The clarification and development of the concept and experience of Italicity and the larger project of establishing new constructive relationships among mainstream and marginalized populations and various cultures can be furthered by exploring a particularly significant but frequently ignored dimension of geographical clustering of ethnic groups and the unique role and function of community-based ethnic and racial organizations. Attention to the local and its relationship to the regional, national, international and global arenas is especially interesting for its capacity to sharpen various types of value distinctions. Moreover, at the local level the primary experiences of human communities can be encountered, described and documented as various means and methods of cooperation and conflict between and among the driving values of various cultures, and the attendant loyalties of persons and associations devoted to community well-being and the preservation and development of cultural legacies and traditions. Such systematic observations and assessments are required to inform the search for adequate and insightful framing of the public choices affecting change and continuity. These choices shape both the burden and the benefits of public policy related to community-based existence in a globalizing world. In this regard we are in a historically unique position. Though our primary concern is Italicity, in the process and under the pressure of globalization, its characteristics cannot be adequately discerned by a direct comparative method focused on what is Italic in Europe and the United States or places such as Chile, Argentina, and Australia.

The task at hand is more complex because the very essence of Italicity is contextual and its particularity must be explained at the community-based level. Moreover, Italicity is an ongoing process of social construction and the reproduction of Italicity is not only generational, but is also areal/spatial, i.e., related to sub-national situations that may be related to national and supranational efforts which are the willful projects of cultural advocates and entrepreneurs intent on organizing, mobilizing and defining Italic issues and agendas. In an earlier paper in this series I attempted to sketch a profile of the Italian American experience. In this paper I hope to deepen our understanding of the topic by exploring a research and action that would foster the development of intercultural competencies, to recovery the local dimensions of culture and values and finally, to advance a networking process among local NGOs and national and international intermediaries that would support and sustain the transmission and representation of what is valued from the local to the national and global arenas That proponents of Italicity should assume a pivotal position in this process is posited. A fuller elaboration of the value and appropriateness of Italicity depends on the efficacy of its evocation and in this respect is an existential research question sustained by the premise that the presence and power of urbanization rooted in the Italic experience makes it particularly bondable to pluriformity. Pluriformity is an essential characteristic of urban life, a composite of differentiated social communities united for collective action and sharing an overarching and common bond of union. Thus world urbanism and America urbanization are inseparable from the development of ethnic organizations as NGOs. They have the charge of representing and educating their constituencies: helping them truly to integrate into the power systems, while at the same time assisting frequently isolated and alienated populations to discover cultural traditions and to retain heritages that are the encasements of social values and personal virtues. NGOs must do this work in times of rapid social, economic and demographic change when value- transformations are inescapable owing to the force of social interaction and the withering of previous dominant symbolizations of order and social controls.

Moreover, on September 11, 2001 came the tragic and terrible event showing the awesome horrors that can befall mankind when unrelieved fear and hatred is untempered by reason and dialogue. American community groups face these challenges of the new century with multiple resources and responsibilities. This event caused the conveners of the first American seminar on Italicity to postpone the meeting that produced the first American and Italian volume devoted to understanding this very significant reformulation and articulation of the essence of the behavior, mind-set, value-orientation, style and cultural formation. Though violence and troubling events influence the development of human affairs, the wider horizons of research and action in support of deepening understanding of the cultural foundations of civilization and assessing the contours of new interactions of Italic culture in new contexts of Europe and America and then other situations must move to continue this and to take steps toward achieving the goals so clearly and iconically captured in globus et locus. These words are an Italic form that is definitive of the local and world-wide realities of our time within which our practice and understanding of Italicity and its relationships to other modern types of urban ethnicity and the values and cultures that are emerging in current practices of social articulation as competitors to the economic and political spheres of order and relationships that are driving globalization. The findings presented in the first collection of articles on this topic are suggestive of a need to deepen and to extend our treatment of the topic and it to this end that the following argument for a research and organizing project is proposed as a new thrust designed to discover, critique and foster articulations of Italicity in the pluralistic contexts in the United States. This new direction and its anticipated outcomes will document the various patterns of Italicty that are existent in the United States and in this process aspire to energize a new coalition of American ethnic organizations devoted to the development of intercultural competencies for the improvement of policies related to the national, regional and global realities of our time.

