Announcing the 2014 All-American City Award Winners

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

We hope you will join the National Civic League and NCDD in congratulating the winners of the 2014 All-American City Awards. The NCL, an NCDD member organization, used this year’s awards to give a special focus to healthy communities. We encourage you to read the NCL press release below or find more information at www.allamericacityaward.com.

The National Civic League announced the ten winners of the 2014 All-America City Awards (AAC) tonight. The award is given each year to towns, cities, counties, neighborhoods and metropolitan regions that demonstrate outstanding civic accomplishments.

Listed alphabetically by state, the 2014 All-America Cities are:

Montgomery, Alabama
San Pablo, California
Brush!, Colorado
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
Chelsea, Massachusetts
Independence, Oregon
Brownsville, Texas
Hampton, Virginia
Eau Claire, Wisconsin

The criteria for winning an All-America City Award include impact, inclusiveness, public engagement and collaboration by the private, public and nonprofit sectors. This year AAC had a special focus on healthy communities.

More than 650 communities have won the All-America City Award since the program was launched in 1949. Some have won the award multiple times. To win, each community had to make a presentation to a jury of civic experts focusing on three outstanding examples of collaborative, community problem solving.

“Congratulations on a job well done,” said Denver Mayor Michael B. Hancock in a message to the All-America Cities. “Not only have you proven your ability to innovate, work together and take on the complex challenges facing America’s communities, you’ve given inspiration and ideas to other communities across the country.”

For two days, groups of civic leaders and community activists met in Denver to present their stories of positive change to a jury of civic experts and to network and exchange ideas and insights.

The 2014 All-America Cities applied grassroots efforts to address such issues as childhood obesity, economic development, neighborhood revitalization, greenway development. They engaged the public directly in budget-making, city planning and communitywide fitness programs. They promoted local arts and cultural opportunities, reduced high school drop-out rates and turned polluted brownfields into parks.

“These communities are amazing,” said National Civic League President Gloria Rubio-Cortés. “They deserve to be recognized for the great work they are doing to make their communities stronger, healthier and more inclusive. They have found innovative ways of aligning existing programs to achieve greater impact.”

Sponsors of the 2014 All-America City Awards are Southwest Airlines, The Official Airline of the All-America City Awards; Campaign for Grade-Level Reading; Colorado Health Foundation; The Colorado Trust; Kaiser Permanente Denver/Boulder Offices; Alameda Gateway Community Association; Delta Dental of Colorado; FirstBank; Greenberg Traurig; Mile High United Way; PCL Construction; St. Anthony Hospital; City of Aurora, Colorado; City and County of Denver, Colorado; City of Lakewood, Colorado; City of Dublin, California; City of Gladstone, Missouri; City of Rancho Cordova, California; City of Hickory, North Carolina; and RubinBrown.

NCL is a 120-year old nonpartisan, nonprofit organization based in Denver, Colorado. Its mission is accomplished by fostering and sharing promising practices of local government and public engagement and celebrating the progress that can be achieved when people work together.

For more information contact Mike McGrath at the National Civic League at 303 571-4343; mikem@ncl.org, or visit the All-America City Blog at www.allamericacityaward.com or the NCL web site at www.ncl.org.

Schooler Op-Ed on Cantor’s (Lack of) Engagement

Posted on June 15, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

We recently read a great editorial in the Star-Telegram penned by NCDD supporting member Larry Schooler that was too good not to share. Larry reflects on House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s recent re-election loss amid claims that he was “out of touch” with is local constituency and what it says about public officials’ engagement practices. We encourage you to read Larry’s editorial below or to find the original here.

Elected Officials Must Always Be Engaged

Analysis of the surprising defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor included the notion, as one county GOP chair told The Washington Post, that voters “hadn’t seen him,” that Cantor had lost touch with his constituency after a long tenure in office and a greater focus on inside-the-Beltway politics than on his district.

Cantor would not be the first to face accusations of being “out of touch” with his electorate, and his defeat raises important questions about how elected officials at all levels should engage constituents after elections.

The “radio silence” that many officeholders adopt after taking office, particularly at the state and national levels, can leave many voters feeling unrepresented.

At the local level, mayors and public administrators in cities across America have begun to realize that those affected by a City Council’s decision should be able to affect those decisions.

Many cities have moved past the era in which people are asked to wait around for hours to speak for a mere three minutes on a topic of great concern to them, the fate of which was likely decided much earlier.

Many cities have taken innovative approaches to engaging the public in dialogue well before making any decisions about policy or budgeting. In cities like New York and Chicago, the public has been invited to “participatory budgeting” processes in which they propose and then vote on specific projects to receive city funding.

In cities like Austin and Fort Worth, citizens can attend a meeting in person or watch the same meeting on television or online. Afterward, they can interact with officials by phone, text message or social media, producing an audience of several thousand that represents a broader cross-section of the public than would otherwise be possible.

But few members of Congress deviate from the “town hall” medium of engagement: positioning themselves in front of a verbal firing squad at the front of an auditorium only to face a barrage of often hostile questions that leave them defensive and silence those who want to have a serious conversation.

Given Congress’s recess schedule and its use of social media, politically advantageous opportunities exist for more robust engagement between members and their constituents, both in person and online. Members of Congress could ask their constituents directly how to handle issues at hand.

Certainly, constituents could call or write, but in the absence of any invitation to provide input or personalized response, the exercise could seem futile.

In its “core values,” the International Association for Public Participation argues that governments should “provide participants with the information they need to participate in a meaningful way,” and “communicate to participants how their input affected the decision.”

Incumbents who don’t take heed could increasingly face a fate like Eric Cantor’s, tossed from office for being unengaged with voters.

You can find the original version of this Star-Examiner editorial at www.star-telegram.com/2014/06/12/5896487/elected-officials-must-always.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy.

KF Interviews Imagining America Codirector

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

We recently read a fascinating interview with Imagining America codirector Timothy Eatman that our organizational partners at the Kettering Foundation published that we want NCDD members to see. IA’s work in bridging academia and public engagement is critical to advancing our field, so we encourage you to read Timothy’s thoughts on how we get there below. You can find the original interview here.

