Author Archives: Sandy Heierbacher

Sad news to share from AmericaSpeaks

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AmericaSpeaks’ executive director, Steve Brigham, added a heartbreaking announcement to the organization’s website this afternoon.

AMERICASPEAKS – IN HONOR OF OUR 19 YEAR LEGACY

AmericaSpeaks has an unparalleled record of organizing more than 100 major citizen deliberations in all 50 states.  Because of this remarkable history that we’ve had, it makes me very sad to share today that after 19 years of working as an independent, national, nonprofit organization–sustained exclusively by grants and contracts–AmericaSpeaks will close its doors today.

AmericaSpeaks has operated without an endowment or a large institutional home and has always been able to raise funds, conduct projects, and sustain our infrastructure, even during some challenging times.  Unfortunately, we have experienced a series of annual deficits due to a dramatic contraction in grant and contract revenue during the Great Recession. These circumstances ultimately forced us to make a very difficult decision to close our doors and cease operations.

Notably, one of AmericaSpeaks’ final projects as a 501(c)3 has been its contribution to a national deliberation on mental health this year that has been a collaboration with the National Institute for Civil Discourse, the National Issues Forums, Everyday Democracy, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. This has been a watershed moment of cooperation and growth for the field of public deliberation….

Read the rest of the post at http://americaspeaks.org/blog/americaspeaks-%E2%80%93-in-honor-of-our-19-year-legacy/ — and definitely take some time to look over the legacy document they’ve created at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6405436/AmericaSpeaks_Legacy.pdf

I spoke to Carolyn Lukensmeyer yesterday (founder of AmericaSpeaks), and she emphasized that though the 501c3 business model is dissolving, a core group of AmericaSpeaks senior associates plan to keep the brand, the 21st Century Town Meeting model, and the network alive and accessible.  The associates (along with the AmericaSpeaks facilitator network) do have the capacity to deliver 21st Century Town Meetings when needed, and are working on developing the structures and securing an institutional home needed to make that work.

Those of you who have worked with AmericaSpeaks or served as table facilitators (many of us – including me!) are encouraged to email your written memories or photos to americaspeakslegacy@gmail.com . Your email’s body and attachments will be directly posted without edits to http://americaspeakslegacy.tumblr.com — where there’s already quite the collection of remembrances being shared.

AmericaSpeaks has been a key trailblazer in public engagement for the past two decades.  They’ve provided valuable leadership in deliberative democracy in many ways, serving as a thought leader in the field, a facilitator of many collaborative efforts over the years, a leader in the use of technology to enable participatory methods to scale up, and so much more.

They were one of NCDD’s 50 founding organizational members, helped us plan the first National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation in 2002, and have sponsored our conferences and contributed to our work in many, many ways over the years.  I want to thank Carolyn Lukensmeyer, Steve Brigham, Daniel Clark, and all of the AmericaSpeaks associates, facilitators, and former staff members we’ve had the pleasure and privilege of working with over the years.  I know we’ll continue to work together despite this transition.

Community Rhythms: Five Stages of Community Life

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Communities have rhythms to them that we must come to understand so that our approaches, programs and initiatives — and the building of public capital — work with those rhythms, take advantage of them, even accelerate them. This 1999 report from the Harwood Institute describes five stages of community life: The Waiting Place, Impasse, Catalytic, Growth, and Sustain and Renew.

CommunityRhythmsImageAccording to the Harwood Institute, while a community can accelerate its movement through the Stages of Community Life, it cannot violate, or simply pass over, the hard work that needs to be done in each stage. For as Five Stages of Community Life reveals, each stage has its own purpose; indeed, within each stage, different approaches must be taken to grow a community.

For example, Growth strategies for the most part will not work for a community in Impasse. Why? Because the community simply does not have the kind of support — structures, relationships, networks, norms, sense of purpose, in short the level of public capital — required to undertake and sustain such strategies.

Written for the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Community Rhythms report helps you understand what stage your community is in, so you can choose actions that will best fit current conditions.

The Harwood Group’s work in communities reveals that there are stages of a community’s life and that each stage has deep implications for understanding your community and what it means for moving forward. These stages echo the development of all living things, such as a person or a plant or an ecosystem. Only if you know and understand the stage in which your community rests, will you be better able to figure out what kinds of approaches, strategies and timing best fit for seeking to move your community forward.

Each stage brings its own set of challenges and opportunities. The problem in many communities is that too often we do not think about stages of community life, or are even aware of them, much less approach them strategically in terms of what they mean for our actions.

Harwood’s Stages of Community Life emerges from over a decade of research and on-the-ground initiatives throughout the U.S.

