Elinor Ostrom was my favorite scholar. Her research was empirically rigorous and methodologically innovative. After working with Vincent Ostrom on water management, she turned to a series of studies of police. Her findings are pertinent today, when crime has fallen but we are (and should be) deeply concerned about racial bias in the criminal justice system.
The topic of policing scrambles ideological lines. Progressives who are otherwise favorable toward governments and unions get leery of police forces and police unions, for good reasons. Some conservatives who are normally concerned about limiting the state suddenly get enthusiastic about the police.
Placing Elinor Ostrom on an ideological map is also tricky. She was deeply influenced by works like James M. Buchanan’s and Gordon Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, a foundational text of neoliberalism. She opposed centralized control and could be skeptical about redistribution, thus aligning with libertarians. At the same time, she was a committed environmentalist, a defender of indigenous cultures (many of which are not individualist or freedom-loving), and a theorist interested in moving “beyond markets and states”–the title of her Nobel lecture. She was a great proponent of commons and common-pool resources, which are popular on the left. To bring her ideas into the debate about policing offers insights that both sides may be prone to overlook.
Ostrom saw police as consumers and providers of a whole set of “services” (training, forensics, traffic control, patrol, arrests, pretrial detention, investigation, and more). Each unit within the world of policing–whether a forensic lab, a police station, or a specialized investigative team–negotiated with many other units to do its work. Some negotiations were formal, e.g., a town’s police department paying a different city’s forensic lab for services. More often, the negotiations within and among police systems were informal. Citizens were also organized in numerous overlapping ways–towns, counties, states, voluntary associations, juries–that influenced the police.
Ostrom analyzed all this complexity from the perspective of individuals, some of whom might happen to be police officers or other kinds of “professionals.” Citizens–meaning all individuals concerned with solving problems–would generally benefit if: 1) there were many potential providers of services, so that they had some choice, 2) the scale and boundaries of problems matched the scale and mandate of organizations, and 3) they could influence the goals and priorities of the police.
Her main empirical finding was that consolidating police departments reduced the quality of policing–as defined by citizens. Consolidation limited the choice available for services like training and forensics. It reduced the leverage that local police had over larger entities. It kept front-line professionals from being able to define goals and priorities, because they got slotted into larger systems. It kept them from addressing local problems (e.g., dangerous streets) because they had to meet targets, such as numbers of arrests, that came down from bureaucracies. And it blocked citizens in diverse communities from defining what “good policing” should mean.
Public safety (with a dimension of fairness to all) is a common-pool resource. Everyone benefits when it’s provided, but anyone can degrade it by illegally harming others; and lots of people must actively contribute to make it available. Lin Ostrom and her colleagues developed eight design principles that help with the management of common-pool resources, writ large. I list them below (from this summary) and offer some thoughts about how each applies to policing in the USA.
1. Define clear boundaries. Most police forces and organizations do have clearly defined jurisdictions. The fact that the geographical boundaries around police departments, sheriffs’ departments, state police, federal agencies, etc. form a complex pattern is probably an advantage, not a source of inefficiency or damaging conflict, according to the Ostroms’ “polycentric” theory. Thus our police systems do OK on this first design principle.
However, if we move beyond “clarity” and use other criteria to assess the boundaries, we see problems. For example, at the time of Michael Brown’s killing, the government and police force of Ferguson, MO were dominated by Whites even though the majority of the city was Black, and the metro area as a whole was better aligned with the Black population than the city was. To put it another way, the borders around Ferguson were unrelated to real patterns of settlement.
2. Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions. In the US, criminal justice works poorly by this standard. The laws governing citizens–and policies for the police–are set by state legislatures and Congress. Their decisions are not helpful in many specific contexts. For example, criminalizing drugs might have some benefits for reducing drug abuse, but it is harmful in the neighborhoods where drugs are sold.
3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules. Most Americans have a vote and free speech. But we exercise those forms of influence at inappropriate scales and within unhelpful boundaries. A citizen of Baltimore gets a vote in Maryland statewide elections but is outvoted by suburbanites. The police are more accountable to the city and the state than to the specific communities where they work.