In a recent column in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof laments that scholars are too often unimportant and “irrelevant,” producing “gobbledygook . . . hidden in obscure journals.” Kristof goes on to say that “over all, there are, I think, fewer public intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago.” Whether real or perceived, the sentiment that scholars are disengaged is shared by many.

However, on a number of fronts, higher education is enjoying a renewed commitment by scholars to community-centered research and teaching. The Kettering Foundation and many others have referred to this as “public scholarship.” The term “public scholarship” may strike you as a little funny: we don’t typically think of scholarship as public or even publicly accessible. So what’s this all about?

Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA), a national consortium of publicly engaged scholars headquartered at Syracuse University, has for many years drawn attention to these challenges. The program was launched in 1999 at the White House. The founding partners were the University of Michigan, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the White House Millennium Council, led by Hillary Clinton. Today, IA has more than 100 member institutions.

Timothy Eatman serves as codirector of IA and holds a faculty appointment at Syracuse University’s School of Education in the department of Higher Education. He also serves as an affiliate faculty member in the Communications and Rhetorical Studies Department. Jack Becker recently sat down with him for a couple of discussions before and after the 2013 Imagining America National Conference, which brought together several hundred participants from across the country and around the world to ask the powerful question, “How do we catalyze artists, designers, and humanists, and tap the power that their fields represent, to open us up to innovative, 21st century ways of demonstrating the relevance of the academy and of impacting our pipeline of young adults?”

Jack Becker: What kind of space does the Imagining America annual conference open up for thinking about democratic engagement?

Tim Eatman: It’s the space being used for over a dozen years to affirm this work. It helps connect graduate students and scholars to a conversation around civic engagement that they might not be able to have at their university or at their disciplinary conference.

We need a space to just be able to air some of these issues, particularly in the academy. Particularly in Research-One institutions. This is a traditional space. We think we are stimulating and catalyzing a community that sees room for scholarly research to thrive, but also feels that in the 21st century we can have a larger continuum of knowledge creation. This supports the idea of academic freedom and agency.

Part of the challenge is encouraging faculty to think of their pedagogy differently, in ways that harness the knowledge and thinking of students as colearners and colleagues; this orientation changes the dynamic of the classroom. We’re pushing for that as well. What does it look like when we position students as colearners? A lot gets left on the floor in terms of possibilities when we don’t engage students more deeply.

Promoting “publicly engaged scholarship” is one of Imagining America’s core activities. What is publicly engaged scholarship, and is it in tension with conventional forms of scholarship?

Publicly engaged scholarship has an emphasis on the reciprocal dynamic of knowledge making. An orientation of the campus that values the knowledge-making capabilities of the community; a posture that values community-located knowledge in ways that we don’t tend to do much of in the Ivory Tower. It also includes larger efforts to transform the culture of higher education.

So, the key question is, what is the impact our scholarship has on our community? It’s good to have ways to champion each other (faculty and scholarship), but what is the impact?

There has to be space for scholars who want to be engaged in clinical esoteric research and advance knowledge, and there has to be space for those that want to work with teachers, not as, to channel Harry Boyte here, not as experts on top but as experts on tap. When I go into a teacher’s classroom, I can’t tell them anything much about that environment; they know that environment. So it’s a different posture when you go into an environment and say, “you know what, I have some things to learn, I have some things to teach, yes, but how can we think together about what the consequence of our work is and can be?”

The challenge from a policy standpoint is, faculty are going to do some of that anyway, but not in a way they could if that work were valued in the rewards system. On that note, the Tenure Team Initiative has been an important program of IA that focuses on improving the rewards system in academe for faculty who practice engaged scholarship in the cultural disciplines and seeks to develop a broad understanding of the university’s public mission and its impact on changing scholarly and creative practices.

Issues of faculty rewards are among the most traditionally treated issues in the academy. Trying to create space to value something other than traditional forms of knowledge making is difficult work—look I don’t have any argument with that—I too was a master’s and doctoral student stationed with an assigned carrel in the stacks immersed in reading and rigorous theoretical and analytic work. But our relevance in the 21st century requires that we have to have more sophisticated options than collecting and discussing things; we have to engage that work, we have to be able to demonstrate the verity and impact of that work for purposes of societal amelioration.

So, we need our bench chemist, but there’s also space within the continuum of knowledge creation and practice for the engaged chemist that takes students into the community to examine homes with lead paint and analyze samples to explore the scientific principles that that analysis affords, but also takes the next step to connect with policymakers and community leaders to bring the kind of energy to bear that will make that situation better.

So much of the democratic engagement on our college campuses seems to pivot out of the liberal arts. Imagining America has broadened this focus to look at the humanities, arts, and design, among other areas. Particularly, how do the arts enter into the realm of democratic engagement?

One of our key questions is, how does art awaken that sense of civic agency? If we are a consortium that pivots on the arts, then we need some kind of expression of that. The D.R.E.A.M. Freedom Revival, led by IA associate director, Kevin Bott, is one avenue for this expression. Periodically, the Freedom Revival comes together to hold engaged musical performances where audience members are asked to join in; they might come on stage to testify to their dreams for their community as well as their struggles. We focus on all kinds of issues: education, healthcare, democracy, among others. In these performances we believe we are contributing to a broader democratic revival that encourages community members to commit to this revival.

Thinking about the idea of a revival of civic agency is powerful. We are trying to harness the notion that the oldest democracy in the world was here in Syracuse, the Onondaga Nation. In these performances, we use a community-engaged model to stimulate participants in an awakening of that history and connecting it to contemporary issues. This is one way IA is operating to connect to our understanding of the power of artistic expression, in addition to our work around tenure and other initiatives.

I think of IA’s work in the arts as creating spaces where hearts and spirits meet minds for deep, sustained, impactful, knowledge creation and healing. And we use words like spirit, heart, and healing because those things are achieved with the arts in a way that other disciplines don’t; art stimulates things that other disciplines don’t and creates spaces that aren’t otherwise there.

