Innovation Archives - Community Engagement Learning ExchangeCommunity Engagement Learning Exchange

How Can Communities Help their Residents Reconnect?

This entry was contributed by Maggie Woods, on December 14th, 2018 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Community Partnerships, Public Meetings.

Pleased to have Maggie Woods report on the kick-off of a long-term effort on community reconnection. Maggie is a Policy and Program Manager at NC State University’s Institute for Emerging Issues.

Maggie:

North Carolinians are having increasing difficulty talking — and listening — to each other. That’s making it hard for us to get things done in our communities. And people want to find ways to fix that.

At least that’s what we heard, as my colleagues and I from NC State University’s Institute for Emerging Issues held “community conversations” across Western North Carolina this past summer.

From Buncombe to Clay to Wilkes counties — in coffee shops and at colleges — we met with 80 plus people to get their ideas about why it is so hard to connect to each other and how we can do better.

Enhancing Community Engagement through Positive Deviance

This entry was contributed by Brian Bowman, on October 25th, 2017 at 10:15 am and is filed under Capacity Building, Innovation.

Anyone who serves on a citizens board, volunteers at a house of worship, or does anything to help other people has experienced frustration. They have a problem that needs to be solved, but they just can’t seem to find a solution. People can quickly become frustrated if their partnership isn’t productive. If you’ve been stuck in a late-night meeting spinning your wheels, you know what it’s like.

A concept that began in healthcare circles decades ago may be helpful for tackling problems in other settings. The term is positive deviance, and it’s relatively simple – where some have failed at a project or task, others will find a way to succeed, even with similar circumstances and resources. These people or groups may be referred to as positive deviants. The challenge is in finding such behaviors and reproducing them for other applications.

Moving to Cary From Rural NC: Urban and Rural Approaches to Citizen Engagement

This entry was contributed by Emily Edmonds, on September 15th, 2016 at 9:00 am and is filed under Dialogue & Deliberation, Outreach Methods, Public Meetings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Triangle

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

Highlights from Community Engagement Matters (Now More Than Ever)

This entry was contributed by Cate Elander, on March 15th, 2016 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Civic Education, Community Partnerships, Innovation, Outreach Methods.

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

Financial Transparency is Essential, but not the Entire Solution

This entry was contributed by Kevin Amirehsani, on March 4th, 2016 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Innovation, Online Participation.

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

The Last Mile: Building Better Access in North Carolina to Enhance Civic Participation

This entry was contributed by Emily Edmonds, on February 11th, 2016 at 11:46 am and is filed under Capacity Building, Online Participation, Outreach Methods.

In December, my colleague here at CELE, Brian Bowman, wrote an excellent piece about how technology can help make government more transparent and accessible. With data from the Pew Research Center, he then explored how often citizens are able to access government information on the Internet – and the many underserved groups who don’t yet receive the full benefits of technology (including older people, non-English speakers, and colorblind individuals).