It is the burden of this situation to move beyond the general characteristics of Italicity in America and to develop an action research project that would 1) at the national level include training and technical assistance designed to foster intercultural competencies among racial and ethnic organizations with offices in Washington DC and 2) at the local level with the assistance of community groups in Congressional Districts that have meaningful concentrations of ethnic populations in each district to explore a counter-part to the national initiative that would concentrate coalition building among ethnic groups and ethnic leaders and the identification of convergence issues among ethnic groups that would reconstitute bonds of union, invigorate platoons of friendship and produce prototypic models of intercultural cooperation that could become demonstrations for new and successful ways addressing the intercultural imperatives of our time.

While American social values have been changing in the last few decades and continue to change, America has become more diverse, and in many ways more unequal, than ever before in its history. Even those counted as minorities far outsize most countries: 35,000,000 Hispanics; 34,500,000 blacks; 10,500,000 Asian Americans; and 4,000,000 Native Americans. Eastern and Southern-Mediterranean Americans comprise nearly 16 percent or over 40 millions persons. Of these nearly 16 millions are Italian-Americans. Though such macro-level demographics are revealing, a truer picture of ethnic and cultural interaction emerges from finer grain analysis, which the use of Congressional District data facilitates. Certain deep lines of continuity emerge from the rudimentary analysis of demographic clusters of the foundational populations and the immigrants. Ethnic political development and more detailed analysis of embedded values of ethnic political phenomena may enable us to assess the longer cycles of change and continuities that form the deep structure and the ethnic dimension of the America regime.

Instead, one learns that in a stable system, one need not search for special meaning unless the percentage of red beads falls above or below "control limits" defined by the simple equation:

p 3 p(1-p)/N

where p = the total proportion of red beads derived from sampling and N = the sample size, in Deming’s example, N=50. Hence, in the Red Bead experiment, it is not meaningful that any particular paddle dipped into the batch of mixed marbles pulls out between 1 and 19 red beads.

Using this principle of meaningful variation and U.S. Census data regarding ethnicity in Congressional Districts, we find that America remains amazingly "unmixed" or statistically "out of control." America remains lumpy beyond the superficial and scientifically meaningless categories which inform much of the political debate regarding ethnicity and race. For example nearly all reports of public opinion including National Election Exit Polling Data

African-

American 9.6 141

American

Indian 3.5 14

Asian-

American 2.9 105

English-

American 13.1 226

French-

American 4.1 48

German-

American 23.3 186

Hispanic-

American 8.8 127

Irish-

American 15.6 225

Italian-

American 5.9 135

Polish-

American 3.8 131

continue to make much of the white and black categories and the synthetic groupings of Asian and Hispanic/Latino populations that are not only comprised of various national traditions and ethnicities but also are quantitatively extremely small segments of the electorate. Instead of using the category "white," the following statistical test uses the U.S. Census data for several of the largest American ethnicities and owing to the need for national comparability this analysis respectively combines Native Americans, Asian American and Hispanic American communities into three data clusters comprised of all of their respective nations, tribes and ethnicities. Table 1 reveals the extent of patterns and clusters of ethnicities in U.S. Census districts that are above meaningfully high percentages for ten of the largest ethnic groups. This test documents and establishes the baseline from which impacts on the political culture, electoral strategies and campaign tactics of these groups and combinations of these groups can be assessed. Patterns of ethnicities in each congressional district provide a measurable and meaningful method of locating the particular contours of ethnic group interaction , its intensity and magnitude.

