Although federal agencies can be reticent to convene advisory committees (in part due to restrictions posed by the Federal Advisory Committee Act), municipal governments routinely employ citizens advisory committees for issues ranging from parks and recreation and solid waste management to business recruitment and retention, libraries, and the arts. Well ...
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As the principal government agency responsible for enforcing federal law around our environmental health – clean air, water and waste – the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has protected and prolonged the lives of people in the United States since late 1970 – and, because of the EPA’s work with ...
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Much of our public engagement practice over the decades has been woven into environmental reviews and issues. The recent spate of Executive Orders from the new White House have reminded me of one of my favorite hit oldies, Environmental Justice, or EJ for short. What a great concept – Justice. ...
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For those of us who love ice hockey, ’tis the season! As a fan of ice hockey and my work, it struck me that a hockey match is kind of like a public meeting that, if facilitated properly, can end up being a satisfying experience for most. Like many public ...
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The guy running the project was honest; brutally honest in fact. He said he’d done his time in the military, took his degree, his rank and his time in and hooked on with a federal agency that he barely knew existed before he joined it. He was interested in getting ...
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These are challenging times for us public participation practitioners. Our life’s work is conflict management and dispute resolution, plus adjusting to the various conflict resolution styles. To support this, we’ve built some nice, neat boxes that contain tools for working with people in most of the ‘real world’ situations encountered ...
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Digital communication has truly transformed public participation, from risk communication to online town hall meetings. However, it is not an automatic or comprehensive solution to working with the public. Agencies would like it to address everything they want to do with the public, but it just doesn’t.
When I ...
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The Town Hall Meeting format will need to be thrown on the scrap heap for the next four years. It’s deadly if you’re trying to control the message and this President and this congress clearly need to control their messages. In their defense, controlling messages and the public narrative is ...
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There are many terms for a community advisory board. These boards can be called citizens’ working committees, public reference groups, stakeholder task forces, whatever. They go by many names – but what are they, and why are they used?
A community advisory board can be a viable alternative to engaging ...
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Election winners frequently tout their success as a mandate to do as they choose, suggesting that they have been ordained to represent and act on overwhelming public opinion. This is generally the argument regardless of the winning party and it’s generally wrong.
I have to think that this is something ...
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