Category Archives: From the Community

Announcing the New Nevins Democracy Leaders Program

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We are excited to congratulate our friends at Penn State University’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the recent creation of the Nevins Democracy Leaders program – an innovative program that will expose more young people to “transpartisan” leadership and to the field of dialogue and deliberation. We couldn’t be more pleased to see this happening because the new program has NCDD written all over it.

Mccourtney Institute LogoThe McCourtney Institute is a key NCDD organizational member and partner – it was one of the generous All-Star Sponsors of this year’s National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation, and it is headed by long-time NCDD member and D&D thought leader John Gastil, who has emceed not one, but two NCDD national conferences. In addition, the gift that made the Nevins Democracy Leaders program possible came from NCDD Sustaining Member David L. Nevins, who is the National Grassroots Coordinator of No Labels, one of the nation’s leading “transpartisan” organizations.

Most exciting for us is the fact that NCDD will be playing a role in the project’s pilot (and likely after that), to solicit applications from D&D organizations that are interested in being matched with top-notch interns from Penn State, and make recommendations to our colleagues at Penn State.

The new program is an exemplar of how our field’s leaders can collaborate to continue bringing “Democracy for the Next Generation” into reality. Take a look at how the program is described in a recent Penn State article:

The Nevins Democracy Leaders program, a signature initiative within The McCourtney Institute for Democracy, based in the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State. The Nevins Leaders program will provide education and ­training in transpartisan leadership skills by exposing participants to a variety of philosophies, viewpoints and strategies; teaching the tools of critical thinking, deliberation and dialogue; and placing students in unique internship opportunities in democratic and civic renewal.

…Penn State students who serve as Nevins Democracy Leaders will participate in collaborative dialogues, meet with guest lecturers, and complete coursework to learn the skills of civil political discourse and critical thinking necessary for a problem-solving approach to governance and citizenship. Additionally, every Leader will gain practical experience, working as an intern with organizations and individuals, inside and outside government, that share a commitment to improving American politics such as the Aspen Institute, No Labels, or the Jefferson Center for New Democratic Processes. Each year, Leaders who have returned from their internships will share their experiences with the new group of students joining the program.

Certainly the new program will take time to start up, but we encourage our members looking for innovative solutions to our nation’s “wicked problems” and partisan gridlock to keep it mind because creating partnerships with leaders tackling these issues in the coming years will be of particular interest for the Nevins program:

John Gastil, director of The McCourtney Institute for Democracy, said, ”…The program will connect Penn State with leaders across the country who want to tackle the most vexing problems we face in society by working across party lines and bringing together people of diverse backgrounds to work together to find common ground and realistic solutions.”

With a program headed by such wonderful D&D leaders advancing key concepts and ideas from our field, we can’t wait to see how the Nevins Democracy Leaders program develops.

We encourage you to learn more about the McCourtney Institute and the new Nevins Democracy Leaders program by reading the full Penn State article, which you can find at http://news.psu.edu/story/336362/2014/12/04/academics/gift-business-executive-creates-nevins-democracy-leaders-program.

Congratulations to John, David, and the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on this wonderful step forward for yourselves and our field! We at NCDD are excited to continue working with you and the new young leaders you will surely be cultivating.

Report: How should we tackle our field’s biggest barriers to success?

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NCDD has completed a report on the October 2014 engagement project focused on addressing barriers in our field. This project was launched on the second day of the 2014 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation, where during a plenary session our 415 attendees launched discussions about four barriers to the dialogue and deliberation community’s success:

  1. IMG_8016How might we overcome the lack of trust in our Democracy, our leaders, and in one another?
  2. How might we make our D&D work more equitable, inclusive and empowering?
  3. How might we more clearly delineate our field of practice for ourselves and those we seek to serve?
  4. How might we eliminate structural barriers in our democratic systems?

The results of this engagement project give us valuable insight into the ideas and actions that resonate most with the dialogue and deliberation community.  This data can help NCDD and others devise clearer paths forward in our attempts to overcome our field’s greatest challenges.

Download the report here

The four barrier “areas” were identified by looking through the results of an earlier engagement project we ran on Codigital.com that was focused on the question “What do you want to see happen when our field comes together at NCDD 2014?”

IMG_8202Conference attendees were encouraged to discuss these barriers to effective dialogue and deliberation work, and to identify new and existing strategies for overcoming them. We asked a note taker from each table to enter the top three “leading edge solutions” from their group under the relevant barriers on new pages we created on Codigital.

The day after the conference concluded, an email invitation was sent to all conference attendees as well as all members of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation — whether they attended the conference or not — inviting them to Codigital to identify existing strategies and co-create new strategies for overcoming persistent barriers to effective dialogue and deliberation work. Users were invited to add new ideas, vote on ideas to prioritize them, suggest edits to the ideas, and vote to resolve edits as a group.