Syracuse University has worked very hard to strengthen ties with the broader community. For former chancellor Nancy Cantor, this investment in the community went well beyond the push to extend teaching and learning into the community, but to invest in physical infrastructure—buildings and pathways that connected the university and community, what she referred to as “third spaces of interaction.” How should this fit into our thinking about the spaces our campuses occupy?

This whole Connective Corridor and The Warehouse is developing a district that supports thinking about space—how we occupy space and how that space opens us up to the community. It’s one thing to understand the value of this, it’s another thing to get the resources. One of former Syracuse chancellor Nancy Cantor’s approaches has been to invest in space. Things that are attached to the ground mean something to the community. The Warehouse, in downtown Syracuse, was an eyesore in this community. As I understand it, there was a financial bond that Syracuse owed New York State from a residence hall they had built. So instead of paying the state through the bond, Syracuse University built a space to improve the community. This is leveraging resources and shifting mindsets and discourses. People begin to talk and think about what it means to be a Syracuse citizen and have their space and city expressed through the eyes of artists and citizens.

The Connective Corridor and Near Westside Initiative, [initiatives started by Syracuse University as a means of bolstering the community-university relationship and investing in space] means nothing without important partnerships in the area. They get grants to invest in community, and Syracuse doesn’t have total control of the money. Nancy Cantor understood a deeper commitment was needed. When you empower the community, it makes a difference. It’s a different way of thinking about institutions of higher education and creating third spaces, between the university and the community. Building relationship with strength and a sense of cohesion is difficult.

The point here is that there is something very important about the nexus between higher education institutions and the community that can be leveraged for good or for ill. I want to be part of a nexus of individuals that embolden the disciplines in a way that will expand knowledge creation and helps develop solutions to pressing public problems.

You can find the original version of this interview at http://kettering.org/kfnews/making-scholarship-tangible.

Citizen’s Initiative Review Spreads to County Decisions

Posted on May 20, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

Our friends at the Jefferson Center, an NCDD organizational member, recently shared an exciting piece about the first use of the Citizen’s Initiative Review process at the county level. Conducted in collaboration with Healthy Democracy, another NCDD organizational member, the project seems to have been a success and bodes well for the expanded use of CIR processes across the country. You can read more in the article below or find the original piece here.

We recently partnered with Healthy Democracy - a civic engagement organization that uses its Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) process to facilitate citizen evaluation of ballot measures and provide Oregon voters with unbiased information – in the first ever county-level Citizens’ Initiative Review.

The Jackson County CIR convened twenty randomly-selected voters from across the county to form a demographically-balanced microcosm of the community and evaluate Measure 15-119, a local ballot initiative seeking to ban the cultivation of genetically modified crops within the county. Measure 15-119 has received significant attention across the state and country, drawing millions in outside contributions.

Over the course of three-and-a-half days, the twenty CIR panelists parsed arguments from both the PRO and CON campaigns, listened to presentations from technical experts, and deliberated among one another to produce a Citizens’ Statement outlining their conclusions about the ballot measure. CIR panelists reported ten key findings, or factual arguments that the panelists thought every voter should know in order to make an informed decision when voting on the measure. The Citizens’ Statement also included the five best arguments in favor of and in opposition to the proposed ballot initiative.

2014 Citizens Initiative Review Group The CIR is being evaluated by researchers from Colorado State University. Questionnaires given to the panelists by CSU researchers provided initial insight into citizen perceptions of the CIR process and community deliberation. Eighteen of the twenty panelists felt high or very high satisfaction with the CIR. Significant majorities also felt they had sufficient opportunity to express their views and were consistently willing to consider the views of other panelists and experts who held opinions different from their own.

In their closing statements, panelists expressed great enthusiasm for the opportunity to have participated in the CIR and, more importantly, to have helped their neighbors understand complex arguments related to the Measure.

The Citizens’ Initiative Review is an adaptation of our Citizens Jury process, and we’re proud to see it succeed in new contexts. We’re also humbled to see the support of voters who participated in the process. Check out some of their comments in the news stories below:

KDRV TV (ABC)

KOBI TV (NBC)

Kettering Interview with NCDD’s Sandy Heierbacher

Posted on May 19, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

Back in March, our partners at the Kettering Foundation published a wonderful interview with NCDD’s very own director, Sandy Heierbacher, that explored the origins of NCDD and more of Sandy’s own story. Sandy has been too humble thus far to post the interview here herself, but I’m not! It’s an insightful read with a peak into NCDD’s future, so I encourage you to read the interview below or find the original version here.

Connecting Communities: Sandy Heierbacher & the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation

For folks who are out in the trenches of communities, opening up dialogues, working on problems, one of the most useful spaces on the Internet is the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation’s (NCDD) resource center, which has almost 3000 items compiled from practitioners throughout the field. Case studies, tools, descriptions, maps, assessment tools – it’s a treasure trove for the dialogue and deliberation field. But another contribution of NCDD’s might be even more important – and that’s the physical (and digital!) work of connecting the many diverse members of this field. It’s this connectivity that makes the community as productive and innovative as it is.

But this doesn’t happen on its own – it happens because NCDD director Sandy Heierbacher and NCDD have made it their mission. Former KF research assistant Jack Becker recently sat down with Sandy for a chat about the history and future of NCDD.

Jack Becker: Can you first talk a little about your background? What brought you into dialogue and deliberation, and what lead to the creation of NCDD?

Sandy Heierbacher: I was drawn to the concept of dialogue because of my interest and involvement in race relations. I first learned about dialogue in graduate school in 1997, during a course on conflict transformation at the School for International Training, where I was studying intercultural and international management.

When I learned about dialogue, I realized I had been approaching anti-racism work all wrong. It dawned on me that people can’t change until they feel respected and safe and until they feel they’ve been listened to without feeling judged. I dove into dialogue after that and decided to focus my studies on race dialogue.

Part of my graduate program included conducting in-depth interviews with leaders of race dialogue efforts across the country, asking dialogue practitioners questions like “Which methodologies do you use?”, “Do you feel connected to other dialogue practitioners?” and “What are your greatest challenges?” (among many others!). The interviews were amazing, and I had soon fallen completely in love with dialogue and with the kind of people who are drawn to this work.