These data sources have been prepared and arrayed to focus our attention on the strategic shift in research and action proposed in this paper: Decentralization of efforts to develop understandings of the human scale interaction of ethnic populations in nationally significant political units B- the Congressional District B- and the primary transmission of such findings to national ethnic organizations so as to enhance their development of intercultural competencies that are rooted in the experiences of specific locations and thus enable them to become more representative of intergroup realities in an area that is simultaneously more centralized and decentralized. This project is proposed as test and model for addressing critiques of national interest groups and to narrow the gap between national organizations and the experiences of inter-ethnic realties in Congressional Districts. The proposal would explore the variety of interethnic relations that exist in various contexts and the variations of ethnic identity that are emerging. Finally the project would enable us to discern how these identities comport with the concept of Italicity and its expression in ways that are important for both domestic and international policies.

An action research project focused on a targeted sample of Congressional Districts would allow the testing of approaches to intercultural situations and would further the redefining of local relationships created in particular contexts constituted by the unique intercultural settings existing in a set of Congressional Districts which have interesting and meaningful concentrations of Italian Americans.

The overall rationale and purpose of this approach to the development of intercultural competencies will be spelled out later in this paper. However, the thrust of the project and experiment in localized action research is simple: In many respects the capacity to fashion national remedies for problems related to the lack of understanding of the intercultural imperatives of pluralistic societies and international relations has reached a curiously chaotic phase that includes intense levels of conflict as well as impasses, stalemates and even stunning levels of irrelevancy. This new strategy and its implicit new direction aspires to help ethnic and racial organizations engage substantively and effectively in the civil polity of their communities as full partners in the effort to overcome prejudice and build lines of communication and cooperation in facing on the community level the problems which face our nation and our world toward the realization of American ideals of justice and equality for all citizens.

Dr. Thaddeus Radzilowski, President of the Piast Foundation, framed a rationale for understanding ethnicity in America which I believe can substantively and operationally be applied to the experience and concept of Italicity and certainly must be included in any further clarification of Italicity in the American context and to the task of research and action proposed in pursuit of decentralizing our search for understanding the manifestations of Italcity at the level of Congressional Districts with meaningfully high concentrations of persons identifying themselves as Italian American.. The following text elaborates the core elements of a new discussion of local identity, which are most relevant to the clarification of new understanding of intercultural competencies and in my opinion to our understanding of Italicity and how this concept and experience must be related to the discussion of ethnicity and local identity and the processes which are the undergirding of successful approaches to the development of intercultural competencies.

Table 2, "Congressional Districts by Highest Percentage of Italian-American Population," developed by the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs (NCUEA) provides cross-tabs in these Congressional Districts for the following ethnic populations: African-American, Asian-American, English-American, French-American, German-American, Hispanic-American, Irish-American, Native American and Polish-American. The twelve (12) states within which these Congressional Districts are located are New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Louisiana, and Florida. These sixty-six Congressional Districts in twelve states are not only significant for their Italian -Americans but also include clusters of other ethnic groups and other regional cultural impacts which may be suggestive of typologies of pluralistic cultures within which Italian Americans and others have participated and in which the formation of italicities can be discerned. Moreover, understanding the processes of intercultural relations in Congressional District B, the smallest unit of representation recognized by the US Constitution, may open new questions related to the nexus of interest groups, political participation and representative government that would deepen our understanding of currently salient discourse on both democracy and economic development and their relationship to the cultural sector represented in this case by the concept and process identified as Italicity.

Ethnicity is one of the deepest and most enduring of human identities because it is based on language, religion, culture, family, common history and local community. It can have political salience and as such can play both negative and positive roles. However, political or public salience is not necessary for its survival. It can be the basis of community formation and a generous pluralism on the one hand, or divisiveness and prejudice on the other.

