collaborative action

Public Agenda, a national non-profit, non-partisan research and civic engagement organization, and an NCDD organizational member, is seeking a public & stakeholder engagement associate. Public Agenda (www.publicagenda.org) is at the forefront of the vibrant field of public & stakeholder deliberation/collaborative problem solving and is pleased to offer this opportunity for a confident, motivated professional.

Public Agenda’s public and stakeholder engagement methodologies and practices include issue framing, community forums, leadership dialogues, and on-line engagement strategies. Current projects involve work with community-based organizations and leaders at all levels across the United States to build capacity for engaging critical stakeholders in problem solving on issues around K-12 and higher education reform, economic development/regional planning, the environment/energy use, health care and others. The engagement associate will work on a variety of research and writing tasks, on field–based work on diverse projects, and will assist with organizational tasks in support of a busy department.

Public Agenda is looking for a highly motivated, collaborative fully bi-lingual (Spanish/English) individual who is interested in joining their team in New York City and developing into a project leader over time. (more…)

If you’ve been thinking about enrolling in Fielding’s award-winning Dialogue, Deliberation and Public Engagement Certificate program, now may be a good time. They’ve just extended the deadline to apply for sponsorships to July 2nd and wanted to invite all NCDD members to apply!

Dialogue, Deliberation and Public Engagement Certificate (DDPE)
August 16, 2010 – January 18, 2011

SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITY

Deadline Extended to July 2, 2010

The dialogue, deliberation, and public engagement certificate helps you build mastery by working with a scholar-practitioner model of collaborative learning and reflective practice. An exceptional faculty of scholar-practitioners who do real world work in diverse contexts and cultures, will support your learning and provide coaching for a culminating capstone project over 19 weeks of online, telephone, and 2 face to face workshops. (more…)

Now HERE’S a resource for you… the 50-page Understanding Participation: A Literature Review covers a wide range of participatory activities that are often viewed in isolation. Download it here.

The review brings together different bodies of literature on participation, including literature on community development, volunteering, public participation, social movements, everyday politics and ethical consumption. It looks at the historical and current drivers of participation, the activities and actors of participation and different theoretical approaches that contribute to a better understanding of participation. It closes with our emerging ‘participation framework’ that we aim to further develop and refine in the subsequent stages of the project.

This literature review forms part of a major national research project called “Pathways through Participation: What creates and sustains active citizenship?” led by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) in partnership with the Institute for Volunteering Research (IVR) and Involve. All three UK-based organizations have a history of researching the different forms of participation that will be explored in the project.

(A shout-out to NCDD members Steven Clift and Taylor Willingham, both of whom reached my inbox today with this announcement.)

Matt Leighninger, Executive Director of The Deliberative Democracy Consortium (an NCDD organizational member), recently announced the release of his report Creating Spaces for Change: Working Toward a “Story of Now” in Civic Engagement. Creating Spaces for Change draws heavily on the views and experiences of the people who participated in the Kellogg Foundation’s Civic Engagement Learning Year and the conference convened by DDC and The Democracy Imperative called “No Better Time: Promising Opportunities in Deliberative Democracy for Educators and Practitioners.”

Matt encourages those who see opportunities to use the report in ways that will catalyze future discussions and action to improve civic engagement to contact him (click on his name above for contact details).  Here is Matt’s announcement… (more…)

Here is the audio recording from last Thursday’s (March 18) NCDD Confab call with Martin Carcasson, director of the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State University. We talked to Martin about his must-read Public Agenda occasional paper titled Beginning with the End in Mind: A Call for Goal-Driven Deliberative Practice (Summer 2009).  We had a great group of leaders on the call, and Martin was asked some quite challenging questions.

