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Vending Machines or Barn Raising: The Role of Local Government in Community Building

This entry was contributed by Rick Morse, on October 10th, 2017 at 9:32 am and is filed under Capacity Building, Community Partnerships, Elected Officials.

I recently was asked to speak to a joint meeting of town councils of four communities in Eastern North Carolina. The subject they asked me to speak about was community engagement. What I ended up spending most of my time talking about were two frames for thinking about the role of local government in the overall process of community building. The two frames are local government as vending machine and local government as barn raising. In 1996, Frank Benest, former city manager of Palo Alto, California, wrote an article in ICMA’s Public Management (PM) magazine asking whether local government was serving customers or engaging citizens. He used the metaphor of the vending machine (which he attributed to another city manager, Rick Cole) to describe the common way local government’s are thought of.

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This entry was tagged with the following terms: barn raising, Civic Engagement, civic engagement in local government, community building, community development, community resilience, Frank Benest, ICMA, local government, NLC, resilient communities, vending machine

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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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