4. Make sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities. Here again, mandates by state and federal authorities clearly interfere. In fact, community members are hardly involved at all in making rules in the domain of criminal justice. Common-pool resources rarely survive when this principle is violated.
5. Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members’ behavior. We have police review boards and other tools for monitoring police. There are some interesting and valuable examples, like Community Policing in Chicago Beat Meetings. Still, my sense is that monitoring is underdeveloped.
6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators. The general principle is that violations of rules should carry highly predictable costs, but the costs should start low. If punishment begins at a draconian level, not only may the perpetrator be unduly harmed, but the community is likely to excuse some violators entirely. A first-time offender should be able to pay the price and then be completely embraced by the community. Although penalties should start low, they should rise steadily with repeated infractions. For both law-breakers and police, this principle is almost uniformly ignored in American criminal justice.
7. Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution. In the context of criminal justice, that would mean helping citizens to resolve disputes without necessarily involving the police. It would also mean allowing citizens to resolve their disputes with the police without filing federal lawsuits. Both opportunities seem sorely lacking, despite important exceptions.
8. Build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system. We do the opposite. Mandates flow down from states to cities to neighborhoods; and Congress influences the whole system without much accountability.
In short, criminal justice in the United States is a commons problem that we manage in ways that violate almost every principle for the management of common resources.
Because my concern is with racial injustice, I have no interest in marginalizing racial analysis of policing. However, it is important to structure institutions well. If we assume that the majority population is prone to treat minorities unfairly, that is an extra reason to design the rules right. We should also work on reducing racial bias, but we’d have to be awfully optimistic on that front not to give primary attention to institutions. The design principles are particularly important when we have good reason to mistrust some key actors.
I think restructuring criminal justice in line with common-pool management principles is a promising alternative to “abolition.” To be sure, we should ask the critical question, Why do we employ armed and uniformed paramilitary organizations to keep the domestic peace? The idea of abolishing police is worthy of debate. However, wholesale social transformation has a pretty poor record of success. Restructuring is a better place to start.
By the way, this approach is compatible with recognizing that American police serve many people in many communities very well. We needn’t reorganize everywhere, and we may be able to learn from the better examples.
Finally, this approach has the great advantage of viewing public safety as the job of many actors, of which the police are only one. There is growing evidence that voluntary citizens’ efforts are important for reducing crime. In an American Sociological Review article, Sharkey, Torrats-Espinosa, and Takyar find that “every 10 additional organizations focusing on crime and community life in a city with 100,000 residents leads to a 9 percent reduction in the murder rate, a 6 percent reduction in the violent crime rate, and a 4 percent reduction in the property crime rate.” That finding fits very nicely with the Ostroms’ theory. Vincent Ostrom told my friend Paul Aligica:
We do not think of ‘government’ or ‘governance’ as something provided by states alone. Families, voluntary associations, villages, and other forms of human association all involve some form of self-government. Rather than looking only to states, we need to give much more attention to building the kinds of basic institutional structures that enable people to find ways of relating constructively to one another and of resolving problems in their daily lives.*
The problem with policing is that we have not built structures that allow people to relate constructively across lines of race (and class) in order to resolve the problems that they define as important.
*V. Ostrom to P. Aligica, 2003, in Vlad Tarko, Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography, p. 49. See also: Ostrom, Habermas, and Gandhi are all we need; Habermas, Ostrom, Gandhi (II) or this video that explores Ostrom along with other “Civic Studies” thinkers.
The 30-page article, The prism of the public sphere: The COP15 coverage by the Brazilian media system (2017), was written by Diógenes Lycarião and Antal Wozniak, and published in the Journal of Public Deliberation: Vol. 13: Iss. 1. In the article, the authors provide an analysis of the contributions media provides for the public to understand and engage with deliberative and governmental processes, as exemplified in the Brazilian coverage of the 15th UN’s Climate Change Conference (COP15). Read an excerpt of the article below and find the PDF available for download on the Journal of Public Deliberation site here.