Those interviews provided me with an amazing learning opportunity on many levels, but two observations really stood out for me from my interviews: one, leaders of race dialogue efforts felt isolated and disconnected from other practitioners, and oftentimes felt they were solopreneurs inventing something completely new, and two, most of the practitioners I talked to admitted they were struggling to know when and how to move their race dialogue groups from talk to action and that they were losing African American participants because of a perceived lack of action.

The first learning came into play later on, and led to me and 60 others organizing the first National Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation several years later. The second learning convinced me that I should focus my graduate thesis on how race dialogue groups can move from talk to action more effectively.

Once my thesis was completed, my partner Andy (now my husband and creative director of NCDD) suggested we simplify the paper a bit, break it up into sections, and put it up on a website. I really wanted people to read my work and perhaps benefit from it, and we decided that to get people to the site, we should add a “community page” to the site, where I’d post news from the field, upcoming conferences and trainings, and calls for facilitators. There was no place like this online at the time.

That project, which we called “Dialogue to Action Initiative,” eventually grew into the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation. I think the turning point came about at the 2000 Hope in the Cities’ conference: a group of attendees ended up hanging out in the hallway talking about how great it would be to have a conference designed to allow us to experience each other’s dialogue models and tackle our common challenges—like moving from talk to action or deciding when to use which method.

After the conference was over, I started a Yahoo! group so we could continue our conversation on the idea of a dialogue conference. As so often happens with groups, two people emerged as being the real worker bees who push things forward. For this group, it was me and Jim Snow, a retired US State Department official who was involved in running dialogues for George Mason’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution.

I ended up as the director of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation because of a combination of factors: luck and timing; the right kind of skills and tendencies; a great husband who was willing to contribute his design and tech skills and who became as committed to NCDD as I am; a genuine concern and affection for dialogue and deliberation practitioners; a good deal of self-interest that fortunately was aligned with what the field seemed to need at the time; and a certain amount of youthful energy and naïveté about what I was embarking on and whether I had all the skills and resources required to do it!

Fortunately, it has never been just Andy and me. We brought together a dynamic, diverse group of 60 volunteers (and 50 endorsing organizations) to make the idea of a National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation into a reality—and that incredible spirit of commitment and collaboration has been a key part of NCDD’s culture ever since.

About every two years NCDD members have come together for regional or national conferences. We might call these conferences “exchanges,” since members share insights about their work and discuss their successes and struggles. How do you and the NCDD staff connect these gatherings together and make them meaningful?

Our stated goal for the first National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation in 2002 was to “unite and strengthen the growing dialogue and deliberation community.” This has remained our primary goal for all NCDD conferences.

In many ways, each conference is its own animal, as many attendees and presenters are newcomers to NCDD each time and we try new things with each event. We learn a great deal from each one, both in terms of formats that work for our audience and ways we can help participants tackle their collective challenges.

At the very first NCDD conference, we used the study circles “action forum” concept on the last day of the conference, inspiring over a dozen action groups to form around ideas and goals that had been identified at the previous day’s plenary. The action groups focused on goals like increasing diversity in the field, internationalizing NCDD, building a resource toolbox for practitioners, and integrating dialogue and deliberation into educational environments. Though the conference was very highly rated and our attendees did want to see progress made on all the action areas, we learned that conference attendees are not necessarily interested in committing themselves to long-term group work.

Since then, we’ve experimented with a variety of different formats and tactics to encourage attendees to combine forces and share knowledge both during and after the events. At our 2008 conference in Austin, for example, we had 5 artists in our graphic facilitator team manage large murals that were placed on the walls in the plenary room throughout the 3-day event. Each mural focused on one of the five “challenge areas” attendees had prioritized during the final session of our 2006 conference in San Francisco, which could easily be considered our field’s most “wicked problems”:

Framing this work in a way that’s accessible to a broad audience;
Moving from talk to action effectively;
Institutionalizing or embedding dialogue and deliberation into government and other systems;
Increasing diversity and inclusion in our field and in our communities’ decision making processes; and
Evaluating and assessing dialogue and deliberation work.

For our most recent national conference in 2012, we tried something new called the NCDD “catalyst awards” to provide two $10,000 awards for collaborative, team-led projects that had the potential to move our field forward. Though we hadn’t thought of it this way at the time, you could consider the catalyst awards an experiment in participatory budgeting. We asked our community members to propose projects, work together on developing them, and then vote on the winners.

The framing question for the 2012 Seattle conference was, “How can we build a more robust civic infrastructure in our practice, our communities, and our country?” Why this question? Is there evidence that the civic infrastructure in America or abroad is cracked, crumbling, or otherwise not up to the task of addressing the tough problems governments and communities face?

We’ve learned from our members that dialogue and deliberation work is most effective over the long run when it is embedded in their communities and their institutions. Yet it’s extremely challenging for individual practitioners to focus on impacting established systems. With the concept of civic infrastructure, we’re encouraging NCDD members and conference attendees, in part, to think about small things they can do to make it easier for people to engage effectively next time around.

Thinking about building civic infrastructure through their work, a practitioner might spend a little more time training facilitators and making sure local organizations can tap into and utilize those facilitators for future projects. A practitioner might think about how their shorter-term project could actually launch a long-term online space where community members can meet and connect. And they might take extra time to cultivate and recognize local champions of public engagement—especially those in government.

What is a civic infrastructure? What local and national projects are underway in support of one?

I like to think of civic infrastructure as the “big picture” of why we do this work. Ultimately, dialogue and deliberation practitioners are passionate about what they do because they are showing people that there is another way to make decisions, solve problems, and resolve conflicts. Civic infrastructure is what’s needed in our communities, in our nation, and across the globe, in order for these practices to become simply the way things are done.

By civic infrastructure, we’re talking about the underlying systems and structures that enable people to come together to address their challenges effectively. This includes some things that would require major changes in most communities, like changing local laws and procedures so the public is consulted more effectively when a decision needs to be made on a contentious public policy issue.