Martin’s article, which can be downloaded for free from www.publicagenda.org/cape, outlines three broad categories of goals for deliberation. The essay explores how a clearer understanding of the goals and purposes we are trying to achieve through public engagement can sharpen our methods and increase our impacts. It offers a practical framework to help practitioners systematically consider both their short-term and long-term goals and the strategies that will set them up for success. Please also check out the July NCDD blog post titled New Framework for Understanding the Goals of Public Engagement, which reflects on Martin’s article and introduces a graphic I created that expands on the article’s three orders of goals slightly.

Press the play button or download the mp3 file to listen to the audio.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Or download: NCDD Confab – March 18, 2010: Goals of Deliberation (~50 MB)

Note: “NCDD Confabs” are conference calls for NCDD members where we explore dialogue & deliberation’s role in current issues, learn about exciting projects and interesting methods from fellow NCDD members, and encourage new connections among members.

The newly-funded Alberta Climate Dialogue (ABCD) project is looking for a great person to serve as Project Lead. NCDD is involved in this project, as are a number of other leading organizations in our community. The position is based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The project currently has five years of funding in place, and the Project Lead’s initial term will be for two years. Starting salary of $51,000-$64,000 depending on qualifications, plus a comprehensive benefits package and yearly cost of living and merit increases. Additional details below. (more…)

I submitted a report to the Kettering Foundation last October that I wanted to finally share with the whole network.  Before the 2008 conference, NCDD embarked on a research project with the Kettering Foundation to learn about how attendees at the 2008 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation see themselves playing a role in democratic governance.  Kettering was also especially interested in two of the five challenge areas we took on at the conference (the Systems Challenge and the Action & Change Challenge).

Many NCDDers are quoted in this report, and I write about a number of your innovative projects and initiatives.  88 of you were surveyed or interviewed as part of this research project, and others contributed through our graphic recording team at the conference, and during the online dialogue we held on the 5 challenge areas at CivicEvolution.org before the conference.

I think this report is worth a read.  It’s 38 pages long, but it’s full of gorgeous photos and graphic recordings from the conference (so it’s shorter than it looks!).

The report represents a snapshot of a specific time in this rapidly growing, maturing field of practice.  An exciting time, when process leaders and networks in our field are being brought into discussions about federal policy, and when our field is exploring how and whether it fits into a broader “democracy reform” movement.  It’s also a time in which we’re seeing clear shifts in approach in the field.  Practitioners, organizations and institutions are starting to think in terms of capacity building and find ways to demonstrate perceptible shifts in civic capacity.  Practitioners are focusing more on developing ongoing relationships with institutions, decision-makers and other power-holders in the communities they serve.  And people are becoming more and more adept at using multiple models, combining elements of different models, and designing unique processes to fit different contexts.

You can download the full report here, download a 3-page overview of the report here, or learn a bit more about the report by clicking on “more.”  Feel free to share this report or the overview with others. (more…)

Here is my final post excerpting my IJP2 article on the Systems and Framing challenges. Although I got sidetracked and should have posted this weeks ago with the others (sorry about that!), I think this segment is actually the most important one for practitioners, funders and community leaders to take note of…

Cultivate and Support Public Engagement Practitioners

In Sustaining Public Engagement, Archon Fung and Elana Fagotto (2006) credit much of the success of embedded public engagement to deliberative or civic entrepreneurs – highly skilled and capable individuals who understand there is a market for public engagement. Civic entrepreneurs know “the general public favors more opportunities to participate in public discussion and provide input in policy-making,” and that public engagement is a much-needed tool for problem-solving. Fung and Fagotto acknowledge that, “like other voluntary and private sector initiatives, the uptake of these novel practices inevitably depends upon the tenacity, expertise, and persuasiveness of the individuals who introduce them.”

In their case study on a decade of public engagement work in Bridgeport, Connecticut, our challenge co-leader Will Friedman and his co-authors contend that “the evolution of key actors from the role of deliberative entrepreneur to that of deliberative maven” (p. 14) can be a vital factor in embedding deliberation in communities. Not only do such “deliberative mavens” bring deliberation to a community, but they also inspire and support the emergence of other practitioners and entrepreneurs and serve as information banks and deliberative resources for the community. They begin, the authors say, “as importers of deliberation and become, over time, catalysts and resources for further deliberative practices across the community” (p. 14).

