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!
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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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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At the risk of sounding like a broken record (“A broken what!?” the young person asked.), this business of working with the public is tough and getting tougher. As public meetings get uglier, officials are starting to realize that the solution doesn’t lie in reducing citizen comments from three minutes ...
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I honestly don’t remember who told me, but I guess somehow I was smart enough to take it to heart and I’ve done this ever since. Back when I was just a mere public engagement tadpole, someone wiser and more experienced than I gave me one of the golden tickets ...
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Participatory budgeting may be one of the most obvious and straightforward ways of engaging the public in the affairs of government. It provides people with the opportunity of making very specific decisions about how their collective public money, or at least meaningful portions of it, will be spent. The origins ...
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Two of the hardest things to deal with in public engagement are emotional, angry people and apathetic people. There’s no shortage of angry people who believe that they’re being mistreated or hurt by companies, government, or “the system” – the reactions of those people are on full display, they make ...
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Great answers to tough questions are kind of a holy grail for the public work that you do. The subjects that you deal with are almost always complex, hard to explain and often the details are pretty boring. The questions that you get from people are rarely easy to answer ...
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One of the public engagement techniques that we explain and discuss in our training classes is the Citizens’ Jury. It was developed back in 1971 in the U.S. but interestingly doesn’t seem to be as embraced in America as much as it is in some other democracies. It’s a ...
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Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) has been a particular topic of conversation for us in recent months because we’re finally paying it the attention that it’s deserved but hasn’t gotten. More and more of the students and clients that we work with are making it a priority in their communities ...
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One of the challenges that public involvement people face is embedding what they know that works into a system of government that is often less than enthusiastic about the whole idea of sharing control. Officials aren’t often very keen about giving the public any power or influence over their predetermined ...
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