Ed Schwartz

Bio

As founder and president of the Institute for the Study of Civic Values in Philadelphia, Ed Schwartz has been a national leader in movements to revitalize neighborhoods and expand citizen participation in government for more than 25 years. In the 1970s, he built a city-wide coalition of community organizations that led to his upset election to the Philadelphia City Council as a councilman-at-large in 1984. Between 1987 and 1992, he served as director of Philadelphia's Office of Housing and Community Development, overseeing the rehabilitation of more than 4,000 houses and apartments for low-income residents of the city. In 1992, he returned to the Institute for the Study of Civic Values full-time to develop new models for community planning and citizen empowerment for the 1990s. As a Ph.D. in political science from Rutgers University, Dr. Schwartz has written widely on problems related to civic participation, neighborhood development, and America's democratic heritage. His first book, Will the Revolution Succeed? (Intext, 1973) was excerpted in "The Nation and Change in Higher Education." Since then, his articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The American Prospect, Shelterforce, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Philadelphia Daily News. The work of the Institute for the Study of Civic Values itself is profiled extensively in Robert Bellah's award-winning book, Habits of the Heart. Dr. Schwartz has been a pioneer in the use of computers and now the Internet in promoting citizen participation. In 1982, he developed innovative systems to track the performance of public agencies and city expenditures, using one of the first IBM PCs. He was the first elected official in Philadelphia to computerize his constituent services, and participated regularly in local activist bulletin boards as a councilman in 1985, nearly ten years before the concept of "electronic democracy" was recognized anywhere else in the country. Within months of accessing the Internet in 1994, he became a leader in the movement to build community networks throughout the country and in efforts to help citizen organizations use the Net for political empowerment. Today, the Neighborhoods Online Web site that he created and manages is accessed by thousands of community activists and public officials throughout the country. For relaxation, Dr. Schwartz plays jazz piano. In 1984, he organized The Reading Terminals jazz group with Judge Richard Klein and an architect, Herman De Jong. The group has become a local Philadelphia institution, winning "Best of Philly" awards twice from Philadelphia Magazine.