But it also includes many things that practitioners can influence on a project by project basis, like whether a cadre of trained facilitators is being developed in a community they’re working with and being sure local nonprofits and government champions have access to those facilitators when they decide to engage people next.

There are many local projects underway that support civic infrastructure. One example is New Hampshire Listens, which is building a statewide infrastructure to take the successful dialogue to action techniques used by Portsmouth Listens to scale. New Hampshire Listens is working with local and statewide partners to bring people together for productive conversations that augment traditional forms of government, like town meeting or school board meetings. Their vision is to create a network of engaged communities in New Hampshire that can share their experiences and resources for getting “unstuck” and solving public problems.

NCDD is involved in a national dialogue process on mental health called Creating Community Solutions, which has been developed in a way that could potentially be replicated for different subject areas. The website’s online map in particular provides a model for connecting people and organizations locally to encourage them to self-organize dialogues with some centralized support and resource materials.

The winner of NCDD’s 2012 catalyst award on civic infrastructure is developing an infrastructure for a different kind of self-organized national dialogue. Their approach is to open up the whole process to the public – from selecting an issue to framing the discussion materials to implementing solutions.

Can you comment on what you’ve been up to since NCDD Seattle? What came out of the conference that you’re still following?

A few things of the things we’re still following and supporting from the Seattle conference are:

The two NCDD catalyst award-winners and their projects—one of which is focused on developing a truly self-organized, public, national dialogue infrastructure, and the other has been experimenting with exciting ways to use mass media “infotainment” to promote participatory democracy.
Our emphasis on civic infrastructure has continued, partly through our involvement as one of seven Community Matters partners (a project of the Orton Family Foundation we’ve been involved in for two years which is focused on developing civic infrastructure in communities), and partly through our focus on and involvement in national dialogue efforts, which rely on communities with strong civic infrastructure in order to get to any level of scale.
One or two workshops at NCDD Seattle focused on the growing challenge many public engagement practitioners are facing: organized disruptions to public meetings. I have been focusing on this behind the scenes, learning and gathering as much as I can on these unique protests, and plan to engage the broader membership in this soon.

We’ve been focused on many other projects and programs that are unrelated to the Seattle conference as well, including:

Experimenting in combining “thick” and “thin” engagement by incorporating text messaging into small, simple face-to-face dialogues (part of the Creating Community Solutions project we’re involved in).
Launching a series of “Tech Tuesday” webinars for our members who are interested in gaining a better understanding of how they can utilize online technology in their engagement work.
Working with leading organizations in the field to promote a new set of model ordinances that local government can adopt in order to bypass some of the longstanding legal barriers to quality public engagement.

And of course much of our time is devoted to keeping the NCDD network strong, active, and valuable to our members. This is a time of extraordinary progress, momentum, and productivity in our field, and we are constantly supporting our members by highlighting their programs on our blog and social media, sharing their resources in our online resource center (which now has over 2,900 listings), and providing them with numerous spaces to connect with each other about their successes and challenges.

One thing we’re starting to do now is to gear up for the 2014 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation. We have a great venue secured in the DC area for October 17-19, and we’ll soon be engaging our whole network around what they’d like to see at the next conference.

You can read the original version of this piece on the Kettering Foundation blog at www.kettering.org/kfnews/connecting-communities.

Community Branding Call with CM this Thursday

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

We are pleased to announce the next capacity-building conference call from our organizational partners at CommunityMatters, which is coming up this Thursday, May 8th from 4-5pm EST.

CM is working with the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design to host the call, entitled What’s in a Name? The Power of Community Branding. The call is described like this:

Your community isn’t Anywhere, USA. It has stories to tell – tales of historic moments, epic failures, innovative products, resilient businesses and colorful people. How can your community take its most distinct stories and turn them into a compelling and unified message?

Community branding brings local stories and sentiments to the surface, highlighting unique assets that make a place great.

On May 8, Ben Muldrow of Arnett Muldrow & Associates… will share his experience in working with small towns and rural places to create a strong brand that supports community and economic development outcomes.

Before the call, we encourage you to check out the accompanying piece on the CM blog by Caitlyn Horose, which is cross posted below. You can find the original piece here.

What’s in a Name? The Power of Community Branding

The most compelling reminder that community branding matters is a simple question: Would you rather have a bachelor party in Las Vegas or Des Moines? No offense to Des Moines, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that most people will pick Las Vegas. Des Moines just isn’t famous for its late night party scene – and it probably doesn’t want to be!

The strongest community brands create associations that seem painfully obvious. You say “Kentucky.” I say “Derby.” You say “Maine.” I say “lobster.” And, even if we’ve never been to Austin, it’s likely we both know that Austin is “weird.”

Place branding isn’t just about associations. The benefits of a positive and unified image impact many aspects of community. Here are a few examples of what branding can do:

Attract and retain strong talent. Glasgow, Scotland’s new brand - People Make Glasgow - acknowledges the skills and talent in the city, highlighting Glasgow as a place that’s great for business and tourists alike.

Shift negative perceptions. Newark, New Jersey was named the unfriendliest city by Conde Nast Traveler in 2013. Branding is aiding efforts to erase the negative and emphasize the positive, starting with the downtown Newark neighborhood of Washington Park. Strategies go beyond graphics and logos to include beautification of public spaces, cultural events in local parks, and food truck rallies.

Support economic recovery. When Oakridge, Oregon’s population dropped to 3,200 people, the community banded together for a branding project. Focusing on Oakridge’s natural resources and recreational opportunities, the town self-identified as “The Center of Oregon Recreation.” The brand promotes existing recreational offerings while providing focus to economic development tactics. Targeted support for outdoor-related businesses is now a top priority.

Stimulate demand. A small town in England is branding its local products and services. Shrewsbury’s “One-Off” campaign showcases the local handmade and artisanal culture. The campaign logo is intentionally flexible so that any business can adopt it.

Strengthen civic pride and a shared identity. Kentucky’s new brand – Kentucky Kicks Ass – was created with input from local residents. It seems the slogan is something every Kentuckian can get behind:

But what about those places where community identity hasn’t been crafted? How can small towns stop feeling invisible or change negative perceptions? What works in creating a well-loved community brand?

