Citizen Participation and Elections

The community partner that I will be working with this semester is my home church, Cathedral of Faith in San Jose. It is a nondenominational, Christian church. There are numerous services provided at church such as preschool, Sunday daycare during 4 different church services, food outreach, and various holiday givings. There are many other services as well, but I will be working with the Spanish ministry. I will be working in the nursery caring for children, newborns to two years old. Citizens, whether they are apart of the church or not, may go to our campus and receive gifts for various holidays and food during our Tuesday and Wednesday food drives. People are also able to enjoy the gym during certain allotted times and receive support from those suffering from drug and alcohol addictions. Most of the services besides supporting faith are health based.

Citizens can volunteer(Volunteerism as noted in textbook) to help out the church. They may donate their time, donate food, or donate money. Citizens also meet during bible study and various other meetings to come up with ways to make the church services more efficient and beneficial to those who would like to help and those who receive help. Citizens and church members do some community outreach through missions and raising donations. Usually, the people who participate the most are ones that are elderly or retired because they do not have demanding jobs and have more free time.

By engaging with my community partner, services are expanded or altered to better serve people in need of those services. By parents raising their concerns and suggestions to coordinators of childcare services, changes can be made to better accommodate their needs. The church community as a whole then feels respected and cared for. In regards to healthcare and services such as open gym and alcohol/drug abuse support, this is beneficial to citizens who are not socioeconomically advantaged. These services can be very expensive, but my church provides them free of charge. To my understanding, churches are independent of some government rules and regulations. I also have yet to hear anything about participation methods such as voting used.

State and Local Relations

Questions: Why is there tension between the state and local levels of government? In what ways is this tension healthy for our political system overall?

There is tension between the state and local levels of government because local levels of government want more power and flexibility allocated to it in order to carry out the necessary policies to help those particular communities efficiently. Another contributing factor to the tension between the state and local governments is fiscal stress or in other words, financial stress. Local governments want a lot of monies allocated to them so that they can have higher budgets and wiggle room when it comes to allocating funds for schools, buildings, and public services. Localities are also stressed when states require a certain amount of money and in some cases, taxes, to be funneled back into the state as a whole. This takes away from the local governments abilities to carry out whatever functions they had planned. States may also become frustrated when local governments are given a lot of power to proceed how they would like because services and funds may not be fair all across the board.

This tension is somewhat healthy for our political system overall because it allows our country to test different ways of governing. When certain ways of governing have been proven successful for some local governments, they may prove successful for the state government as a whole which may in turn allow the state government to become a leader for the country. Our political system overall tends to toy with different modes of governing and this allows for both the minorities to be heard along with the majorities. Different modes of governing may also reach different types of communities such as the suburbs.

First Blog Post!

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