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!
I’ve been fortunate enough to have been facilitating a community group of concerned people in a small town around a large and highly controversial proposed mining project for more than 10 years. It may actually take another 10 years for it to come to fruition – if it ever does ...
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So, there are better, more effective ways of crafting emails, but consider the message that the medium itself sends. If you have the option of actually talking with someone face to face, even when it’s less convenient for you, get up, move, walk, drive if you have to, but go ...
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It was interesting to find the corporate world acknowledging the value of engagement but using different terminology, in this case, influence … mutual influence. In other words, operating differently from a position of unilateral hierarchy, coercion or authority, which is the way that we have come to expect most companies ...
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Working with people in leadership positions reveals an interesting conundrum related to credibility with communities. Leaders more often see themselves as cheerleaders for the projects that they manage. That zeal, however, makes it difficult for them to empathize with those who don’t see those projects quite as positively, which creates ...
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We live in a time of talk. Someday anthropologists will decide that people who lived in 2023 all had ginormous mouths and itty bitty ears. We have 24 hour access to a megaphone that’s always on and people use that amplifier relentlessly, broadcasting every momentary thought and posting pics of ...
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Successful public participation requires authenticity. Authenticity requires participation to be meaningful, not perfunctory. That can cause stress for organizations that have dabbled in public involvement in the past, but have done so with minimum commitment. They want credit for engaging their stakeholders but they avoid any serious involvement because they ...
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People find it quite impossible to relate to faceless, sterile institutions. I have yet to meet anyone who gets all warm and tingly around the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The challenge remains that those sterile public institutions are all in the business ...
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I’m not talking about your next set of wheels (although electric vehicles (EVs) are clearly in your present or future) – we’re talking about public engagement. Reach and effectiveness are two arguably valid measurements for authentic public engagement. In this age of ever increasing demands on people’s time and attention, ...
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Rude behavior at public meetings used to be an anomaly – the exception to the norm. But that ship sailed a long time ago. Media deregulation, the loss of the fairness doctrine, and the general suspension of the equal time rule gave rise to Rush Limbaugh and hate radio, ...
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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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