From the introduction…
In studies of political communication, news media are often regarded as a locus for what Page (1996) calls “mediated deliberation” (for an up-to-date overview, see Rinke, 2016), i.e. the sphere in which “communication professionals convey information, values, and diverse points of view to the mass public, which then deliberates vicariously through the give-and-take and to-and-fro of these various professionals” (Gastil, 2008, p. 50). Based on this paradigm, increasingly sophisticated methods and analyses have been developed to assess the “deliberativeness” of media content (cf. Wessler & Rinke, 2014; van der Wurff, Verhoeven, & Gadellaa, 2013).
This strand of literature offers valuable contributions to comprehending in a more nuanced way the different conditions under which the quality of deliberation in the media system might improve or decrease. But in our understanding of the news media’s role in the division of labor in modern societies’ “deliberative systems” (cf. Mansbridge, 1999; Parkinson & Mansbridge, 2012) a number of questions remain unanswered, especially when it comes to problems posed by increasing social complexity (cf. Bohman, 2007). This is because while most studies concerned with mediated deliberation have been focusing on deliberativeness of media content, its mediation dimension (or systemic function) has received less scholarly attention.
This seems to be problematic since mediation between different discursive arenas and perspectives is crucial for making the concept of a deliberative system — and its core principle of deliberative division of labor — empirically plausible. This becomes clear when one takes into account one of the main obstructions that increasing social complexity brings to the normative idea of public deliberation. Such an increasing complexity poses a formidable challenge to holding specialized discourses and institutions accountable to the public sphere (cf. Bohman, 2000, 2007; Christiano, 2012; Fischer, 2009) which is one of the crucial normative ideals of public deliberation.
This paper aims to contribute to closing this research gap by conducting an empirical case study in which we operationalize a systemic view of mediated deliberation. Our emphasis is on the mass media’s functional dimension of mediation in the deliberative division of labor within a deliberative system. We investigate how distinct contributions to the deliberative systems – namely the provision of publicity and intelligibility – are articulated via outputs from different media types. In doing so, this study aims to shed light on how the media system contributes to an articulation and exchange of ideas between civil society and administrative powers in contexts of highly complex governance processes.
In order to explore this articulation, we propose the idea of mediation as an epistemic operator (i.e., a truth-tracker between different discursive arenas) of the deliberative system. By using this operator in terms of its communicative power, it becomes possible to interpret modern democracies and their decision-making processes in a way that identifies a consistent and systematic bridging of the increasing gap between the administrative power and the public sphere.
The main theoretical purpose of this work is to explore how journalistic practices might build this kind of bridge, specifically in situations characterized by high regulatory complexity, such as those triggered by international or transnational governance regimes. These regimes are paradigmatic in this regard since political debate and negotiations in these situations adopt a language far removed from the language of everyday life. Thus, they are disconnected from the lifeworlds of most citizens. In this context, we argue that the media system is able – to some extent – to facilitate the communicative exchange between international governance regimes and a national citizenry. This bridge consists of a preliminary mediation that journalistic practices produce of the social complexity involved in these decision-making processes.
In order to assess this preliminary mediation and, therefore, a relevant dimension of the mass media’s role in the deliberative system, we conducted a case study about the Brazilian coverage of the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15), which took place in December 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark. For this, all fact-based articles (n=86) about the COP15 published or broadcast in two central media outlets of the Brazilian media system were selected. One is the nightly TV newscast Jornal Nacional (JN) and the other the quality daily newspaper Folha de São Paulo (FSP). We selected these two central instances of the Brazilian media system in order to test the reasoning that each one of these media outlets would fulfill normative criteria (or principles) of a deliberative system to varying degrees. Despite both being central elements of the Brazilian media system, they are also rather distinct in terms of modality, presentation style, and target audience, to name but a few.
We selected these different media types because of their distinct features, assuming they would fulfill different deliberative functions. So it’s not a case of trying to find differences in similar cases, but to uncover how different modalities, presentation styles, target audiences, etc. lead to distinct contributions within a deliberative system. With the purpose of controlling the difference regarding the relevance of opinion-oriented articles (which is much more pronounced in quality newspapers), we analyzed only fact-based articles and developed a multimodal content analysis suitable both for newspaper articles and for TV newscasts.