On May 8, Ben Muldrow, Partner with Arnett Muldrow & Associates will join CommunityMatters® and the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design™ for an hour-long webinar on community branding. Ben will share his experience in working with small towns and rural places to create a strong brand that builds civic identity and supports community and economic development goals.

The original version of this blog post is available at www.communitymatters.org/blog/what%E2%80%99s-name-power-community-branding.

NCDD Member’s Work Featured in Progress Magazine

Posted on April 29, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

We were pleased to see that the work of one of our newest NCDD members, Tim Merry of the Art of Hosting community, was featured in the latest issue of Progress Magazine. Tim recently helped guide a public engagement process for a number of new public buildings in Halifax, Nova Scotia: the Nova Centre, Halifax Central Library, and the Halifax Seaport Farmers’ Market. And as the article details, the new buildings are more than just that:

…these are more than just structures. They are fusions of ideas, dreams, and desires captured in a series of unique public-engagement activities. Their designs, from construction materials to landscape features, were shaped by comprehensive consultation processes that not only welcomed but also actively sought community input.

That consultation process was the result of a collaboration between Tim and Halifax city officials committed to engaging and collaborating with the city’s residents to really make the new buildings theirs. The engagement process was anything but ordinary:

The consultation processes merged both traditional and unconventional methods of public engagement to identify what Haligonians wanted in these buildings. From community gatherings to pop-up public-space dialogues—a strategy that aims to connect with people on the streets or in public spaces—these meetings and conferences offered residents multiple opportunities to participate both face-to-face and online. All of the meetings were live streamed. Participants exchanged views through social media, and websites acted as platforms to make public opinion visible and inform dialogue.

Many of the principles that Tim drew on for the Halifax effort are practices that are taught in the growing Art of Hosting community. One of the newer members of that community, Amanda Hachey, commented in the article on the AoH process:

Recently named one of Atlantic Canada’s Top 50 Emerging Leaders, Hachey was introduced to Art of Hosting when she was in Sweden pursuing a master’s degree in sustainability. She admits that she went from thinking the process was “flaky” to believing it was visionary… Hachey has since applied Art of Hosting’s conversational processes to a wide range of functions that she has facilitated, from visioning a marketing plan for organic farmers to action planning at the Nova Scotia Co-operative Council’s AGM. Indeed, the co-op she helped co-found, La Bikery, was created in typical Art of Hosting fashion, evolving from a dinner-table discussion among friends to an organization that represents more than 350 members.

We encourage you to read the full article on Tim’s work with Halifax at www.progressmedia.ca/article/2014/04/hosting-with-heart-0, and we hope the more of our NCDD members will familiarize themselves with the Art of Hosting processes. As we recently highlighted, NCDD members can receive a discount on AoH trainings, and are encouraged to share their experiences with them afterward.

As work like Tim’s continues to thrive, we are optimistic that participatory democratic processes like the one in Halifax and those NCDD members build and engage in every day will continue to occupy more mainstream space. Onward!

Learning from the NH Listens Initiative

Posted on April 29, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

Our partners at CommunityMatters recently shared a wonderful blog piece about the continuing success of a dialogue initiative in New Hampshire called NH Listens. NH Listens is an NCDD organizational member, and the author of the post, John Backman, is an NCDD Board member. We hope you’ll take a moment to read about this innovative program below or find the original by clicking here.

Listening to New Hampshire: Grassroots Groups Assemble Civic Infrastructure for Dialogues

The need was clear. All the pieces were at hand. The challenge was to mold them into a robust civic infrastructure to support dialogue about pressing issues in New Hampshire’s cities and towns.

Bruce Mallory and others took up the challenge, and NH Listens is the result—a network of local groups (currently nine in all) that bring residents together for facilitated, small-group conversations about the issues that matter to them.

“Before this began, there was little ability to convene dialogues on either a statewide or local level,” Mallory remembered in a recent interview. “All communities have issues that need conversation—school reform, master planning, taxation, disaster mitigation, you name it. Historically, few communities are prepared to have those robust dialogues, and there has not been a statewide infrastructure to support them.”

Many communities, however, already had the right pieces: strong webs of local relationships, neutral conveners willing to help, community champions respected across divides. As a civic engagement initiative of the University of New Hampshire since 2011, NH Listens has supported those people and organizations as they build local capacity for neutral, open, inclusive dialogues.

Mallory’s approach takes its cues from the principles of slow democracy. Rather than approach communities with the idea, he responds to requests for a Listens chapter. He works with a local, neutral convening organization to create an advisory committee with a diverse blend of people across local constituencies: business, healthcare, youth, the school district, religious institutions, and law enforcement, among others.

Perhaps most important, he allows the development of each local Listens organization to proceed at its own pace, within the comfort zone of local organizers. “Dover Listens existed for two years without ever having a community forum,” he recalled. “They eventually put a toe in the water by having small, facilitated candidate forums instead of a larger community forum about a controversial issue. It’s only recently that Dover Listens sponsored a city-wide conversation on the future of its schools.

“But that is hardly abnormal. In fact, it can often take one to two years to develop Listens projects to the point where they’ll be sustainable.”

The impact of these organizations is getting attention. Recently, a Listens chapter in New Hampshire’s North Country hosted a bipartisan dialogue with its elected state representatives and senators. The contrast between the local gathering and the climate in the federal government at that time—then in the midst of a shutdown—was striking. “The state representatives were so proud of their ability to engage in civil dialogue in light of the partisan gridlock at the federal level,” Mallory said.

All this local activity is starting to reverberate on the statewide level. “With local Listens groups in place, it’s much easier to trigger a statewide conversation when a major issue comes up,” Mallory noted. “We simply get in touch with the local leaders and ask them to organize dialogues on the topic on the same day.”

The results can be eye-opening. Last year, NH Listens used this infrastructure of local partners to organize a statewide dialogue about mental health, part of the White House’s national conversation on the topic. More than 400 people took part.

