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!
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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I talked to a colleague recently who told me that the public agency she’s working with has now decided that from now on, all public meetings and interactions shall indeed only be done virtually, by Zoom. It’s worked well enough for them over the past several months, it’s easier and ...
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Giving the governed access to their government is a critical part of authentic, effective public involvement. But engagement can’t be just a zero-sum numbers game. It’s about bringing people in to learn, weigh, consider, discuss and really contribute to the best decisions for everyone’s collective interests. Online and video engagement ...
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