A group of 27 gathered on Saturday, Jan. 23, at the Episcopal Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia for a Citizen Voices forum. The moderators were Michelle Charles and Louise Guigliano.

The ideas flowed and the enthusiasms bubbled so steadily at the Church of the Advocate that the forum participants lingered for more than half hour past the scheduled end of the session, ignoring the lure of a surprising winter sun on a Saturday afternoon.

The group, diverse in age, race and background, was connected by a shared vision of Philadelphia communities bonding together to solve common problems and to insist that an unresponsive power structure take notice.

As with other groups, improved education was the theme struck first and most often as the panelists painted their vision of a better Philadelphia.

In their Philadelphia of the year 2010, troubled inner city schools had been rescued by the enactment of “educational empowerment zones” on the model of the economic empowerment zone that had helped North Philly in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

These empowerment zones funneled special resources to struggling schools. They were fueled by a coalition of business and community leaders who came together around the issue of education to pressure political leadership to do the right thing.

In the Philadelphia schools generally, the emphasis was on better communication between schools and families. Retention of committed teachers was improved by giving them higher pay in return for five-commitments not to seek other jobs.

Kids saw a reason to stay in school because schools did much better at addressing the disconnect inner city students used to see between education and employment.

The schools were just one example, in this view, of an increased citizen involvement in city and neighborhood issues, one that was based on solutions, not arguments.

“Everyone one was required to read the Constitution,” one panelist said. “That reduced the partisanship that had been killing us.”

In the neighborhoods, the city removed tax barriers so that homeowners and neighborhoods could take over vacant lots and turn them into gardens and parks.

In the area of crime, the police finally bought into the notion of community policing. Cops were on the street, not behind desks or in cars. There was better training of police to respect minorities and to work with law abiding citizens in poor neighborhoods. Church and nonprofit agencies like Interfaith Action were enabled to do more good when the city took the attitude of offering help instead on creating obstacles.

Drug use was curbed with an emphasis on preventative and rehab programs, though there was still accountability of drug users for committing other crimes, particularly for repeat offenders.

Another important aspect of the crime issue was media reform that changed suburbanites’ and others’ attitudes about inner-city neighborhoods, since sensationalized crime coverage no longer dominated news about the city.

Media made a greater effort to report the “real” story of what went on in city neighborhoods, instead of parroting “official” views.

An audience full of detailed questions pushed two home with the greatest force: Where did you get the money for these good programs? How did you get the political leaders to listen to the people?

Re: money the answers were these: Sin taxes were increased; job creation strategies worked to increase the number of taxpayers and “Gov. Rendell, then President Rendell remembered his old city and took care of it when he got to Harrisburg and Washington.”

The answer to the second question was that citizens working together on real solutions to problems became a force that could not be ignored.

Two other audience questions made memorable points:

“How did we get Philadelphia back to making something the world wanted?”

“How did we stop our neighborhoods being drug supermarkets for the suburbs?”