Not surprisingly, the state itself has begun to collaborate with NH Listens. Mallory and company have built dialogue capacity in three governor’s commissions, as well as in the Department of Environmental Services (to initiate dialogue with employees) and the Department of Transportation. With its successful model—and 140 trained volunteer facilitators currently in place,–NH Listens has further growth in its sights. Mallory envisions 15-20 active groups two years from now, as well as steps to build statewide capacity further.

In advancing this agenda, he will continue to leverage what he sees as keys to success: “frequent check-ins, a local champion to keep the effort moving forward, passionate volunteers who are seen as neutral brokers, continued recruitment and training of facilitators, and a deep respect for community dynamics,” he said. “As long as we use these ingredients, I believe we will continue to respond to a need. There is a tremendous hunger for this work.”

The original version of this blog piece is available at www.communitymatters.org/blog/listening-new-hampshire-grassroots-groups-assemble-civic-infrastructure-dialogues.

7 Lessons in Addressing Racism from Everyday Democracy

Posted on April 28, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

Our organizational partners are Everyday Democracy have been working for 25 years to make racial equity a central piece of their work in dialogue and deliberation, and they recently condensed some of the key insights that work has taught them. We learned a lot from ED’s lessons and share their belief addressing racism in our communities is a key to advancing democracy, so we hope you will take a few moments to read and reflect on their piece. You can read it below or find the original here.

When we were created as the Study Circles Resource Center twenty-five years ago, our founder, Paul Aicher, gave us a fundamental charge – to find ways to make dialogue compelling, routine and powerful for everyone in the country. He envisioned community settings where people of all backgrounds and views would engage with each other on pressing issues, form relationships across divides, create community change together, and improve democracy in the process.

In our quest to bring this vision to life, we began asking informal and formal community leaders about their hopes and the kinds of support they needed. Early on, people from all backgrounds and regions told us that people in their communities wanted to talk about race but didn’t know how. They told us that they needed ways to recruit people from different groups and bring them together. Within three years of our founding, we had decided to address the issue of racism head-on as we worked with and learned from community groups.

At that time, we were a small, all-white organization, just beginning to learn. Our journey led us to deep collaboration with community partners of every ethnic background, working on many different issues, in every region of the country.

As we learned from their experiences, we came to see that racism is more than just another issue area. We learned that systemic structures rooted in racism stand in the way of making progress on all types of public issues – and on realizing the promise of democracy. To meet these challenges, we became a multi-ethnic organization explicitly committed to inclusion and racial equity in all aspects of our work.

These lessons and organizational commitments enable us to support communities in developing their own capacity for large-scale dialogue that leads to personal, cultural and institutional change. As we partner locally and nationally, we reflect, learn, coach, write and talk about the need for equitable opportunities for voice and impact. We often serve as a bridge among the fields of deliberation, racial equity and social justice.

We are still learning, but at this 25-year milestone we want to highlight some lessons from along the way:

1. Diversity is essential across all phases of dialogue-to-change, whether in organizing, dialogue, or action. In addition to racial/ethnic diversity, it’s important to consider other kinds such as education level, economic status, gender, age, sexual orientation, and language. But racial/ethnic diversity is often the hardest to achieve. Tackling it first will help with all other forms of diversity.

2. Diversity is just the beginning. It’s important to build an equity lens in all aspects of organizing, dialogue, and action. Understanding the structures that support inequity (with a particular emphasis on structural racism) is essential for effective dialogue and long-term change on every issue.

3. Personal change and relationship-building are critical to addressing racism. Sharing personal concerns and stories throughout organizing, dialogue and action processes helps make it possible to address issues of privilege, power and inequity.

4. Personal change and trusting relationships are just the beginning. They bring energy and persistence to long-term democratic processes aimed at institutional, cultural and systemic change.

5. Measuring and communicating progress toward community change is essential.Doing so makes it possible to keep engaging new people in dialogue and action, to build on the change that has already happened and to sustain the work.

6. Racism affects all of us personally and in our communities, no matter what our racial/ethnic background is. We all have something to gain by working together and addressing racial inequities. Addressing it is hard work, and requires empathy, self care and long-term commitment.

7. We all need to be part of the change we are trying to create. At Everyday Democracy, we have been learning how to apply an equity lens to all our work. We are committed to “walking our talk.”

We have discovered that fighting racism goes hand in hand with creating communities where everyone has a voice and a chance to work together. We look forward to the next 25 years of learning and change.

See highlights of our journey to address racism.

You can find the original version of this piece from Everyday Democracy at www.everyday-democracy.org/news/7-key-lessons-25-years-addressing-racism-through-dialogue-and-community-change#.U1nEMvldUlo.

Insights on Public Problems, Deliberation from Martín Carcasson

Posted on April 25, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

Earlier this week, our friends at the Kettering Foundation published an insightful interview with NCDD Board member and public deliberation guru Dr. Martín Carcasson. Martín’s insights on public deliberation and civic infrastructure are rich, and we encourage you to read them below or find the original interview by clicking here.

When Martín Carcasson first came to the Kettering Foundation, he had a little group of students and one big idea behind him: help communities solve problems while exposing students to community issues. Carcasson is an associate professor of communication studies at Colorado State University (CSU) and founding director of the CSU Center for Public Deliberation (CPD).

In the center’s terms, his work is “Dedicated to enhancing local democracy through improved public communication and community problem solving.” What this means is the center is a unique resource in Northern Colorado. Now seven years old, the center has trained hundreds of students and community members in facilitation, community issue analysis, and public meeting engagement and hosted many of those meetings.

Jack Becker: The Colorado State University Center for Public Deliberation has become quite the resource for Colorado. Can you tell us a little bit about what exactly the center does, and how?

Martín Carcasson: The focus is primarily on the community level, which we describe as Northern Colorado, or perhaps more accurately Larimer County. As we have matured, I would say that we run projects in the community, of which convening public forums is a key aspect. We began as an organization that primarily ran meetings, but a lot of the work we do now is focused on before or after the meetings themselves.

