Not to ride on a certain president’s coattails, but the call to public service is louder and more salient now than it has been in a long time. In both its formal and informal forms, that service is especially important now as Austin residents and companies show symptoms of the current economic malady.

The recession story is two-fold. On the one hand, we know, with reasonable certitude, the source of the problem: bad practices in the housing market. However, for the most part, we are powerless to control the persistent decline of the economy. Even the most seasoned and knowledgeable leaders tell us that, palliative bailouts notwithstanding, we are going to have to ride it out for the next few years.

And yet, as bad and ominous as the recession is, we are realizing more and more that we do have the ability to… (wait for it…) do something. Maybe we can’t resolve this crisis, but we can certainly do something to prevent future ones. As the housing collapse metastasized over the last year and a half, we were reminded just how closely we are connected to one another. Both the actions and the inactions of citizens accumulate to have subtle but profound effects on others in our immediate locale, region, state and country.

Naturally, the moral of the story is taken more to heart when the effects of its dismissal are knocking on our doors. The economy is now correcting itself, yes, but that does not mean things should go back to the way they were. Americans must cultivate an improved culture of accountability, and that culture starts with small steps taken at home—in our neighborhoods, our cities and our states.

This is not a tirade against overconsumption, our culture of waste or anything like that. Heck, right now, more consumption is exactly what we need to protect our businesses. But if the vote is the single most important instrument American citizens have, then civic involvement is the single most important collective action we can muster.

This is true not only in the case of economics but also in most other policy areas. Healthcare, education and the environment, to name but a few, are all arenas impacted by the aggregate of millions of individuals’ actions. More importantly, these issues almost always get decided first in a piecemeal fashion at local and state levels, before receiving national attention.

Thus, involvement in one’s community has immediate and tangible effects. Neighborhood associations enact rules and decide hyper-local issues. Quality of life concerns are constantly addressed at commission and city council meetings. The most superficially boring zoning meeting produces some of the most serious and material effects in a city.

It behooves us to learn more about the mechanisms of such de facto policy formulation at the local level. That, in fact, is the explicit goal of the newly-minted student organization Citizens for Local and State Service (CLASS). CLASS facilitates participants’ efforts to plug into local and state policy discussions. The group regularly goes to a cross-section of city meetings, will be attending Texas Legislature hearings and is even producing a mayoral candidate debate. CLASS and other groups are great ways to resolve the disconnect between the classroom and the office.

Lastly, and luckily, I know that I am preaching to the choir here at the LBJ School. Nearly all of us accept civic involvement as a given. Our dilemma revolves around how, not if, we should participate. We tackle policy challenges at the urban, regional, state, federal and international levels. But everywhere is somewhere, and all politics are local.

This piece was written on behalf of and in cooperation with other members of Citizens for Local and State Service, a new LBJ School student group.