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!
Anyone doing this work for any length of time has horror stories and I’ll bet that most of them center on bad, traditional town hall style public meetings. You know, the ones that give you night sweats for weeks after. These are often the worst possible way to try to ...
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If you’ve taken the IAP2 Foundations course from us, you’ve heard us say (until you’re maybe tired of hearing us say it) that effective, authentic public participation is about making better, sustainable, powerful decisions. Public involvement isn’t just a nice, feel-good thing to do to placate the unruly masses; it’s ...
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Most of what’s written and discussed about public participation these days emphasizes online engagement and that’s understandable. It’s still new enough, organizations are able to reach an exponentially larger audience, and users’ comfort level and convenience continues to grow. But the rules aren’t really any different than they’ve always been; ...
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The pushback usually heard about public participation tends to focus on how long it takes, and that criticism is often justified. Doing a lot of work under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) over the years, we’ve seen project studies migrate from months-long affairs to years-long marathons with budgets and ...
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The pushback usually heard about public participation tends to focus on how long it takes, and that criticism is often justified. Doing a lot of work under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) over the years, we’ve seen project studies migrate from months-long affairs to years-long marathons with budgets and ...
read more →
It’s funny because for a minute there the pandemic felt like it was waning and it was starting to look like we might be sliding back into being able to get together with people face to face, and meetings were getting back to the way they used to be. Wrong. ...
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Facing, understanding and owning up to failures and deficiencies in public involvement is required if we’re ever going to make things better. PRing drive-by engagement or just sprinkling a little fake public participation fairy dust on questionable projects that benefit powerful people and roll over the powerless isn’t moral or ...
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Infrastructure in the U.S. is crumbling and needs help badly and soon. We – citizens, taxpayers and voters – need to agree to and be part of the solution to make this happen. But states spent nearly three times as much to build a mile of highway in the ‘80s ...
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The inside of the bureaucratic bubble can feel like a nice, safe place to work with people who think alike and sometimes feel themselves to be above the mass of the “great unwashed.’’ I know that sounds harsh and it’s certainly not common to most people working in the public ...
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We in this business often struggle with terminology. Various practitioners consider public or community participation, involvement, or engagement to mean different things, but the definitions are really in the minds of the beholders. Academia likes using ‘‘co-production’’ in reference to government’s public relationships and working with the people it ...
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