We essentially provide a set of services tied to deliberative engagement, including analyzing issues from an impartial, deliberative perspective, to working to identify and connect a broad range of stakeholders to the issue, to facilitating productive conversations among those stakeholders, to writing reports on those meetings, and finally to helping groups move towards actions. The cycle of deliberative inquiry, which we developed to explain the work of the CPD, lays out all the skills/services we provide to the community.

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We do this work by relying on a group of students who apply to a special “student associate program” and earn class credit while being trained. They take a 3 hour course their first semester, then return for at least one hour of practicum their second semester. Practicum is basically experiential learning; each credit hour equals 40 clock hours of work for the CPD. Many students end up returning for additional semesters for more practicum credit or simply volunteering.

We also do some statewide work, especially this year as I’ve been doing some work with CSU Extension. I trained a group of 14 extension agents from across the state primarily through a two-day workshop in November 2012 and then offered online webinars periodically. The CPD then ran some projects for CSU Extension, running an event in Jefferson County in the Denver area and in the mountains in Steamboat Springs this fall.We’ve also done a series of community workshops to introduce community members to the work of the CPD, and from that have a group of around five community associates that help with events at times.

After these experiences, however, we decided to focus more locally rather than trying to be more of a statewide resource as a center. I still do a lot of work statewide, especially through some consulting I do with the Colorado Association of School Boards.

In the most recent release of Connections, David Mathews writes, “Too often, people are on the sidelines of the political system. They don’t make any choices, or they choose by not choosing at all.” In Colorado, and particularly in Northern Colorado, you’ve been able to develop a strong base of citizens who want to get involved. Why do citizens get involved in these public meetings, and why do they come back?

I think people are on the sidelines because most current processes don’t really have a decent role for them. Most public processes are extremely limiting, like voting, citizen commenting time during city council or school boards or public hearings, signing petitions, writing letters to the editor, etc., and basically cater to people with set opinions.

Most public processes are also too late in the process. People get a chance to respond to a decision, or maybe weigh in right before a decision is made, but rarely help define the problem, come up with potential responses, or really struggle with the inherent tensions. As a result, most public engagement is primarily complaining because people see things too narrowly.

The good news, which I’ve learned from the CPD experience, is that the cynicism and polarization of the public is pretty thin. I think people are starved for genuine conversation. If you give them an alternative, they seem to latch on and enjoy it and realize it’s simply a better product than what they’ve been getting. They come back because they know it’s important.

You have said that public problems are often “misdiagnosed.” In particular, you have argued that universities are focusing on developing the wrong skill sets for students. Can you say a little more about this?

The primary theory behind the CPD is that most public problems are wicked problems that are marked by competing underlying values that are in tension and need to be addressed. Universities primarily teach models of problem solving that are either tied to expertise, such as seeking a technical answer to a problem, or primarily focus on activism, such as building a coalition to affect change.

Neither of these models works well because both don’t see problems as wicked problems, thus the misdiagnosis. Experts see problems as technical problems, and activists see problems as primarily people problems, such as seeing things as good versus evil. One way to think of wicked problems is that the problem is what is wicked, not the people.

You’ve introduced an additional framework for thinking about problems as adversarial, expert, and deliberative and argue that the first two are often overemphasized, while deliberative engagement is overlooked or, at least, not given the adequate resources and attention to build more deliberative capacity.

Your particular work has stressed the deliberative, but you also stress the importance that each contributes to addressing public problems. Why do you think this is so? When are these three modes of work at their best and how do they work together?

I think expert and adversarial processes are overemphasized because they are much more natural and supported by existing institutions. As I was saying before, universities were built on the expert model, which provides major capacity. The two party political system relies on adversarial politics, and social movements fit well into that model. The Internet is now a great tool for adversarial politics, making it so easy for like-minded people to gather and grow. Many refer to this as “echo chamber” because people only hear voices like their own.

The deliberative model is typically under-resourced because it requires what I’ve called “passionate impartiality,” which is simply in low supply. Too few people are willing to take an impartial view and focus on process. This is one of the reasons I think the centers for public life, and as I’ve argued, communication departments in particular, can be such critical institutions for communities. They can provide a critically needed resource.

When I started examining the adversarial, expert, deliberative typology, I usually saw the first two as “bad” and deliberative as “good.” I’ve realized that all three are necessary. I actually rely heavily on the other two to do my work, and at its best, the deliberative perspective can bring out the best in the other two.

In a way, the deliberative perspective works to focus on the positive aspects of both while undoing or overcoming the limits and negative consequences of each. Adversarial processes can provide important challenges to the status quo or dominant perspectives and help provide a wide range of perspectives. Adversarial processes also have more of a focus on moving to action and keeping people motivated. Expert processes help infuse decision making with high quality data and reality.

You’ve long argued that universities are critical “hubs” of democracy. The CPD is certainly a powerful demonstration of that argument. Another way to conceptualize democracy’s hubs is as civic infrastructure, a topic that’s much talked about these days.

When I talked with Sandy Heierbacher, director of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, she conceptualized civic infrastructure as “the underlying systems and structures that enable people to come together to address their challenges effectively.” Thinking along those lines, how do you connect the work that the CPD is doing to the larger civic infrastructure in Colorado?

In an article I wrote for Kettering on democracy’s hubs, I argued that communities need capacity for passionate impartiality to take on wicked problems, and that while universities are not really a good fit, they are likely the best shot communities have. The win-win-win-win of the CPD is the reason why. Students win by gaining skills, universities win by getting good publicity for helping the community, professors like me win because we get to study real deliberation and provide innovative teaching, and finally the communities win because they get the increased capacity for little or no cost.

I very much agree centers like the CPD are key parts of civic infrastructure. I think organizations like United Way, League of Women Voters, and community foundations can also provide passionate impartial infrastructure, but doing the work well takes so much time and so many different skills, I think it is hard to expect them to be able to do it on their own.

Here again is where organizations like the CPD can come in. We work closely with those organizations, providing them with the additional capacity to be able to do this sort of work. We have also worked closely with several citizen boards and commissions, which, like these other organizations, they care about community, that is, they are passionate, and are impartial, but don’t have the time, resources, or skills. We compliment them well, and with the students and with me fashioning almost full time hours out of this work, we have more and more time to try to do it right.

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