Ethnicity in America is a creative adaptation to life in the New World by immigrants, both free and coerced. It was an attempt by newcomers to make themselves "at home" in a new place, often under difficult and challenging conditions. Out of the process came cultures that were born out of preservation, adaptation, direct borrowing and invention, often reinforced by prejudice and interest. Successful ethnicities have kept the ability to change themselves to meet new conditions as well as to modify the dominant society in which they are embedded and to affect other ethnic cultures with whom they exist.

 Ethnic adaptation to preserve core values and to mobilize group members in times of difficulty has happened with remarkable speed given the usual more leisurely pace of historical change. To be able to anticipate and use ethnicity in ways beneficial to the evolution of our society requires a clear understanding of recent history and current prospects if it is to succeed.

At this moment ethnicity does not play as significant a political role as it potentially could because the language of race continues to dominate the public discourse. For groups that are lumped together as "white" there is no venue for operation or any sets of values, networks, languages, etc. to draw on to impact policy and civic development as the carriers of those values are in ethnicity not in race. Despite all of the talk of "whiteness" or white culture or white ethnicity, there is neither identity nor culture there. It has no story especially for those with a strong ethnic identity. At this moment, given a free choice to self identify, less than 1 percent of the population chooses "white" or any variation thereof. There are more Slovaks than "whites."

Given the rapid change that has taken place in the public perception of minority status and other metaphors and understandings that have had currency over the last half century, it is not farfetched to predict a significant collapse of the "whiteness" discourse and a major shift in the way the unique African-American situation of American society is positioned and discussed in the public square in the near future.

At this point it is not utopian to suggest the possibility of the re-politization of ethnicity and its return as a vehicle to talk about civic values, community and multiculturalism. This discourse will require rethinking of multiculturalism at the same time. Its harder version, which postulates the incomprehensibility and irreconcilability of cultures to each other, is useless for any civic dialog. Multiculturalism in its soft form is at this time too superficial and vapid to carry any meaningful concepts of community development. Neither has a language or a story out of which to fashion a political dialogue, nor are they, any more than is race, embedded in institutions in which people can act in the civic arena.

 In order to prepare for the re-emergence of ethnicity as an element of political culture beyond its current use, which confusingly straddles the issues of race, and ethnicity, we need to begin to try out ideas and ways of talking about it in new contexts. We should begin with pilot projects in a number of areas. Because of my own experience and because of the nature of the locale, I would clearly suggest my own Institute working with the University of Michigan in Detroit and Dearborn as one of the major sites for such activity.

The Detroit area has a large Polish-American population (600,000), the largest Arab-American population in the United States (300,000) a sizeable Italian-American group and a growing Hispanic, largely Mexican- American, population anchored by a city which has an 80% African- American population. The university has centers for the study of Arab and Hispanic population and a new endowment for a Polish chair and center. The area’s fifth largest ethnic group is Italian-American.

Secondly, we must take the pilot project to a national level and make it available to leaders of ethnic groups in the United States. We can prepare training materials drawn from the lessons of the pilot projects and assist groups in using them. The key will be to have groups reflect on their history and experience in America and the adaptation of their cultures to the American reality with an eye to learning how they can utilize that experience in shaping a generous and genuinely multi cultural society and civic life.

A third step is to teach the application of the insights of the ethnic experience in America in the homelands of the ethnic groups who have created and shaped American civic life and institutions. This is very important as many of these nations are emerging out of communist or other dictatorships and are seeking ways to work out democratic and pluralist solutions within their own polities, but also to become part of regional or even continental unions with peoples of quire different cultures and with histories of mutual antagonism.

As I have extensive ties with universities and foundations in Poland, Ukraine, Albania, Slovakia, Macedonia and Bulgaria, I would be willing to work on that piece. I have organized and chaired meetings and conferences in East Central Europe.

In transmitting our experience there I suggest that at least part of the program involve participants from a number of ethnic groups who have lived, worked and shared a civic life in the same cities or areas over multiple generations to actually demonstrate beyond the experience of the homeland ethnic group how it works in practice. Whenever possible African- Americans should be included.

