Online or in person, public participation planning is essential to (re)building or maintaining public trust, reaching the people who need to be engaged, learning the issues, finding the doable level of influence, and getting honest, usable input from people. Knowing and following the basics of good public involvement drastically improves ...
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Right now, being a citizen in the U.S. feels unsettling, daunting and frustrating for people who follow the state of politics. Participating in the affairs of government seems like the last thing people might want to do. But put that in perspective: there are 500,000 elected officials in the U.S., ...
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Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times said, “When one is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” I think that explains much of the opposition that we see to the Black Lives Matter movement, LGBTQ rights, and most other social struggles that people are … struggling with. Diversity, equity, ...
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500,000 local elected officials control more than $2 trillion of taxpayer money. And every day an estimated 1,500 public meetings are held in the United States, many of which relate to what happens to that $2 trillion. Local newspaper (and radio and TV) reporters used to tell us who said ...
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For a long time the common understanding of the purpose of corporations has been to make money for its shareholders – or its sole owners if it’s privately held. I suppose you could also argue that government’s only real purpose had been to do the bidding of the elected officials ...
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The biggest, loudest, most passionate voices attract the most attention and those activists tend to get things done. Additionally, those activists almost always represent themselves as the voice of the people, suggesting they speak for the majority. Trouble is that more often those loud voices only represent a narrow interest, ...
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“You’re on mute” may be the most used phrase of the times. We’ve spent nearly two years working with each other by way of Teams, Zoom, GoToMeeting, WebEx, Google Meet, Skype, or some other video conferencing/meeting platform. And it turns out a lot of people have learned to like it ...
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“The community-input system is unfixable and, more important, undesirable,” so says the accompanying article from The Atlantic. I say bull-cookies. With all due respect to the article’s author, they clearly don’t know what you and I know. Public engagement, done with authenticity, skill and creativity, is most desirable. The ...
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I recently started working with a municipality confronting the growing homeowner opposition to multifamily housing adjacent to or within established neighborhoods. I’m sure you know that home prices and rents are going through the roof (pun intended) – as is demand, especially for multifamily and more affordable housing. Cities, builders, ...
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Change is the key. You can make a reasonable argument that the angry public, fractured state of our union, broken politics, and the present culture war being waged in the U.S. are all simply the result of changes that people were/are unwilling to accept. We need to understand change – ...
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