In the following chapter, we explicate the idea of mediation as an epistemic operator of the deliberative system. We then present our case study and explain the reasons why the COP15 and the selected media outlets are adequate for assessing the mass media’s role in the deliberative system in view of the problem posed by increasing social and regulatory complexity. The third section explains the operationalization of the normative principles of publicity and intelligibility for a content analysis of the selected news material. After presenting and discussing our research results, we indicate how conceiving the media system both as a prism of the public sphere and as a gateway to the informative system improves our understanding of the mass media’s role in the deliberative system. We also reflect about the systemic adequacy of our empirical observation by highlighting media systems’ role in actually involving citizens with different levels of political knowledge in an active engagement of comprehension and interpretation of complex governance processes. In order to improve this engagement, we also devote a section to point out implications for media professionals and public officials. Finally, we outline how future research may improve our understanding about how journalistic mediation works differently depending on the media outlet and the distinct normative principles of deliberative democracy in question.
Download the full article from the Journal of Public Deliberation here.
About the Journal of Public Deliberation
Spearheaded by the Deliberative Democracy Consortium in collaboration with the International Association of Public Participation, the principal objective of Journal of Public Deliberation (JPD) is to synthesize the research, opinion, projects, experiments and experiences of academics and practitioners in the emerging multi-disciplinary field and political movement called by some “deliberative democracy.” By doing this, we hope to help improve future research endeavors in this field and aid in the transformation of modern representative democracy into a more citizen friendly form.
Follow the Deliberative Democracy Consortium on Twitter: @delibdem
Follow the International Association of Public Participation [US] on Twitter: @IAP2USA
Resource Link: www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol13/iss1/art8/
In case you missed our original announcement, we have an exciting NCDD Tech Tuesday call featuring Iceland’s Citizens Foundation, tomorrow February 13th from 2-3pm Eastern/11am-Noon Pacific. This FREE call will showcase Citizen Foundation’s digital democracy tools and how they are working to strengthen civic engagement in Iceland. You don’t have to be an NCDD member to participate in the webinar, so we hope you will join us! Register ASAP to save your spot on the call.
Róbert Bjarnason, from the nonprofit Citizens Foundation in Iceland, will present digital tools for upgrading democracy in Iceland and beyond, outlining the Foundation’s digital democracy work since 2008. Projects including policy crowdsourcing and participatory budgeting using open source tools will be demonstrated in this webinar. As highlighted in the Financial Times, since 2011 the citizens of Reykjavik have voted online to select close to 1,000 community improvement projects totaling over $20 million dollars.
The Citizens Foundation open source digital democracy tools have been used in over 20 countries and by over 1 million people to change policy and help rebuild trust between citizens and their governments. Collaborating with E-Democracy.org in the United States to help others deploy and measure civic digital outreach efforts, a new case study (request a copy) comparing paid Facebook and Google advertising used to reach nearly every citizen of Iceland will be shared in brief.
Róbert is a successful entrepreneur that introduced the web to Iceland in 1993 and in 1995 to Denmark. Before co-founding the Citizens Foundation in the year 2008 he worked in the online gaming industry where his team received many industry awards.
Robert has many years experience and much success in using digital tools for democracy, and he is looking forward to sharing his knowledge and experience with us. Don’t miss out on this unique opportunity – register today!
About NCDD’s Tech Tuesdays
Tech Tuesdays are a series of learning events from NCDD focused on technology for engagement. These 1-hour events are designed to help dialogue and deliberation practitioners get a better sense of the online engagement landscape and how they can take advantage of the myriad opportunities available to them. You do not have to be a member of NCDD to participate in our Tech Tuesday learning events.
The 34-page article, Deliberative Technology: A Holistic Lens for Interpreting Resources and Dynamics in Deliberation (2017), was written by Jodi Sandfort and Kathryn Quick, and published in the Journal of Public Deliberation: Vol. 13: Iss. 1. In the article, the authors “introduce the concept of deliberative technology as an integrative framework to encapsulate how facilitators and participants bring different resources into use in deliberative processes.” Read an excerpt of the article below and find the PDF available for download on the Journal of Public Deliberation site here.
