If you haven’t reexamined your community engagement practices during COVID, you should! It’s not too late. When it comes to community engagement practices, finding a balance between practical and effective can be difficult even under the best of circumstances. Throw a...
It’s time to change things up when it comes to public meetings if we want them to be effective. Our communities have changed and it’s time the way we hold public meetings changed too. As we discussed in this earlier post, residents aren’t coming to the meetings because they aren’t convenient. Making information more accessible and making meetings better experience for everyone are easy ways to make your community engagement more engaging.
Most local government leaders say they want to provide access for all members of the community to voice concerns and opinions about issues affecting the community. Effective community engagement builds on-going, permanent relationships among individuals and interested organizations for the purposes of developing and applying a collective vision for the community’s benefit. Unfortunately, the way many communities actually practice community development works out quite differently. In many communities, community engagement is limited to formal meetings of the governing board and looks something like this, as summarized in a post from the blog Orange Politics: