Youth engagement Archives - Community Engagement Learning ExchangeCommunity Engagement Learning Exchange

Community Engagement: Not Just an Event—Steps to support the Ongoing Flow

This entry was contributed by John Stephens, on December 28th, 2017 at 10:28 am and is filed under Advisory Committees, Capacity Building, Civic Education, Community Partnerships, Innovation, Outreach Methods, Uncategorized.

This is a repost on how to have more permanent forums and tools to support strong public engagement.

A hat-tip to Matt Leighninger for his thinking and permission drawn from Part 5 of his series, How Public Engagement Needs to Evolve.

Matt, a friend and colleague, identifies some of the problems as:

In many instances, engagement happens as a temporary, stand-alone activity;
Professionals in these different areas (for example, school policy, police-community relations, and community development) rarely work together when they are trying to engage the public;
Every-department-for-itself engagement usually results in lower turnout. Faced with a choice about which of many meetings to attend, busy citizens will usually choose the one that is most relevant to their interests (or none at all).

In response, Matt proposes to build some “universal pieces” of local engagement infrastructure, such as:

Finding Common Ground During a Divided Time

This entry was contributed by Brian Bowman, on July 12th, 2017 at 10:36 am and is filed under Capacity Building, Community Partnerships, Dialogue & Deliberation, Diversity.

“I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.” – Thomas Jefferson to William Hamilton, April 22, 1800

If you’re involved in community engagement in any way, thank you. Your commitment to dialogue and pragmatism is perhaps more important today than it has been in decades. Whether you serve as a volunteer, board member, advocate, whatever, please know that your work is helpful and appreciated.

After the most recent presidential election, a Gallup poll found that a large majority of Americans, 77%, felt the country was divided; that’s the highest percentage the company has ever recorded. Only one in five said they felt that Americans were unified.

Engaging Youth with Deliberative Problem-Solving

This entry was contributed by Sabrina Slagowski-Tipton, on May 14th, 2015 at 9:51 am and is filed under Capacity Building, Civic Education, Outreach Methods.

The importance of engaged and informed citizenry in a democracy is undeniable. Throughout the last several years, there has been a push for more deliberative problem-solving tactics in communities across the country. Some in the deliberative community have had conversations about helping to build a collection of what we call “super citizens”; folks who have a clear sense of what deliberation is and are energized and passionate about making democracy work on a community level.

I have been part of a faculty-college student deliberation research and action group at Colorado State University. I’m pleased that in the last year we have worked with high school students to build their interest and skills in deliberation and democracy. Continue Reading