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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:

  1. In many instances, engagement happens as a temporary, stand-alone activity;
  2. 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;
  3. 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:

Continue Reading

This entry was tagged with the following terms: community engagement infrastructure, local engagement commission, online local networks, participation infrastructure, wired public spaces, Youth councils, Youth engagement

Please Note…

This site welcomes a variety of viewpoints and perspectives on community engagement. Ideas shared here should not be considered as being endorsed by the UNC School of Government. The School is nonpartisan and policy-neutral.

Resources: School of Government

  • Public Participation
  • Guide for local government officials - public outreach and participation
  • Citizen Academies
  • International Association for Public Participation

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