Organizations that focus on building civic capacity in the region rather than importing talent temporarily from outside the community are more likely to create local deliberative mavens, and thus to facilitate embedding public engagement. The authors suggest the more user-friendly and affordable the approach or method of public engagement used, the easier it is for local civic entrepreneurs to “master it quickly, adapt it to their needs, and make it their own.”

Dialogue and deliberation cannot be embedded in our systems at the local level if the capacity to organize and convene public engagement efforts cannot be maintained. Local civic capacity includes trained moderators and facilitators, the capacity to mobilize and recruit participants representing a cross-section of the community, and the know-how and initiative required to organize programs and events.

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Note from Sandy:

This is my ninth blog post featuring content of an article published in a recent edition of the International Journal of Public Participation (IJP2), titled Taking our Work to the Next Level: Addressing Challenges Facing the Dialogue and Deliberation Community. The article outlines our learnings in two of the five challenges we focused on at the 2008 NCDD conference in Austin: the “Systems Challenge” (How can we make D&D values and practices integral to government, schools, and other systems?) and the The “Framing Challenge” (How can we talk about and present D&D work in more accessible ways?). You can download the full article from the IJP2 site.

Ariana McBride, Senior Associate at the Orton Family Foundation, is a member of NCDD and gave me the okay to re-post this fantastic blog post from Foundation’s Cornerstones blog. See the original post here, and check out the Foundation’s blog here.

Deconstructing Diversity

Published by Rebecca Sanborn Stone on February 4, 2010 | Add comment to original blog post

In Millbridge, Maine, a local non-profit won federal funding to build housing for immigrant laborers. But local residents circled a petition and approved a moratorium on multifamily housing in order to keep immigrants out.

In Brooklyn, New York this fall, a local Hasidic community objected to safety issues and immodest clothing among cyclists on its neighborhood bike lanes. The Department of Transportation sandblasted the lanes—which guerrilla bicycle activists promptly painted back on.

And in Katy, Texas, when a local Muslim community purchased a piece of land and planned to build a mosque and school, one citizen responded by running pig races next door on Friday evenings, the holiest day of the week for Muslims (see Jon Stewart’s coverage on The Daily Show).

It’s easy to brand these all as examples of intolerance, NIMBYism or downright racism. In our politically correct and increasingly diverse culture, the socially acceptable stance is that diversity is an unqualified good. But in the reams of sociological research on diversity and its impacts on communities, the findings are much fuzzier. In a controversial 2007 study, Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, found overwhelming evidence that diversity corrodes social capital, community cohesiveness and trust—not only between ethnic groups, but within them. (more…)

A national leader in the field of civic participation and community change, Everyday Democracy (based in Hartford, Connecticut) helps people of different backgrounds and views talk and work together to solve problems and create communities that work for everyone.

Using innovative, participatory approaches, Everyday Democracy works with neighborhoods, cities and towns, regions, and states. We place particular emphasis on the connection between complex public issues and structural racism. These issues include, but are not limited to: poverty and economic development; education reform; racial equity; early childhood development; police-community relations; youth and neighborhood concerns.

Everyday Democracy is an equal opportunity employer committed to practicing diversity and inclusion. We seek a Program Director to join our Community Assistance team. (more…)

A group of top researchers and practitioners in deliberation we’ve been involved in recently got some great news we wanted to share with everyone…

How can collective deliberation by citizens lead to wise and timely action on climate change, including by municipal and provincial governments? Alberta (Canada) will be a testing ground for this question over the next five years. An international team of scholars, NGOs, businesses, and governments will be addressing it, supported by $1 million in funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and over $3 million in contributions from other sources.