It is important to note as a caution that in so far as we espouse and practice multiculturalism and believe in a pluralist and open society, we are being quintessentially Western and especially American. It might ironically be even seen as one of our ethnocentricities given the fervor of our commitment. No other modern world culture has placed such a high premium on such ideas nor developed their theoretical underpinnings as well as we have. These are not transplanted concepts without roots in our culture. Thus, we have a greater certainty we can succeed at them, more than perhaps any other society in the world. We need to be able to take this fact into consideration in our preparation for the work we will do overseas.

Because I am a historian who has written at some length about these problems and because I have been involved as an activist in many of the main developments in the field of ethnicity since at least 1967, I have chosen to look at the problem from a historical point of view to set a context for my suggestions. It follows this summary.

The Second World War turned the melting pot into a pressure cooker for most American ethnic groups. While the war had mobilized many of them for relief and political support for homelands that were caught up in the storm of war and hence intensified identity with ancestral home, it also put unparalleled pressure on them to Americanize and to show their unquestioning loyalty to the United States in the face of total war. The second generation served in unprecedented numbers in the war and came back imbued with American patriotism. The Cold War during its first intensive phase from the late forties to the early sixties continued and even strengthened the need for conformity. European ethnicity was mobilized by the U.S. government for the struggle against Communism. On the national domestic scene, by contrast, ethnicity was muted to play down any hint of foreignness. Its public expression was largely confined to underlining its 100% Americanism. In private, however, ethnicity continued to inform, enrich and shape the family and neighborhood life of most Americans of Southern and Eastern European ancestry and to shape their responses to life, culture and politics.

This was a contrast with the 1930s, which saw a resurgence of public ethnicity after the Americanization following World War I. The Depression called forth the need for mutual assistance and community solidarity, which translated, in many areas of the country into direct support of the new CIO unions. The ethnic infrastructure of halls, newspapers, neighborhood networks and radio became one of the keys to the success of the organizing drives. Most importantly, it was the hidden basis for worker solidarity. Most remarkable was the intergroup cooperation and mutual support that was engendered. Ethnicity was also given legitimacy by the direct government support of folk cultures to help combat despair and deflect anger and the attraction of radical ideas during the Depression

Another surge in the political expression of ethnicity in these groups emerged across the country in the nineteen sixties as the "new ethnicity." It was not new, but it was a new public expression of it. Its origins were complex and cannot be fully explicated here. To enumerate the main causes however we need to list:

—Détente and the waning intensity of the Cold War, which undermined the need for a façade of, united America.

—Religious change born out of Vatican II, which threatened the religious worldview of many and was used as a new tool of Americanization as Aggiornomento became associated with an updated American Catholicism and ethnic enculturations were seen as "Tridentine."

—Assaults on ethnic neighborhoods by city planners, highway builders and private developers.

—The social and political upheavals and the new language of politics born out of the reaction to the Vietnam War.

— Generational change in the ethnics groups themselves accompanied by changes in the economic and educational levels of the groups. Many expressions of the new ethnicity came out of the college-educated third and fourth generations.

—The movement of the Civil Rights Movement north, the confrontation over integration of schools and neighborhoods. This resulted in the shift of the southern metaphors of black and white to multi-ethnic northern cities.

The expression of ethnicity, which resulted, was both positive and negative. They became the basis for new coalitions such as the National Council of Neighborhood Women and the Black Polish Alliance. They also provided the basis for resistance to bussing and movement of African-Americans into ethnic neighborhoods. The most promising result was the neighborhood movement which provided a venue for the expression of the civic virtues of responsibility for neighbors and environment, cooperation and mutuality, community solidarity, the importance of home, family and place as the basis for a politics rooted in ethnicity. In general it was a successful adaptation.