Download the report: http://ncdd.org/rc/wp-content/uploads/Harwood-CommunityRhythmsReport.pdf

More about the Harwood Institute: www.theharwoodinstitute.org

NCDD’s Year In Review

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2013 was an incredible year for NCDD and for our community.

We started off the year by intensely engaging our members around how the D&D community can respond to crises like the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting (explore the Hackpad series here). Soon after that, we announced the two projects that won our member-selected Catalyst Awards (in hindsight, we realized we had actually run our first Participatory Budgeting process, having had members develop the contending projects in teams and then vote for the winners!).

NCDD Meetup at TuftsWe ran two mini regional events — one at Tufts in July and one at the Univ of Virginia in November thanks to Lucas Cioffi and Nancy Gansneder, and we secured a great space for next year’s national conference and are seeing buzz building around that event already!

We bumped up our “virtual” events this year as well, getting in the habit of offering a high-quality and well-attended Confab Call or Tech Tuesday almost every month (archived recordings here).  We also experimented with informal “coffee hour” calls, which our Board plans to continue in 2014 in a different format, having Board member run monthly Coffee Hours on a topic of interest to them and our community.

We spent a good deal of time this year on collaborative projects with other leaders in the field — projects we felt were well worth our investment of time due to their potential to move our field forward.  NCDD continues to serve on the core team of Creating Community Solutions, the “dialogue part” of HHS’s national dialogue on mental health.  We have continued our work with the Orton-led Community Matters partnership, building resources on civic infrastructure with key leaders in our and related fields. And we have become part of the amazing community that is convened regularly by the Kettering Foundation, and you’ll be hearing more and more about our exciting work with them during 2014.

We also played a leading role in the Text Talk & Act experiment that melded the fun and convenience of texting with the irreplaceable value of face-to-face dialogue.  And we supported projects to develop a comprehensive open database of case studies (Participedia.net), to develop and promote new local laws that “make participation legal again,” to run the first online unconference on online facilitation, and to offer the top-notch Dialogue, Deliberation & Public Engagement certificate program.

US-GoogleMap-outlinedWe’ve grown to 1,900 members this year, and to 33,000 subscribers on our e-updates.  And we scrapped our not-nearly-good-enough members network and replaced it with a gorgeous Google map and super-useful online directory of our members.

We also launched the Dialogue Storytelling Tool this year in partnership with the Kettering Foundation and Participedia, to help our members report on their dialogue and deliberation projects and events, and let NCDD do the work of spreading the word.

We doubled or tripled the usefulness and quality of our community blog by hiring Roshan Bliss as our lead blogger, and saw more and more NCDD members post their own news and resources on the site as well.  And of course we maintained the tools you rely on that keep our community vibrant and connected, like our listservs and social media spaces.

Our small staff and our amazing Board and volunteers do our best to support this vital community’s work, and I think 2013 may have been our best year yet in this regard.

Does all this make you want to support NCDD with an end-of-year gift? We need your support to keep this work going strong — so please think of us as you consider end-of-year donations. It’s extremely easy to donate to NCDD using the short form that’s up at www.ncdd.org/donate.  NCDD is a tax exempt 501(c)(3) organization, so your donations are fully tax deductible.

Results of NCDD’s member drive – and a huge THANK YOU!

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Last month, we shared NCDD’s news from 2013 with all our members—including our strengthened relationship with the Kettering Foundation—and asked you to support our efforts to serve you by “stepping up” your membership.  Our goal was to see many non-dues members upgrading to supporting member levels, and to see those whose dues were due for renewal or lapsed to get their supporting membership in good standing.

ThankYouImageMany people did exactly that. In all, nearly 150 stepped up during the drive (all but 14 as supporting members), representing more than $6,000 in support for 2014. That includes 64 brand-new members (welcome!). We think it says a lot when people choose to contribute dues when they don’t have to.

To everyone who joined, renewed, or upgraded, thank you. In the final analysis, you are NCDD, and your commitment fuels our ability to strengthen your practice, expand your network, and advance the field of dialogue and deliberation. Without you, it doesn’t happen—so your dedication to NCDD is deeply appreciated. (And in case you missed out, there’s still time to upgrade or renew your membership.)

Again, thank you for your support. NCDD’s staff and Board wish you all the best for the holidays.

Recording of today’s Tech Tuesday with Dave Biggs of MetroQuest

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We had a great Tech Tuesday event today, with about 100 people participating in a stimulating webinar led by Dave Biggs, Co-Founder of MetroQuest. Thank you, Dave, for the great presentation — and thanks to everyone who participated!