From the introduction…
Public deliberative processes can create many positive results, including enabling participants to understand substantive issues, appreciate other perspectives, and build their abilities to develop or act upon solutions (Gutmann & Thompson, 2004; Jacobs et al., 2009; Mansbridge, 1999). To readers of this journal, this almost goes without saying. Yet, attempts to create these results often fail (Fung, 2006; Nabatchi et al., 2012; Quick & Feldman, 2011). No single dimension explains success or failure; the results of deliberation arise through a complex mixing of contextual and design features. However, as deliberation becomes an increasingly expected mode of governance (Leighninger, 2006), there is a thirst for more practical guidance about how to make deliberation efforts more successful.
Seasoned practitioners have a healthy skepticism of how-to guides. They know there is no “master recipe” or set of rules that will reliably produce successful public deliberation. Instead, they are aware that a variety of deliberative techniques exist to serve particular purposes (Creighton, 2005; Kaner, 2007; Leighninger, 2006), and are able to draw nimbly on a wide palette of them to design each deliberation to suit particular purposes (Bryson et al., 2013; Carson & Hartz-Karp 2005). Indeed, as skilled practitioners think through how to accomplish the goals of deliberation, they may experience a diminishing return on investment for advanced planning in deliberation. Many find the unpredictability of deliberative processes not only inevitable, but also inherently desirable. As they gain more experience and judgment, they actively read, respond to, and shape emergent dynamics in deliberation to steward productive deliberation. Thus, a variety of modes of engagement emerge from the interactions among 1) the nature of the problem to be worked on; 2) the policy imperatives about participation (LeRoux, 2009); and the combination of the facilitator’s skills and preferences with available resources (Davies & Chandler, 2012).
This article complements what seasoned practitioners already know by introducing the concept of deliberative technology to encapsulate how facilitators and participants bring different deliberative resources into use in particular settings in the design and enactment of deliberation. Developed from inductive theory building from ethnographic research on three deliberative processes, the deliberative technology concept provides a means for clearer understanding about the unpredictable dynamics of deliberation. The cases were selected from a unique field research setting in which hundreds of facilitators were trained in a particular deliberative approach (Quick & Sandfort, 2014). The projects illustrate differences in the implementation despite the fact that all three involve a common aim, a single geographic region, and the same set of deliberation techniques. In this paper, we use deliberative technology to describe the general concept and deliberative technologies (plural) to describe and draw attention to the multiple ways in which deliberative technology takes form in particular contexts.
After elaborating the concept of deliberative technology, we present data on how deliberative technologies emerged during the three projects and how participants experienced them. We emphasize the divergences in the experiences of the three processes, even where comparable techniques or concepts or physical materials were used, to make sense of how deliberative technology emerges in practice. We conclude the paper by exploring the implications, for both training and practice, of the new understandings afforded through the deliberative technology concept. In our own experience – as people who are simultaneously practitioners, teachers, and scholars of deliberation – understanding deliberative technology helps people to proactively design and adaptively manage deliberative processes.
Download the full article from the Journal of Public Deliberation here.
About the Journal of Public Deliberation
Spearheaded by the Deliberative Democracy Consortium in collaboration with the International Association of Public Participation, the principal objective of Journal of Public Deliberation (JPD) is to synthesize the research, opinion, projects, experiments and experiences of academics and practitioners in the emerging multi-disciplinary field and political movement called by some “deliberative democracy.” By doing this, we hope to help improve future research endeavors in this field and aid in the transformation of modern representative democracy into a more citizen friendly form.
Follow the Deliberative Democracy Consortium on Twitter: @delibdem
Follow the International Association of Public Participation [US] on Twitter: @IAP2USA
Resource Link: www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol13/iss1/art7/
Public engagement practices can be best accomplished with the help of volunteers as NCDD member org Everyday Democracy points out in this article. Volunteers can provide several benefits to public engagement, because of their community expertise and additional support for the work that needs to be done. In the article, Evdem gives examples from across the country of engagement work being done with the help of volunteers to drive a more participatory democracy. You can read the article below or find the original on Everyday Democracy’s site here.