By the nineteen eighties the public language had again changed. The metaphors of Third World resistance to colonialism born out of opposition to the Vietnam War was transferred to domestic politics and Third World people were equated with a new domestic group, "people of color." The black/white metaphor resulted in the leveling of the ethnic reality into a simple bi-polar racial world. Both of these undermined the possibility of a common language to build solidarity.

With the coming end of the dominations of this bi-polar thinking in American life we can see the possibility of a re-emergence of ethnicity that will include not only the older third and later generations of the old ethnic groups who continue to hunger for identity that has a meaning, a rich culture and a story which "white ethnicity" does not offer, but also the new immigrants from most of these groups who continue to come with the language and culture of the homeland and who must be brought into engagement with American life and culture. For this we need new expressions of ethnicity that can underpin a generous multiculturalism. Its legitimacy has already been established. Now we need to give it rooting in solid values that come out of each ethnic group’s experience and to its expression in their different enculturations to be shared across groups.

There are two elements that need to be developed if we are to be successful. First, the soft multiculturalism that is based on superficial sharing of cultures has to be given some rigor. It is now largely based on the exchange of information about the folk and high culture of the homeland and contains almost nothing about the American experience of the group, the cultural adaptations it has developed to make it successful in the New World or its interactions with others. This is where we can learn about the contributions of the group to the civic culture of the communities it lives in.

The second element is that we need to train the leaders of groups to reflect on and tease out of their history precisely those experiences which allowed them to be successful and to contribute and to think about those virtues which are particularly important for ethnic leadership, especially their role in articulating goals and brokering between groups. It is at this point that we will be able to move to mobilizing ethnic groups to use their experience positively and to teach those lessons abroad.

Prior to developing this decentralized model, the Center for the Study of Culture and Values held 3 seminar meetings for the Washington national coordinating councils of the racial and ethnic communities to ascertain their specific requests for assistance. Many of the fifty-plus ethnic organizations with national offices in Washington including the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs, the National Italian American Foundation, Order of Sons of Italy, The Polish American Congress, National Council of LaRaza, The One America Foundation, The Lusa-American Foundation and other related organizations represented the most extensive national background and experience devoted to intercultural relations for a period of over three decades with ethnic and racial groups in cities across the country and in countries across the world. These organizations have struggled with the emergence of pluralism and the welter of claims made in pursuit of equitable distribution of resources and support for cultural democracy and the right to the preservation and development of cultural legacies.

These organizations have taken leadership roles in the last several years in a variety of areas, which include but are not limited to:

(a) co-chairing an ethnic-racial coalition of some 60 plus groups working on the Census procedures for the year 2000;

(b) instituting a One America award involving such individuals as President Clinton, Muhammad Ali and others;

(c) instituting a series of seminars dealing with various aspects of racial reconciliation;

(d) inaugurating a college level course on race and ethnicity in American life, which was first taught at the Catholic University of America in Washington, and is being used in an American college in Italy;

(e) distributing resources to libraries, teachers at the university and college levels and to the broader local school population at the primary and secondary levels.

The wealth of this experience combined with the seminars noted earlier, confirmed our suspicions that the leadership of ethnic-racial organizations in the Washington area need assistance in helping their constituencies face vital and serious challenges. The soundings in the three previous seminars manifest a number of specific, concrete needs had by local racial and ethnic groups if they are to respond to the new challenges. They need and desire help in several key areas:

(1) The first area is that of communications in the broadest sense. That is, to serve the community at large not only in order to attract its help, but also to play their proper role these organizations need to be able to reach out to the media, to the business and labor communities, to American public policy leaders, and to the public at large. Journalist Chuck Conconi, senior editor at Washingtonian Magazine, spoke to the ethnic-racial leaders at one seminar as did journalist Michael Barone. The sessions demonstrated a profound interest on the part of the community leaders in learning how to deal with the media and other opinion leaders.

