Report on Public Engagement Learnings, Fall 2012 Three Conferences, One Retreat, Awesome Relationships, and Incredible Learning

by Arjun Singh Citizen, Kamloops City Councillor, Co-Chair Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation For the past twenty years, I have been passionate about and involved in projects that strengthen democracy. In my own community, Kamloops BC, I am extensively involved in community work as a member of city council. I have served on the board of the Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation since 2008 and helped lead the electoral reform movement in BC from 2005 to 2010. I hold a certificate in Dialogue, Deliberation, and Public Engagement and a MA in Professional Communication.

Introduction
In the fall of 2012, I was honoured to have the opportunity to do an incredible amount of learning and relationship building around the practice of public engagement. In about a three week period, I attended The Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) convention in Victoria, BC The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) North American conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia The Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation (C2D2) planning retreat in Halifax, Nova Scotia The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) conference in Seattle, Washington.

This short report is a summary what I learned about public engagement best practices at these events. I want to talk briefly about the reasons to do public engagement and to note best practices in public engagement. I also want to highlight interesting topics and techniques I encountered and profile one key group in society that could help drive better public engagement.

Reasons to Engage The Public

The reasons I list below come largely from sessions presented and facilitated by Dr. John Gaventa, Pete Peterson, and Tim Bonneman. Dr Gaventa, director of the Coady Institute, gave a high level summary of research he has done on hundreds of citizen engagement processes across the world. Mr Pete Peterson, director of the Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership, spoke about his experiences working with and training local governments officials in the US. Mr Bonneman facilitated a dialogue with Canadian (largely) public participation practitioners. In no particular order, here are reasons I heard: leads to better citizens and more effective participation strengthens governments

builds greater pluralism risk management right thing to do safeguarding reputation building trust saving money on the back end increasing buy in increased profit because of shared values reducing political blowback make better decisions more cohesive, trusting community helps solve very tough problems includes full diversity of community impacted / involved citizens desiring more and more to be involved finding unexpected expertise

Further Resources: Video of Pete Peterson Speech at the NCDD conference http://ncdd.org/10232 John Gaventa (et al) Research on Global Civic Engagement http://drc-citizenship.org/pages/global-citizen-engagement Tim Bonnemans blog post on key themes on his IAP2 session (with comments!) http://www.intellitics.com/blog/2012/05/23/2012-iap2-conference-lets-talk-publicparticipation-roi/

Public Engagement Best Practices

There is an incredible amount of knowledge and expertise on public engagement best practices. A lot of this work has been encapsulated in the IAP2 Core Values and the NCDD Core Principles work. One key thing, in my mind, is that there many different types of public engagement methods. The first question to ask is what is the purpose for which we want to come together. Again, IAP2 offers a Spectrum of Participation (PDF file) and NCDD offers an Engagement Streams Framework. My summary of key learnings from the events I attended adds some of my own personal detail to the excellent work linked in the above paragraphs. Building Relationships: One of the pieces of feedback on the C2D2 planning retreat was that we worked almost as much on getting to know each other better as we did on the actual meeting content. We attended to both the heart and the mind, to relationships as well as content. At the UBCM convention, some of the most important work gets done

outside formal sessions. One of the most powerful sessions at the IAP2 conference for me was one on storytelling. With a guided storytelling session, I was amazed at how quickly people managed to connect with each other. Using different types of learning / teaching / facilitating styles: At the UBCM convention, the sessions seem to be designed as one way information sharing, with people at a table at front and microphones for questions. Although perhaps appropriate for UBCM purposes, this gets tiring after a while, I think. At the other events, there was a combination different facilitation, learning, and recording styles. The plenary and workshops mixed presentations from the stage with different types of group work. An amazing group of visual recorders made the various themes and ideas come alive. Meeting people where they are at: A recurrent theme in many of the sessions I attended was that one on one, door to door, small group conversations can be enormously fruitful, especially where people have barriers to participation. If someone is very upset or fearful, if someone has a busy schedule, if someone is not used to or comfortable with a traditional public meeting format: meeting them where they are at, one on one (or close to it) can be enormously effective.