The research team includes leading researchers and practitioners of deliberative democracy, environmental organizations, energy companies, municipal governments, and Provincial ministries. The project, called Alberta Climate Dialogue (ABCD), will help to convene groups of citizens within Albertan municipalities to shape policies on greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation to climate change, and also build province-wide deliberation and dialogue on climate issues.

Learning alongside citizens, the team will investigate how the design of citizen deliberations — how participants are selected, who participates, how the agenda is set, how often the citizens meet and for how long, whether policy makers are involved, and so on — shapes their social and political influence. The team will also explore the sorts of influence that citizen deliberations can have on climate issues, including informing and directing policy makers and processes, as well as shaping citizens’ knowledge, their sense of environmental citizenship, and their political capacities and networks. Through this work, we will seek to show how citizens can lead effective responses to climate change, and how political leaders and institutions can skillfully engage with citizens to develop policy.

This groundbreaking research project was initiated by NCDD member David Kahane (pictured), a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. I am listed as a “collaborator” in the grant application and on the website, and the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) is a Partner of the project.  We plan to be as involved as resources will allow us to be, and to keep the network as informed as possible about project learnings and benchmarks.

The project website is at www.albertaclimatedialogue.ca and email can be sent to .

If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out the site sociologists (and NCDD members) Caroline Lee and Francesca Polletta created at http://sites.lafayette.edu/ddps/ to display the results of the 2009 Dialogue and Deliberation Practitioners Survey. You can also download the full survey results here.

The survey was conducted online last Fall for the purpose of academic research on the deliberation field by the researchers. Francesca and Caroline felt that the field of public dialogue and deliberation has been growing so dramatically that no one fully knows what the field looks like. They sought to answer questions like:

• Who is doing public dialogue and deliberation work?
• What forms is their work taking?
• What common challenges do they face?
• How they would like to see the field develop?

The data they collected is extraordinarily valuable for our field, and you are encouraged to site it and utilize it widely. On the site, you can download or browse the survey results, ask a question of the researchers, or join a discussion about the findings.

Here are some of the results I found most interesting/useful from NCDD’s perspective:

Participants were asked to rate the importance of the 5 challenges facing the D&D community that were identified by NCDD conference participants:

• 34% identified the Systems Challenge as our most important challenge (making D&D integral to our public and private systems).
• Three of the challenges were seen as most important by 20% each:  the Framing Challenge (framing D&D work in a more accessible way), the Action & Change Challenge (strengthening the link between D&D, action and policy change), and the Evaluation Challenge (demonstrating to powerholders that D&D works).
• Notably, only 6% indicated that the Inclusion Challenge (addressing oppression and bias) as the most important challenge facing our field.

When asked who should take the lead in advancing dialogue and deliberation in the U.S., “professional associations” like NCDD and IAP2 was selected most often (62%), followed by an “alliance of experienced local organizations” (51%), the White House Office of Public Engagement (48%), “national D&D facilitation organizations” like AmericaSpeaks and National Issues Forums (47%), foundations that support D&D (47%).

57% of respondents prefer the term “community of practice” to describe the people and organizations currently leading D&D efforts, compared to 16% who prefer “movement” and 11% who prefer “profession.”

Of the 4 engagement streams (exploration, conflict transformation, decision making and collaborative action), conflict transformation was the only one selected by less than half (38%) of respondents indicating the type of D&D work they practice. (more…)

I’m going to be in Point Clear, Alabama from March 3rd through 6th for a conference called “Connecting the Dots.” It’s a national student conference on embedding the democratic practices of public dialogue, deliberation, community problem solving and action sponsored by the University of Alabama’s David Mathews Center for Civic Life.

I’m being brought in to present a couple of workshops on distinguishing between and deciding on various approaches to dialogue and deliberation, and I’m really looking forward to spending time with college students (and others) who are passionate about democracy and engagement!

The conference goal is to provide a forum for students learning about how to embed democratic practices in their everyday work and lives. The conference director, Lane McClelland, told me that the event was inspired by the students who attended the No Better Time conference many of us attended in New Hampshire last July.

Students, faculty members, program administrators, practitioners, and community members are encouraged to attend. Registration is $150 for students and $300 for others. The $300 registration fee is waived for any faculty or staff who register 4 or more students at the $150 rate. Although there’s not a whole lot of lead time on this, I hope those of you who work with students will consider bringing a few of them to Alabama in March!

Steering committee members for the conference include representatives from Everyday Democracy, The Kettering Foundation, and The Democracy Imperative.

More information on the skill-building workshops conducted by leading practitioners in the field, as well as a Call for Proposals, is available at http://mathewscenter.org/2010_student_conference/.

In many ways, the Systems Challenge overlaps with the Evaluation Challenge and the Action & Change Challenge (these are three of the five challenges we focused on at the 2008 NCDD conference). Embedding dialogue and deliberation in our government and other systems is next to impossible if we are not able to assess the effectiveness of these processes, and to show how they lead to concrete outcomes. Since there are many types of outcomes of this work and much of what is being done today is still experimental, practitioners can and should identify and clearly communicate what “success” means to them.

In the online dialogue we held at CivicEvolution.org before the conference, planning team member Joseph McIntyre wrote about his experiences with the Ag Futures Alliance project, which focuses heavily on dialogue to drive change in food systems. He emphasized how important it is for local Alliances to identify their own concepts of success, as numerous impacts and outcomes can usually be demonstrated. McIntyre listed a number of outcomes the Alliances have produced, from creating farm worker housing to new laws being enacted.

McIntyre pointed out that although the project can boast numerous outcomes, if someone asked him if they were closer to a sustainable food system, “I’d have to say no.” He continues, “D&D is simply plowing the field and planting the seeds that will result in the changes needed. In my case, D&D is part of an evolutionary change.”

In a new occasional paper published by Public Agenda (2009) titled “Beginning With the End in Mind: A Call for Goal-Driven Deliberative Practice” (Summer 2009), workshop presenter Martin Carcasson outlines three broad categories of goals for deliberation. Carcasson points out that although the “first-order goals” like issue learning and improved democratic attitudes are often discounted as we focus on our primary goals related to concrete action and impact on policy, those first-order goals still impact the big-picture goal of increasing a community’s civic capacity and ability to solve problems.

Note: The text in the graphic pictured here is a slightly adapted version of the paper’s “Goals of Deliberation” figure. Click on the image to see a larger version, or click here for more detail on why I created the graphic and why I feel practitioners should familiarize themselves with Carcasson’s framework.

In his 2008 book Democracy as Problem Solving (MIT Press), Xavier de Souza Briggs shows how civic capacity—the capacity to create and sustain smart collective action—is crucial for strengthening governance and changing the state of the world in the process. Valuing shorter-term goals (first-order outcomes) and the overall development of civic capacity may be more practical—and satisfying—than solely emphasizing second-order goals like collaborative action and policy change, since such goals usually depend on many decisions and factors outside the scope of any one project. Practitioners should consider all three types of goals when determining measurements of success.

Even funders at the 2008 NCDD conference emphasized the need for practitioners to (1) own the definition of success and then (2) demonstrate their success. At a breakfast John Esterle and Chris Gates hosted for a cross-section of NCDD leaders to discuss funding challenges and opportunities for this work, Esterle, Executive Director of The Whitman Institute and board chair of Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE), implored those present to empower themselves regarding impact. “Let funders know, ‘this is how we measure our success.’” Be proactive and able to articulate your impact in a compelling way.

Next section (coming soon): Cultivate and support public engagement practitioners

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Note from Sandy:

This is my eighth blog post featuring content of an article published in the latest edition of the International Journal of Public Participation (IJP2), titled Taking our Work to the Next Level: Addressing Challenges Facing the Dialogue and Deliberation Community. The article outlines our learnings in two of the five challenges we focused on at the 2008 NCDD conference in Austin: the “Systems Challenge” (How can we make D&D values and practices integral to government, schools, and other systems?) and the The “Framing Challenge” (How can we talk about and present D&D work in more accessible ways?). You can download the full article from the IJP2 site.

In order to build the “joint ownership” described in the previous section posted about the “Systems Challenge,” a necessary step in many communities is to convene and connect the various groups and leaders who are already mobilizing people locally around issues and problems. Our challenge leaders suggest that community foundations and others who tend to play convening roles should bring these local leaders together to talk about what’s currently being done and by whom, and to start thinking and talking about a) how they can work together better and b) what barriers to collaboration need to be overcome.

During our “Reflective Panel” plenary session, a conversation among four leaders in the dialogue and deliberation community, panelist Carolyn Lukensmeyer (President of AmericaSpeaks) emphasized the need for practitioners to understand and work within the existing political structures in their communities. She advised practitioners to:

• Develop relationships with the people in the agencies and government sectors you want to influence to do this work regularly, such as city managers, key leaders in agencies that have some resources, and elected officials.
• Coordinate your efforts with the predictable cycles of decision making, such as with budget cycles.
• Know where there is a felt need to link public will to political will, and seek to understand the issues related to this felt need.

Some workshop presenters focused on the importance of learning from and building on processes that have been embedded in government for decades or centuries. Woodbury College faculty member Susan Clark’s workshop, Direct Democracy in the Mountains, explored what can be learned from Vermont and Switzerland’s long-running town meetings. “For centuries,” Clark says, “town meetings have involved citizens from all income and education levels and political perspectives in the ‘public talk’ at the heart of this decision-making institution.”

Another example of long-standing embedded processes that are certainly worth learning from is neighborhood assemblies and neighborhood council systems. According to Matt Leighninger (2009), “the history of these neighborhood governance structures offers a rich legacy of successes, mistakes, strengths, and weaknesses that can inspire and inform democracy reform at every level of government.”

Several workshops focused on creating or capitalizing on what Archon Fung and Elana Fagotto (2009) call deliberative catalysts – “centers that promote deliberation and assist organizations that seek public input or want to increase civic engagement.” One workshop focused on establishing university and college centers as platforms for deliberative democracy. Across the country, a diverse network of university-based public deliberation programs focused on practical scholarship and hands-on deliberative activities has been forming in recent years.

Another workshop, led by Taylor Willingham (LBJ Presidential Library) and four of her colleagues at various libraries across the country, urged public engagement practitioners not to overlook libraries and university extensions programs, since they are “the people’s university, the public’s forum for dealing with contentious public issues.” Extensions educators provide problem-solving expertise in every county in the U.S., and libraries are ideal venues for public forums. As the co-presenters pointed out, there are more libraries in the U.S. than there are McDonald’s restaurants.

Other workshops recognized individuals and government agencies championing the systematic use of public engagement processes in our institutions. One workshop highlighted the innovative Citizen Councilor Network of King County (Seattle area), which has gotten local government to actively promote and support the formation of numerous small dialogue groups that meet to discuss on an ongoing basis important regional and societal issue.

Newer efforts that build on existing structures were highlighted at the conference as well, e.g., Vets4Vets, a program which trains Iraq-era veterans to facilitate dialogue among new veterans. Working closely with the Veterans Administration (VA), Vets4Vets’ goal is to build an international peer support community using local groups, phone and internet connections among the growing number of vets who have served in the global “War On Terror.”

Next section (coming soon):  Establish your own definition of success

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Note from Sandy:

This is my seventh blog post featuring content of an article published in the latest edition of the International Journal of Public Participation (IJP2), titled Taking our Work to the Next Level: Addressing Challenges Facing the Dialogue and Deliberation Community. The article outlines our learnings in two of the five challenges we focused on at the 2008 NCDD conference in Austin: the “Systems Challenge” (How can we make D&D values and practices integral to government, schools, and other systems?) and the The “Framing Challenge” (How can we talk about and present D&D work in more accessible ways?). You can download the full article from the IJP2 site.