eJournal of Public Affairs, Volume 10, Issue 2, From the Editors

Our work to publish this special eJournal of Public Affairs issue during the Independence Day season brought focus on our responsibilities as citizens. Separately, we may each have a private or professional identity – a merchant, a medical or legal practitioner, sales or management, for example – but we also each find ourselves functioning as citizens of a particular place. That locality is only a place until we accept responsibility for engaging in the work to preserve and improve it, and then it becomes a true community for us. Our shared civic responsibility, however, increasingly seems to be weighed down and complicated by the shared frustrations of public life, particularly at the state or national level where partisan politics dominates even our best intentions. Yet, the local level remains remarkably available to individuals who desire to solve the problems they have in common as a community. This is an issue about just such effort, and we are proud to elevate it.