming from both sides. Certainly, part of this involves communicating with and demand more from our leadership, but a large part of this starts with us.

So the question is, what are you going to do now?

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Adil Dhalla is launching "My City Lives" in January