Interesting Topics and Techniques

At the events I attended, there were a huge range of interesting public engagement topics and techniques discussed. The NCDD conference guide and the IAP2 conference guide are chock full of really interesting stuff. The recent letter from the C2D2 board talks about a variety of different work undertaken in the past few years. Again, what follows are techniques I experienced and topics I learnt that I found particularly interesting and / powerful: Pattie LeCroixs storytelling exercise : At the IAP2 conference, Pattie LeCroix offered a session called Igniting Engagement, Why Stories Matter. At each table, participants were invited to share a 2 minute story about someone who inspires them and gives meaning to their work in the world. The other people at the table remain silent. As each person finished their story, they pulled back from the table and then remained silent. The rest of the participants then discuss what the story is about and come up with a title. The storyteller the rejoins the discussions and comments on the titles discussed and the title selected. Our table group told stories and then discussed the stories in a wonderful, respectful, and appreciative way. It was no more than a half hour exercise but it seemed to great connection and interest among my table mates. I am now much more curious and interested in the power of storytelling. Participatory budgeting session: In my own community of Kamloops, there has been interest in engaging in participatory budgeting. So, at the NCDD conference, I was really pleased to attend a session entitled One Person, One Vote - Bringing Deliberation into Public Budgeting. The session was presented by Brian Wampler, Janette Hartz-

Karp, and Maria Hadden. Participatory budget is typically a process where citizens are given a vote on spending in a specific area of the city budget. Participatory budgeting is often used where there is a desire for greater social justice and oversight. Sometimes, in a participatory budgeting process, a selected group of participants become delegates and spend more time learning about the budgets in question and make recommendations. One of the challenges in participatory budgeting is attracting a good diversity of people to participate. There may be little desire to engage in participatory budgeting if citizens are generally happy with the budget work of their elected reps. Community summits: I often wonder how what are the best ways fairly sizeable communities can think together and work together. At the NCDD conference, Mike Huggins and Grace Weltman presented a session entitled Empowering Individuals and Community Stakeholders for Meaningful Engagement. This session talked about large gatherings, often held only annually, where participants engage in large and small group work to take some responsibility to productively contribute to building on community strengths, addressing community issues, and setting community direction. The examples highlighted were Clear Vision Eau Claire from Eau Claire, Wisconsin and the Empowerment Congress from LA County, California. I didnt take great notes at this session but, thankfully the websites for these initiatives, particularly the Clear Vision Eau Claire project site, have a lot of resource materials.

A Key Stakeholder - The Media

I struggled a bit when I read about a session entitled The Art of Engagement: What is Journalisms Role in a Civic Infrastructure - and I am not completely sure why I struggled. The easy answer (and one that is indeed true) is that the session competed for my time with a whole lot of other amazing sessions in the time slot. Perhaps, though, I struggled because journalism as civic infrastructure seemed quite a stretch. Not sure. I was heartened by the quality of people in the session and the quality of discussion. Peggy Holman, Mike Fancher, and Jan Shaffer led a fantastic two hours. Some takeaways for me: journalism is critical to help citizen make good decisions in a democracy; journalists, editors, and publishers are in a great spot to convene people over narly problems to help us to imagine and create new possibilities; that the theres not story if there is no conflict mentality can be harmful; the crisis for local journalism is a crisis for democracy, yet also a great opportunity; the important thing is not digital tech, that important thing is for people to interact with each other in a thoughtful, caring way; journalism does not need saving, it needs creating - more channels and more models. My personal view is the media is a creator and keeper of culture. I think journalists and public participation / democracy advocates would do well to learn from each other. If a core goal of the media was to help create a more thoughtful, educated, dialogic, and caring society, I think we

would be in a much better place to address many of the big issues of our day.