Public and community engagement, involvement and participation is what we are doing as consultants. It is also what we help others do most effectively. We work with teams, companies and agencies on reaching consensus through public participation and collaboration. We usually find ourselves bridging divides by creating spaces where people are willing to participate to build solutions. Community engagement builds consensus. And below you have some of the best of the news and tips that we have found about how to engage communities. Or what happens when you do not. The latest news handpicked by our public sector consultants, all wrapped up with a sometimes snarky – yet always informed – perspective. Enjoy!
If you’ve worked in public engagement for a while, you should seriously consider the process of becoming an International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) Certified Public Participation Practitioner (CP3) or even a Master Certified Public Participation Practitioner (MCP3). My partner, Doug Sarno, and I were two of the first ...
read more →
With all due respect to my civil engineering pals, I’m not sure that I could have thought of a subject less sexy and interesting than storm water management, and then I ran across the story below. Okay, maybe sexy is pushing it, but if you’re looking for public involvement success ...
read more →
If you’ve not yet read this, I’d encourage you to do so. Matt Leighninger and Quixada Moore-Vissing summed up the current state of affairs nicely in this paper from Public Agenda. As they said, “When citizens do not feel their voices matter, particularly when they have made the effort to ...
read more →
One of the best and most useful skills to develop in public engagement, facilitation, and conflict management is the ability to ask dialed in, compelling, clear, to-the-point, interesting questions. Great questions result in great answers, and questions that sound more like some kind of ham-fisted, bureaucratic interrogation usually get lousy ...
read more →
In the work that we do and in the classes that we teach, we increasingly run across people just starting out in this biz. Newer facilitators tend to be nervous about the idea of dealing with volatile situations and people with strong feelings on competing sides of issues. They’re usually ...
read more →
A recent Pew research study finds that Americans tend to have a positive image of the work of research scientists (which is great news), but don’t think much of the ability of those scientists to communicate (which is entirely fixable). Once again, it corroborates what we’ve seen for ...
read more →
People who deal with tough public policy, stakeholder conflicts and upset people much of the time can become jaded, skeptical and even cynical about working with the public. You begin to wonder if people are truly as unreasonable and crazy as broadcast, cable and social media news coverage makes them ...
read more →
I just spent several days professing with the next generation of public servants at a major university recently and a hot topic of classroom conversation had to do with big changes made by their administration without engaging the students who would be affected – they weren’t pleased. The conversation was ...
read more →
Just so happens that I’m writing this from Chicago (Second City, that Toddlin’ Town, the City of Broad Shoulders, Hog butcher for the world, or as the Wall Street Journal called it, Beirut by the lake) this week. I’m teaching the weeklong IAP2 Foundations in Public Participation course ...
read more →
Empathy is on the decline. This is pretty startling information because we talk about empathy a whole lot in this work. Research suggests that people are getting less empathic – or empathetic, if you prefer. And, in fact, people are getting more selectively empathic, meaning that we might care about, ...
read more →
