Giving Compass' Take:

• The Aspen Institute relays three important takeaways about civic engagement from interviews with government officials, tech start-ups founders, and community organizing practitioners. 

•  Good civic engagement relies on meaningful dialogue and feedback. How can philanthropy and other organizations encourage communication between officials and communities? 

• The Aspen Institute published an earlier article detailing steps to practicing civic engagement in 2018. 

The final set of interviews in our Listening to Inclusive Innovators series addresses civic engagement.  As before in this series, I asked practitioners–two government officials, founders of gov-tech start-ups, a leader in community organizing and participatory budgeting, and a university official–five questions about civic engagement.

These interviews reveal three important lessons for creating and implementing inclusive and effective civic engagement:

  1. Civic engagement is an ongoing, continual responsibility of institutions.  Grayce Liu, a Los Angeles official, emphasizes that civic engagement is not promotion or outreach, or a one-way broadcast about government activity.  Instead, she says, “For engagement to really have an impact, it needs to be an ongoing dialogue and not just a one-off letter or public comment.”
  2. Robust civic engagement, like co-creation, requires culture change. Civic engagement is about listening and learning on the part of institutions and requires humility.
  3. Good civic engagement requires governments and institutions to show how residents’ input is being used.  If governments or institutions aren’t providing feedback about how they are using residents’ input, those unresolved emotions build and spill over into the next engagement.

My working hypothesis, after doing these interviews and the co-creation interviews, is that good civic engagement creates the trust, empathy, and knowledge that underpin co-creation.  Both require a willingness to listen and to cede power.  Perhaps most importantly, both call on people to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Read the full article about civic engagement by Jennifer Bradley at The Aspen Institute.