Thank you to James Carr for donating his time and software to NCDD once again. Codigital is a dream to work in, and we really appreciate James’ generous support. James can be reached at james@codigital.com.

Orton’s Community Field Guide Makes Holiday Reading List

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If you are looking for something to read during your holiday down time or gift ideas, we encourage you to check out the great community and economic planning reading list that our partners with CommunityMatters shared on their blog. We especially encourage you to learn more about the Orton Family Foundation’s wonderful Community Heart & Soul Field Guide, a resource on the list that is designed to help those of us doing community & civic engagement work. You can read the list below of find the original post here.

CM_logo-200pxThe Center for Rural Entrepreneurship shared its list of top reads of 2014. Included on the list is the Community Heart & Soul™ Field Guide recommended by Erik Pages, a CRE fellow and president and founder of EntreWorks Consulting, an economic development and policy development firm who said: “This is an excellent guide to strategic planning and community building for small towns.”

Thank you Erik! Lots of great reads to add to our holiday wish lists!

Here are the center’s Top 12 Recommended Reads of 2014:

Recommended by Erik Pages, EntreWorks Consulting and Center Fellow: The Tyranny of Experts by William Easterly. While the book is mainly about international development issues, it’s a useful caution that economic development is about individual choice and empowerment – not the latest scheme from so-called “experts.”

Recommended by Don Macke: Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson. This book provides both a framework for exploring the innovation process and wonderful stories of innovation. Check out Johnson’s program on Public Broadcasting.

Recommended to Deb Markley by Angela Lust, Amarillo Area Foundation: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer. This book is a true story of innovation under the most challenging circumstances. Inspiring!

Recommended by Erik Pages, EntreWorks Consulting and Center Fellow: Community Heart & Soul Field Guide by the Orton Family Foundation. This is an excellent guide to strategic planning and community building for small towns.

Recommended by all Center staff: The Good Jobs Strategy – How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profit by Zeynep Ton. This book provides great case evidence that the race to the bottom need not be the rule as businesses struggle to be competitive.

Recommended by Don Macke: Owning Our Future – The Emerging Ownership Revolution and Journeys to a Generative Economy by Marjorie Kelly. For those of us engaged in entrepreneurship as a means to better economies, this is a must read.

Recommended by Erik Pages, EntreWorks Consulting and Center Fellow: Fueling Up – The Economic Implications of America’s Oil and Gas Boom by the Peterson Institute, an economic impact study of shale energy. Not the most scintillating read, but great data that encourages us to be cautious and realistic about the “shale energy revolution.”

Recommended by Travis Starkey, a millennial and educator in eastern North Carolina: “Creative Class Counties and the Recovery.” This Daily Yonder article shows the value of the “creative class” to the economic recovery in some parts of rural America.

Recommended by Don Macke: The End of the Suburbs by Leigh Gallagher. This book provides interesting insight on the changing spatial demographics in the United States.

Recommended by Deb Markley: Sources of Economic Hope: Women’s Entrepreneurship. This Kauffman Foundation research report suggests why accelerating women’s entrepreneurship might be the best thing we can do for the U.S. economy.

Recommended by Don Macke: The Coming Jobs War by Jim Clifton. This book provides insight from the Chairman of Gallup and their unique international view of global competition.

Recommended by Don Macke: What Then Must We Do? – Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution by Gar Alperovitz. Rooted in the value that economies exist to meet the needs and dreams of residents, this book provides insights worth considering as we engage in economic development.

You can find the original version of this CM blog post at www.communitymatters.org/blog/12-great-reads-add-your-list.

Apply for Grants from the Taylor Willingham Fund by Dec. 31

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New NIF logoFor the third year now, our partners with the National Issues Forums Institute are accepting applications for grants from the Taylor L. Willingham Legacy Fund. The $500-$1,000 grants are intended to honor the legacy of Taylor Willingham and her contributions to the field of deliberative democracy by supporting projects in the field, and we highly encourage NCDD members to apply for a grant or to donate to the fund.

You can download a PDF of the application form by clicking here, and you can learn more about Taylor and make a donation to her legacy fund by clicking here. Applications are due on December 31st, 2014 so make sure you apply before getting swept up in the holiday season!

Learn more by visiting NIFI’s announcement about the newest round of applications at www.nifi.org/en/groups/apply-taylor-willingham-fund-grant.

IF Offers Discussion Guide on Climate Change

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The next round of UN climate talks began this week in Lima, Peru, and as global leaders debate how to avert the worst effects of climate change, our communities also need to be having conversations about this pressing topic. We learned from our members at the 2014 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation that D&D practitioners want more resources that will help them have real and productive conversations on this difficult topic.

