civic engagement
Researchers at the UNC School of Government recently released the results of a survey (PDF) they conducted about Chapel Hill’s Central West Small Area Plan process. You might have seen some press and spin about this survey and the comments participants provided in the survey. But before we start extrapolating from these data, it’s important to make sure we understand who provided feedback on the Central West process and how those individuals compare to our community at large.
Making this comparison is particularly important to assess and understand the effectiveness of public participation efforts in our local government. After all, if public participation is primarily coming from specific groups of people and other groups are being left out of the process, that’s not true public participation or engagement -- it’s the privileging of certain groups at the expense of the rest of our community.
So let’s take a look at the demographic data of the Central West survey participants compared to the 2010 Census data for the town of Chapel Hill. Here’s what the age and race data look like:
With all the talk about restructuring Chapel Hill's advisory boards, I thought it might be good time to publicly share my idea for a new board to help foster better civic engagement and more open government, while also addressing the gap left by firing the technology advisory board 7 years ago. I shared this proposal with the Mayor's Committee on Communications
in late 2010, but there didn't seem to be much interest at the time.
Maybe now there is an opportunity to do something to make Chapel
Hill more participatory and democratic.
Not
enough Chapel Hill residents participate in public meetings and
advisory boards. This lack of engagement leaves the Town at a
disadvantage without the valuable input of a broad range of Chapel
Hillians, and also leaves many people feeling frustrated and cut off
from decisions that impact their lives and issues that concern them.
A few days ago I sent the following message to my fellow members of the Outreach Committee for Chapel Hill 2020. Apparently having and stating strong opinions is incompatible with leadership in that process. Rather than spending time struggling to lead the internal outreach process, I think I will be a more effective and way more authentic advocate from the outside. It's a pity the Town can't make room for vocally opinionated comunity members to be leaders in creating our new comprehensive plan. We all have opinions. Some people are just more blunt about them than others. There are precious few "neutral" leaders who are qualified and motivated enough to serve.
I've been encouraged to hear municipal staff and elected leaders in Chapel Hill talk about how broad, inclusive, and engaging they want the process of revising the Town's Comprehensive Plan to be. I've also seen some positive steps in this direction, but have also been frustrated about my inability to get information about what is going on with the process so far. Hopefully, this frustration will end when the public part of the process kicks off on September 27th (OP's birthday, coincidentally).
The town's "2020" web site lists ways that people can get involved including: Become a Stakeholder, Join a Working Group, Subscribe to our email list, Take a survey, Attend a Meeting, Tell someone about Chapel Hill 2020, and Tell us who's missing. This is a great start. I think this process is an opportunity to think more broadly about how to get residents more involved more effectively and creatively in our local government, and I bet we can think of some different formats and different venues for this to happen.
Yesterday there was a community meeting for Northside residents to learn about the evolving framework for downtown development. The Downtown Partnership, who is a partner with the Town of Chapel Hill in the development of the plan, live-tweeted the meeting at @CHDpartnership for folks who couldn't attend.
It sounds like it was a very good start, although residents will need to do more digesting and analysis before they have an informed response to the proposal. Here's what the Partnership tweeted...
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