(2) Community based ethnic and racial groups, particularly because of September 11, now have an urgent need for strategic and tactical planning. How can they do their essential jobs while faced with more and more serious problems than ever before, with tensions that divide as well as unite, and in a period of declining resources.

(3) A third major need for the Washington based groups is to create a resource pool so they can assist each other as the occasions arise. In fact the coordinating work done by the Center for the Study of Culture and Values is the sole regular exchange of information among the Washington based ethnic and racial coordinating groups.

Based on the extensive experience of the principals of this project and the needs expressed by the racial-ethnic leaders in the seminar noted, the following process has been hammered out which we feel can and will be of substantial assistance to the Washington based groups. This is intended not only to provide necessary steps to help them survive and thrive as organizations, but also to assist them in keeping their respective cultures vitally alive while partaking fully of the American experience.

Additionally, we expect that the realization of this program will become a model for other metropolitan areas around the nation. It will be so structured as to provide program concepts and materials for state and community based college programs and local foundations cooperating jointly for the good of their communities.

This initiative of the Center for the Study of Culture and Values includes a series of seminars for the Washington based ethnic-racial coordinating groups.

These seminars will deal with a variety of issues:

(a) Media and Communications B as noted, this issue is of paramount importance to the Washington based groups. Veteran Washington journalist will conduct the seminars dealing with any and all aspects of medial relations and of interface with the larger Washington public policy community.

(b) Sessions on Strategic Planning B these will draw upon university specialists from the social sciences as well as experts from organizations that have demonstrated specific competence in this area. Stress will be given to attainable short and long-term goals as they relate to the purpose of the individual racial and ethnic organizations.

Several of these sessions will be held on Capitol Hill with an invited audience not only of the community leaders, but also of congressional leaders and its key staff members.

All organizations in the Washington area, whether they have attended such sessions or not, will receive monthly information sheets on the sessions together with key contact information.

The general sessions described above will be supplemented by intensive individual training sessions with special emphasis on the specific issues of communications and strategic planning while are being faced by particular organizations. These will be selected for this training within the first few months of the program as a summary of the key points and procedures is distributed to all Washington based groups. The sessions will be conducted by practitioners best suited to work effectively at each of the local sites and liaison with the national racial and ethnic organizations and networks.

The program as described will enable Washington based organizations to contribute substantially to local contexts and thus foster more informed participation and a more effective transmission of intercultural competencies into the civic polity of our nation. Beyond this it also will be a model for other areas, community colleges and foundations in their search to enliven civil society as a base for effective citizen cooperation in times of special tensions and challenges. Over the past three decades materials on ethnic groups in America have researched the following topics: origins, migration, arrival, settlement, economic life social structure, social organization, family and kinship, economic and educational and health behaviors, religion, politics, and large-scale patterns of intergroup relations; the maintenance of group solidarity in terms of language, literature, folklore, food, festivals, music and forms of communication and networking. To deepen such analysis with further attention to the value foundations encased in cultures, to foster the art and science of coalition building at the Congressional District level and to reenergized national and international organizations devoted to shaping public policy in new directions through education and advocacy defines the agenda of service required to meet the challenges of the 21st century. To ignore and deny the significance of non-governmental organizations related to ethnic cultures and to focus on the ragged-edges of conflicts that have engaged race and ethnicity as causes of divisiveness rather than as a cultural resource from which we can mutually draw are two central aspects of the past. The new thrust and new direction that can emerge from the Italicity initiative and the proposed weaving of its potential as a recovered well-spring of values and a potent evocation of the human spirit could resonate not only among those particularly interested in what is Italic but among others engaged in parallel and equivalent probes into the mystery of being as it is manifested in various ways and narratives. These converge into accounts of personhood, peoplehood, nature and the divine—common experiences of reality—which are accessible in the articulations of culture and even "learnable," as we cultivate the capacity to become multi-culturally competent and shape the development of a philosophy of culture addressing current needs.