Lucky for us, the Interactivity Foundation (or IF) – one of the wonderful sponsors of our conference – recently created a resource for exactly that. Based on three years of online discussions with international input on climate change and the lessons learned from their signature Project Discussions on the subject, IF produced a report on the discussions called “Human Impact on Climate Change: Opportunities & Challenges.” The report serves as a discussion guide designed to use non-ideological language that helps participants to separate potential policy directions from partisan agendas and arguments over science, and to explore possibilities for how they or their communities might respond.

The easy-to-use, 40-page guide frames the possibilities that discussion participants can consider in two categories. The first, “Setting the Stage”, focuses on immediately impact awareness and action, and the second, “Meeting the Continuing Climate Challenge”, is focused on the more complicated, long-term approaches needed to impact infrastructure and natural systems.

Here is how the report has framed six different possibilities for participants to discuss:

Possibilities for Setting the Stage

A. Promote Climate Awareness – Improve understanding of climate impact, climate science, and possible approaches.
B. Change Consumer Habits – Focus on human consumption as a source of carbon and greenhouse gas emissions.
C. Go for Results – Identify efficient and low-cost solutions that are available for short-term action.

Possibilities for Meeting the Continuing Climate Challenge

D. Heal the Planet – Plan and implement long-range recovery and rehabilitation of ecosystems.
E. Deal With a Different World – Adapt to changed conditions and plan for climate emergencies.
F. Focus on the Developing World – Assist developing nations in reducing climate impact activities and adopting clean technologies.

The guide expounds on all six of these frames as starting points for in-depth conversation and deliberation, and offers example policy suggestions grounded in all six frames for participants to explore. It also includes a great list of additional resources to help facilitate further conversations at the end.

With the wide range of perspectives and the depth of feelings that the general public has about the topic of climate change, this kind of resource can be an indispensable tool to help those of us seeking to have effective deliberations on the topic that can move our communities forward without descending into divisive and counterproductive arguments. We highly encourage you to take a look at IF’s “Human Impact on Climate Change: Opportunities & Challenges” discussion report and use it to you help you host these vital conversations.

To help these conversations be more inclusive and accesible, IF has made a PDF of the report available in both English and Spanish, and you can also view it online. You can go directly to the report summary page by clicking here, and there is even a Facebook discussion group based on the report. We hope that this great resource will help you start your communities, organizations, or institutions have better discussions about this challenging issue.

To learn more about the Interactivity Foundation and its innovative work, visit www.interactivityfoundation.org. Thanks so much to IF for creating this amazing resource!

Healing, Transformation, & Change from Ferguson

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As negativity continues to swirl around Ferguson, MO and the country at large in the aftermath of the non-indictment of Officer Darren Wilson last week, the time is ripe for real and challenging dialogue about how we can transform this energy into something positive. Everyday Democracy program officer Janee Woods wrote a powerful piece for Guernica Magazine in which she says that both punitive justice and restorative justice models are inadequate for healing the deep wounds that racism has caused our country, and advocates instead for rehabilitative justice, saying that “[w]e need to rehabilitate ourselves and our relationships with each other, across differences of perspectives and background, before we can successfully change the way inequitable systems and institutions work.”

We were particularly impressed and inspired by the list of suggestions that Janee offers for those of us grappling with how to move our work and conversations toward the rehabilitation of people and relationships that we need now. We’ve excerpted those suggestions below, but we encourage you to read her piece in its entirety by clicking here.

Janee Woods: A Different Kind of Justice

…We may feel powerless standing in the shadow of institutions, politics and the long history that got us here but that does not mean that we are, in fact, powerless. We know there is power in public protest that demands large scale change but not all of us are ready to engage with the system in that way. Try to develop your power by engaging truthfully with yourself and with neighbors in your community on a smaller scale. The inaugural step toward rehabilitating our humanity is honest communication with those who are near us. In many ways, this might be the hardest step because we must first create spaces where we can come together as individuals with disparate life experiences, diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, and varying levels of understanding about the legacy and impact of American racism. And once we come together, we must share a commitment to follow through in learning together and moving to action together. There are many ways you can create the space and structure that allow for this kind of communication and commitment.

Bring people together for conversations that transform conflict into meaningful relationships. Use conversations to Continue reading →

DC City Council Brings Citizens into Bill Amendment Process

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We saw an interesting post recently from our friends at the Davenport Institute – an NCDD organizational member – about a new program for public input on city council bills in DC. We encourage you to read more below or find the original post here on their Gov 2.0 Watch blog.

DavenportInst-logoWashington, DC has launched an online program where citizens of the city can propose amendments and opinions on certain aspects of a bill before the city council. The idea of this program is to allow more transparency and use technology to enhance voter participation. Although this is in its beginning stages, the idea is to bring the workings of the city government to the people directly so they can have a voice in the shaping of bills:

Washington, DC has launched a program where citizens of the city can propose amendments and opinions on certain aspects of a bill before the city council. The idea of this program is to allow more transparency and use technology to enhance voter participation. Although this is in its beginning stages, the idea is to bring the workings of the city government to the people directly so they can have a voice in the shaping of bills.