For every one professional athlete, thousands of amateurs play pickup games in the spare time. For every Broadway actor, hundreds take up theater as a hobby on a community stage. For every band with a hit single, there are dozens of musicians jamming in garages or playing covers in bars.
The “professionalization” of these activities, or forms of art, has obviously not stopped those with far less training and skill from taking up the craft. If anything, we often see an upsurge in hobbyists when a professional rises to prominence–think of the impact Tiger Woods had on golfing, or how American Idol inspired shower singers to take the stage.
This all has relevance in the context of deliberative democracy and public engagement for a few reasons. In the last few decades, this field has experienced significant growth in the number of practitioners focusing on public engagement as a profession or occupation; that is, receiving specialized training and making their living in the design and convening of public engagement. More and more governments–particularly at the local level but also in counties, regions, and states–have worked with such professionals to evolve their public engagement strategies away from the “three minutes at the microphone” public hearings that satisfy few citizens’ needs. The profession has helped governments involve citizens earlier and more robustly and meaningfully than hearings held the night of a vote. Decisions made by those governments incorporate more of the public’s interest and often prove more politically sustainable.
So, where might that leave those who care deeply about including the public in political deliberation but who have another professional calling? What about those who have retired and lack the stamina for a full-time job but would love to be involved? What about full-time students focused on academics but interested in internships, course credit, or community.
The number of public engagement “professionals” (defined as those who make most or all of their living doing this work) does not seem to meet the demand for public engagement nationwide–especially in cities where engagement may happen on multiple topics simultaneously. But that does not necessarily mean government agencies have been willing to fund the amount of public engagement that they believe they need. Elected officials often pay lip service to the need for better, more expansive public engagement, without budgeting funds for that purpose.
Consider the difference between what a professional and a volunteer (or an “amateur”) might bring to their work in this field. Those who come to this work as volunteers often bring the perspective of their other profession or career and a different way of framing questions to discuss with the public or respond to comments made during dialogue. They may also bring a special level of passion and commitment to their opportunity to facilitate; they may view it as a unique opportunity for them in ways that professionals doing the work every day might not.
Additionally, while many public engagement professionals or volunteers do work in their own communities and are recognized and trusted by community members, they often “parachute into” a community where they lack relationships that local volunteers might have. Those volunteers may make community members participating in a public dialogue feel more at ease, particularly if the volunteers are hosting dialogue in their homes or in familiar local hangouts, rather than governmental facilities.
All of these assets (and others) have led several communities to embrace the role of volunteers in public engagement. For instance: in Arizona, Project Civil Discourse has involved volunteers as facilitators of small group discussions held at forums on issues affecting quality of life in the state. They call upon all participants to follow a pledge: “I pledge to engage in the basic principles of civil discourse: to respect diverse points of view, listen with an open mind and speak with integrity. I call upon all civic leaders to meet the challenge of solving difficult social issues by adhering to these principles, thereby creating a better world for ourselves and future generations.”
In the Pacific Northwest, the Countywide Community Forums empowered residents in the greater Seattle area to discuss local issues facilitated by volunteer hosts. Participants could register online to find conveniently located meetings and join a group of between 4 and 12 participants discussing a common topic, introduced by a video. Participants and their volunteer host even decide on a meeting place and time. In an evaluation of the program, the King County Auditor’s Office reported, “Overall, participants are satisfied with this engaging, nonpartisan effort and report that they learn about the topic and King County policies.” The auditor recommended that the Forums “engage [volunteer] citizen councilors and others in providing feedback and ideas and helping make the program more attractive to users.”
Chicago developed a model replicated in other cities (including Columbus, OH) known as “On the Table,” in which thousands of volunteers host dinner dialogues to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing the local community. Some 55,000 people participated in roughly 3,500 volunteer-led dialogues in 2016, with dinners occurring in private homes or offices and public spaces (up to the host’s discretion). The Chicago Community Trust, which helped organize the day of dinners, reported that out of the respondents from 2016 who participated in On the Table in previous years, 57 percent participated in follow-up conversations over the past year, 46 percent stayed in contact with other attendees and 24 percent worked with one or more attendees on an idea. One third of surveyed 2016 participants also said they made specific plans to work with one or more attendees. More than three-fourths of those surveyed said the dinners helped them better understand both community issues and how to address them. Everyday Democracy’s Anchor Partner InterFaith Works in New York hosts a similar dinner dialogue program, aimed at promoting deep inter-faith conversations.
In nearby Oak Park, Illinois, Dinner & Dialogue gave community volunteers a chance to host discussions in their homes over meals paid for by the City of Oak Park on topics including diversity, race, and inclusion.
In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and other communities across the state, Everyday Democracy Anchor Partner New Hampshire Listens, and its affiliate Portsmouth Listens, recruit volunteer facilitators to host multiple dialogue sessions, often in their homes and on consecutive weeks, and to guide their small groups towards consensus on a local issue. Portsmouth’s process involves volunteers from the get-go:
“Portsmouth Listens volunteers and city officials form a Steering Committee drawing together stakeholders in the question or issue. This committee frames the dialogue question to be given to the study circles. For example, ‘How do we balance the tax burden and level of services needed to make Portsmouth the best place to live and work for everyone?’ (Dialogue on FY12 city budget)…Portsmouth Listens recruits and trains neutral facilitators and develops a study guide for the four two-hour sessions that the study circles will deliberate….Citizens in the small groups or Study Circles deliberate for two hours a night over four weeks to answer the question….The individual Study Circles write their conclusions in a report, and present their findings. The reports are presented to relevant government bodies (city council, planning board, etc.) in person and their written reports are published in the newspaper.”
Building on New Hampshire’s model, in Austin, “Conversation Corps” has recruited and trained hundreds of volunteers to host dialogue throughout the city on topics recommended by the City of Austin, the Austin Independent School District, and the public transit agency, Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Through carefully designed discussion guides, volunteers could give participants an overview of the topic and some background statistics and pose specific questions that agencies felt would yield information helpful to their policymaking. As Austin transitioned into a single-member district City Council, with ten members representing districts instead of six members elected at-large, conversations in all ten districts helped better connect voters to their elected officials and gave a more accurate picture of public opinion across the city. To date, more than 200 volunteers completed training.
Additionally, models like the “meeting in a box” utilized in multiple cities and “Text, Talk, Act,” a project of Everyday Democracy and several other partners, drew upon the energy of volunteers to bring topics that would have been discussed at a public meeting into their circles of friends, community organizations, and the like. These self-facilitated discussions did not require host training or volunteer coordination as much as a willingness on the part of the initiating participant to report their group’s findings back to the sponsoring entity at the conclusion. In an evaluation of the Text, Talk, Act dialogue on mental health, a study found:
“participating in Text, Talk, Act leads to an increase in participants’ ability to recognize a peer in need, ability to reach out to a peer in need, ability to talk about the topic of mental health, likeliness to seek additional information, and likelihood to implement information or skills from TTA. Furthermore, participants reported positive experiences based on the technology used by TTA, clarity of TTA purpose, and the relevancy/usefulness/quality of TTA content. These satisfaction indicators support the participants’ likelihood to recommend TTA to others…Also, when participants were asked, ‘what are the best ways to engage youth on the topic of mental health, TTA was voted to be the third most effective or popular method (after face to face conversation and social media).”
Countless other examples exist of volunteers contributing to the work of public engagement, but this survey illustrates the variety of ways in which those charged with engaging the public can multiply their forces and improve their reach into their target populations. While volunteers may lack the time and expertise that public engagement professionals bring to the table, they can entice those disinclined to participate to change their minds, and they can bring about a revolution in the ways the public engages.
You can find the original version of this article on Everyday Democracy’s site at www.everyday-democracy.org/news/new-take-role-volunteers-public-engagement.