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!
A state government agency head that we’re acquainted with recently announced that all of their public meetings will now be held only on Zoom; no longer in person. A pretty dumb policy in our estimation. Online engagement has grown the reach of government exponentially – no doubt it’s changed the ...
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The pandemic has taught us a lot about climate change. More specifically, the public reaction to the pandemic has taught us a lot about how people are likely to continue to react to a changing climate, what they’ll believe, whom to blame and what, if anything, they’ll be willing to ...
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The American Rescue Plan (ARP) that passed in March in the U.S. is designed to be a game changer for reducing the national poverty rate, improving healthcare and bringing broadband access to people who don’t have it but need it badly. But like most government initiatives, the plan’s complex and ...
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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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