You can read more here.

Conflict Resolution Job Opening with the EPA

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Be sure to check out the email below about a great job opportunity with the EPA that our director Sandy Heierbacher sent out this weekend over our “Making a Living in D&D” listserv. For more updates on openings in the field, make sure to subscribe to the listserv today!

Hi, everybody! The Environmental Protection Agency will soon be announcing an opening for a GS9/11 Conflict Resolution Specialist position located in the Office of General Counsel, Alternative Dispute Resolution Law Office/Conflict Prevention and Resolution Center (CPRC).

The position will be posted during the week of December 1st for 5 days only. General information on CPRC can be found at www.epa.gov/adr.

The duties of the position will be:

  • Provides Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) advice and counseling to EPA clients, applying ADR and conflict prevention theories to controversies involving EPA’s environmental programs to effectively prevent and manage disputes.
  • Develops, implements and conducts environmental ADR-related training to build EPA employees’ knowledge and skills.
  • Assists in providing support for neutral services in disputes involving EPA and regulated entities or disputes involving private parties related to Agency actions to prevent or resolve disputes.
  • Participates in outreach activities on the agency’s environmental ADR activities to promote the use of conflict prevention and ADR processes.

If you’re interested, you’ll need to look for the announcement on USAJOBS.GOV with the keywords “conflict resolution specialist.” Try on December 1st, and then the next day if it’s not posted yet. For any questions about the position, you’ll need to ask the Human Resources Management Division point of contact listed in the announcement.

Input Needed on Draft U.S. Public Participation Playbook

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The White House’s Open Gov Initiative announced on Tuesday that it is opening up a draft “Public Participation Playbook” for edits, additions and comments.

A team across the government is now working side-by-side with civil society organizations to deliver the first U.S. Public Participation Playbook, dedicated to providing best practices for how agencies can better design public participation programs, and suggested performance metrics for evaluating their effectiveness.

I encourage NCDD and IAP2 members to add their input to the draft Playbook asap, as submissions must be made before December 17th. I’ve been assured that this is very much a draft document — not something that is being simply displayed for comment after decisions have been made.

The Playbook has been posted to Madison, an open source tool created by the OpenGov Foundation to help people collaboratively craft legislation. The OpenGov Foundation’s director, Seamus Kraft, is a supporting member of NCDD.

To participate, go to:

https://mymadison.io/docs/us-public-participation-playbook

“The playbook is not limited to digital participation, and is designed to address needs from the full spectrum of public participation programs,” wrote Corinna Zarek, senior adviser for open government for the U.S. chief technology officer, and Justin Herman, the SocialGov lead for the General Services Administration who is also managing the U.S. Public Participation Playbook project.

Yet the current draft is certainly heavy on examples and language relevant to digital tools, platforms, and strategies for public participation. It clearly needs some TLC from the face-to-face public participation experts who are involved in NCDD and IAP2 — as well as further input from those of you who focus on online engagement.

What is a playbook, you ask? Check out the Digital Services Playbook for an example. Playbooks are compilations of best practices (or “plays”) that government agencies can borrow from and help guide their efforts. In this playbook, extra emphasis is given to performance metrics for public participation. The playbook “reflects the best ideas and examples for agencies to use in developing and implementing their programs with public participation in mind.”

A formal version of the initial playbook is expected to be released for piloting by agencies by January 2015.

Resources for Dialogue After the Ferguson Decision

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With yesterday’s announcement of a grand jury’s decision to not indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the need for dialogue in our communities about race, police, deadly use of force, and our criminal justice system is high. In moments like these, it is hard to know where to even begin with these kinds of conversations, so we want to offer some resources to help those of our NCDD community who may be working to facilitate conversations about the issues swirling around Ferguson.

NCDD’s Director, Sandy Heierbacher, put together a great list of NCDD resources as well as a few more from our network earlier this summer, so we encourage you to look back at her post for that list, which you can find at www.ncdd.org/15953. We especially recommend that you check out the Race Issues tag in NCDD’s Resource Center of nearly 3,000 resources for D&D.

We also recommend a couple of great blog posts on the subject from our partners at Everyday Democracy:

And for those looking for reflections on how to navigate difficult conversations about the surrounding racial issues with white folks, Janee Woods Weber wrote a powerful piece with some advice called “Becoming a White Ally to Black People in the Aftermath of the Michael Brown Murder” that can be a good place to start.

We wish all of you having these challenging conversations the best of luck, and hope you will remember to take some of the reflections and lessons from them with you to the upcoming meetings between NCDD members and the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service next year. They will certainly help us find ways to try to keep moving forward together.