MetroQuest public involvement software is recommended as a best practice by the APA, TRB, FWHA and other agencies. Dave shared with us some of what he’s learned about best practices for online engagement generally, and gave us a demonstration of the MetroQuest software, and walked us through several recent case studies.

You can watch the hour-long webinar now if you missed it. Plus, feel free to download Dave’s PowerPoint presentation here if you want to check out the slides without audio.

In a nutshell, MetroQuest software enables the public to learn about your project and provide meaningful feedback using a variety of fun and visual screens. It’s easy to mix and match screens to accomplish the engagement goals for each phase of the project from identifying and ranking priorities, to rating scenarios or strategies, to adding comments on maps and much more. To ensure the broadest participation, MetroQuest can be accessed on the web or mobile devices, at touchscreen kiosks and in engaging town-hall style workshops.

Via the comments below, Dave will be answering some additional questions that were submitted during the webinar that we couldn’t get to.  Feel free to add more questions, and of course to interact with Dave and others here!

If you’d like to contact Dave directly, he can be reached at Dave.Biggs@MetroQuest.com or (604) 317-6200.

NCDD’s Tech Tuesday events are meant to help practitioners get a better sense of the online engagement landscape and how they can take advantage of the myriad opportunities available to them. Keep an eye on the Events section of the site (ncdd.org/events) for upcoming Tech Tuesdays, Confab Calls and other events.

Challenges to Democracy Public Dialogue Series and Blog

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I wanted to share some news from one of our newest supporting members. I finally got Archon Fung to take the plunge and join NCDD during the recent member drive. (Yay!) For those who don’t know, Archon is the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship at the Harvard Kennedy School, and he’s one of the top researchers in our field.

ArchonFung-borderArchon is a key member of the faculty for the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Kennedy School. The Ash Center advances excellence and innovation in governance and public policy through research, education, and public discussion. One of its three major programs is the Program on Democratic Governance, which researches those practices that resolve urgent social problems in developed and developing societies.

In honor of its 10th anniversary, the Ash Center launched a public dialogue series named Challenges to Democracy. Through a series of events with scholars, policymakers, journalists, and artists, the Center seeks to broaden and deepen public dialogue on how we might address democracy’s greatest challenges in order to adapt and preserve our form of government.

The series launched October 3 with a standing room-only event featuring a panel discussion moderated by WBUR and NPR’s On Point host Tom Ashbrook on the threat economic inequality poses to the health of American democracy—and broadcast on the On Point radio program. Additional challenges will include immigration, lack of representation, business power, political polarization, the risks and opportunities created by digital technologies, the place of cities in American democracy, the decline of popular movements, and more.

The Challenges to Democracy Blog, launched in October 2013 by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (and edited by Archon), captures the stories and lessons of the public dialogue series, exploring ways that American democracy is being tested, digging deeper into possible solutions, and pointing readers to news stories germane to the series. The blog provides unique content including in-depth accounts and audio and video recordings of past events, interviews with public figures asking their thoughts on the greatest challenges to democracy, lengthy excerpts from the books of featured speakers, and posts highlighting new research from the Ash Center faculty and Democracy Fellows.

Check it out today at www.challengestodemocracy.us/home/ and stay tuned for future blog posts in the series.

Video review of JCRC’s Year of Civil Discourse

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I’m thrilled to share with you this wonderful video overview of Rachel Eryn Kalish‘s work on the Jewish Community Relations Council’s Year of Civil Discourse initiative. Congratulations, Eryn, on your incredible work with the Community Relations Council in Northern California.

Eryn is a long-time supporting member of NCDD, and we’re so very proud of her!

The Year of Civil Discourse (YCD) Initiative was designed to elevate the level of discourse in the Jewish community when discussing Israel. This innovative project is a joint effort of the Jewish Community Relations Council and the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Federation, in partnership with the Board of Rabbis of Northern California.

YCD envisions an inclusive Jewish community where people from across the political spectrum can come together, discuss challenging topics, inspire and empower one another, leading to a stronger and more vital Jewish community. YCD will provide Jewish community members, institutions, and leaders with the tools to have respectful, vibrant, engaging conversations about Israel and emerging controversial issues.

Randi Dodick Fields serves as Project Coordinator, Rachel Eryn Kalish is Project Facilitator, and Abby Michelson Porth is Associate Executive Director of the JCRC. (Eryn and Abby founded Project Reconnections, the catalyst to the Initiative.)

Funders for the Year of Civil Discourse Initiative included the Jewish Community Endowment Fund, the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, and the Walter and Elise Haas Sr. Fund.