It wasn’t a grand setting for a groundbreaking announcement – the basketball court of the South Estes public housing community in Chapel Hill. Eager volunteers stood at folding tables under the hoops ready to sign up residents for digital literacy classes and announce the Town’s new effort to bring free internet to all public housing residents. Trays of sausage and chicken biscuits, and jugs of sweet tea sat ready for an estimated 100 people.
Charlotte’s West End is among the oldest and most culturally rich areas of the city. With neighborhoods dating back to the late 1800’s, this area has served as a hub for the African-American community for generations. From long standing community service organizations to educational institutions such as Johnson C. Smith University to more than 330 acres of greenspace, there is a strong community built on Charlotte’s west side and many people invested in its future.
I recently moved to the Town of Cary from a rural area in Western North Carolina. To say that things are different would likely be the understatement of the year; Cary has over 155,000 people at last count, and my hometown had about 2,500.
My family and I shifted from one of the smallest towns in the state to the seventh largest. That’s a process that will make you pay attention to the differences between where you’re coming from, and where you’re going.
It highlights the need for advocates of citizen engagement to provide more nuanced and custom approaches to citizen engagement that can work for both rural and urban communities – where there are often different cultural norms, values, and lifestyles. Continue Reading
What do soliciting budget input from local residents, putting on international-themed speaker and networking events, and hosting interfaith discussion groups have in common?
Trying to attract and engage people who wouldn’t normally attend is almost always the hardest part. Trust me.
As a former policy manager at a civic engagement firm, current board member of a World Affairs Council young professionals group, and on-and-off anti-Islamophobia Meetup organizer, all here in Denver, this has been much of my life for the past year and a half.
Here are four tips and tricks for you to move past “the usual suspects,” bring in demographically and experientially diverse locals, and boost non-traditional community engagement.
It’s a great icebreaker for public servants. The next time you’re talking with someone who works in local or state government, ask about unrelated phone calls and emails. Almost every week (or day in some cases), public sector employees will field requests for information that have no connection to their organization.
The first time I heard of this was in the 1990s when some 911 dispatchers in a rural county near Raleigh told me how busy Friday nights were. For the most part, the calls weren’t emergencies; they were mostly questions about high school football scores. Driving directions were also a popular request. Continue Reading
Stanford Center for Social Innovation just released an article titled Community Engagement Matters (Now More Than Ever), co-authored by Melody Barnes of the Aspen Forum for Community Solutions and Results for America and Paul Schmitz of the Collective Impact Forum. The article is concise and powerful, and it calls for pairing evidence-based programs and data with genuine community engagement and context for best results toward sustainability of community-level change. Without both approaches, top-down efforts will ultimately fail to create lasting change. Specifically, the article states:
“To achieve positive and enduring change, public and nonprofit leaders must create community engagement strategies that are as robust as the data-driven solutions that they hope to peruse.” Continue Reading
As we’re constantly told, this is The Age of Big Data, and tapping into that monstrous yet murky term indeed has the potential to revolutionize the way organizations function, particularly when it comes to finances. Local government and other public entities are no exception.
Indeed, many are increasingly publishing reams of financial data, like procurement contracts, salaries, and details of their various budgets. Some of this is still done in old-fashioned ways – many of us know how frustrating it is to mine data from PDFs of scanned documents, for instance. Yet even when Big Data is made available by governments in a standard format, with accompanying APIs for coders to freely draw from, and with aesthetically pleasing visualizations, is that enough? Continue Reading
By Krystel Green
Have you ever met a fascinating person who engages you with probing questions, thoughtful commentary and interesting facts? The two of you then embark on a lively conversation where you might gain or give a different perspective and learn something new. When parting ways, you’ve probably said, “Let’s keep in touch” and exchanged contact information. This is the dynamic that the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) looks to create with the public. Continue Reading
The presidential primary season has drawn considerable attention to the issue of young voters and what appears to be their overwhelming support for Bernie Sanders. On my campus students are engaging in debate watch parties, are organizing voter registration drives, and a small group of around twenty students, both Republican and Democratic, are having the experience of a lifetime in a program called Wake the Vote, which has taken them already to Iowa and New Hampshire and later in the year will give them the opportunity to attend the conventions. These kinds of experiences translate into participation at the polls. An organization that studies the political participation of young people (CIRCLE) reports that 70% of the youth votes (18-24) cast were cast by young people with at least some college experience. Clearly, activities that provide students with the opportunity to get engaged in the political process are powerful motivators for voting.
T.J. Smith is a senior majoring in Politics and International Affairs and minoring in Biology and Spanish at Wake Forest University. He is from Greensboro, NC and is highly engaged on campus and in the Winston-Salem community. In this post, he responds to our invitation to provide a student voice in the discussion about the role higher education institutions can play in civic life.
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As a guest author, I would like to write from the student perspective in discussing civic engagement. I will be responding to Dr. Harriger’s post on the teaching mission of the university and the university’s role in community-engaged research. In particular, I hope to use my own experience as a Wake Forest University student to illustrate two things the university can provide students in order to advance civic engagement.
First, the university must offer service learning but within the proper framing. I agree with Dr. Harriger’s post that too often college students are engaged in community projects that do more harm than good so I would like to offer a solution.