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!
Meeting facilitation can be a complex art and science when the issues themselves are comparably complex. As we teach in our meeting facilitation training, learning to do meeting facilitation well requires paying attention to nuances, one of which is getting the right people in the room. The room, of ...
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| If this doesn’t make you want to shotgun a tall boy, nothing will. |
Max Hardy is a longtime Aussie mate and colleague of ours who, in this Ted talk, does a nice job of explaining the power of the right question....
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We help organizations overcome dysfunction, both with the customers/public that they serve and internally. People need control of their lives and jobs and if they don’t get it, they disengage....
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These are tough days to be working in public service, especially federal government. It’s hard for people who have been under constant fire and derision for years to stay motivated to serve the greater good, and it’s difficult to inspire younger people to want to do it for a living, ...
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The thesis of this article is that the best, most effective crisis management team is You. And your neighbors and your community. Us. The Tribe.
About a year ago, I read Sebastian Junger’s wonderful book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. What an ...
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America seems to love polls, and the media loves to feed us poll results on a daily basis, but what do they really mean? And what is their true usefulness? If we take a poll on a specific question with a few hundred people out of a population of 300 ...
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At the risk of revealing a dirty little blogging secret, the phrase I’ve used as the title of this article has been included in our guiding list of ‘key words’ for quite some time. So, I know there’s at least one of you out there who thinks this is an ...
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Citizens Advisory Boards are convened by government agencies to seek advice over time. Members are typically selected from diverse perspectives. As a cross-section of the broader community, they commit to spending time together to develop agreement on the advice they will provide to the sponsoring agency they serve.
Documenting the ...
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We have all been there. Our clients want the latest and greatest online participation tools—not to enhance their programs, but to replace the need to actually get out and meet with stakeholders. The risks with online public engagement are great.
Online tools are obviously great at many things: reaching a ...
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