In 2022, the U.S. Federal Government received 930,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. And that’s just the feds. If you’ve worked in the public sector at any level, I expect you’ve dealt with public information requests and the challenges that they create. There’s a baked in tension between the ...
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Usually when I first walk into a room full of agitated people, I hear Jimmy Buffet singing in my head – “You got fins to the left, fins to the right.” Dealing with disparate groups and the thorny problems that they struggle with poses challenges for facilitators from lots of ...
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Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and my friends and I had to ride our chickens to school (couldn’t afford horses), we were taught a quaint subject called “civics” and/or “government.” That gradually came to an end as school curricula changed and narrowed. And that lack of basic understanding of ...
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Getting the best out of people and nudging them into some level of cooperation is a learnable art and skillset. It’s sort’a required for the work that we do. Although we do deal with students and clients who sometimes just oversee the function of public participation but don’t actually work ...
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Eli Lilly and Company announced this month that they’re reducing the price of their most common insulin by 70% and capping patient out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35 or less a month. It might make cynical people wonder why. But in spite of how things feel these days, the overall arch ...
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“I’m not opposed to (FILL IN THE BLANK) – just don’t put it here!” Boy, if I had a dollar for every time I hear that said at a public meeting, I could hire Stephen King to write this newsletter. NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard) has been around as ...
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Direct democracy or citizen lawmaking might be the clearest example of true, authentic public participation that we can think of. Yet citizens taking direct control of their own governance through ballot initiatives are under wholesale attack. Constituents demonstrating power in politics simply doesn’t sit well with a significant number of ...
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Conversations are interesting social constructions – a give and take and turn-taking encounter. But it’s particularly interesting to dig deeper into who’s giving, who’s taking, how they start, how they continue and how they end....
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A real success story. It sometimes feels like these examples are few and far between, but when we bother to look, we find good people doing good work in some of the most historically challenging situations. Let’s let this serve as inspiration for the rest of us. ...
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A lot of our clients are introverted. Funny, but we tend to be professionally extroverted introverts ourselves. Most introverted people are really uncomfortable making small talk. But small talk builds connections that lead to conversations which lead to discussions that can solve problems. This will help.
