Reinstate the Neighborhood Assistance Program Petition

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/nola-neighborhoodassistance/

Please sign our online petition to request that Mayor Nagin reinstate funding for the Neighborhood Assistance Program.

Tough budget choices? Ask an everyday citizen

Tough budget choices? Ask an everyday citizen

Could you and your neighbors make smarter budget decisions than your elected officials? A Brown sociologist is leading a real-life trial of just such a process in a Chicago ward.

By Alison Fairbrother ’09 | May 22, 2009 | 

An experiment in democracy is brewing in Chicago’s 49th Ward. The neighborhood is vying to become the first community in the United States to use participatory budgeting, in which residents directly decide how to spend public money, to allocate its municipal funds. It is an experiment that imports concepts developed as far away as Brazil. And it takes on added significance as federal, state, and local officials across the country face greater public scrutiny in allocating federal stimulus funds and scarce budget dollars. Gianpaolo Baiocchi leads a workshop on participatory budgeting in Chicago.

We can’t afford not to fund participation.

Since Hurrican Katrina, New Orleans has undergone a series of public planning processes aimed allowing ordinary people to be more involved in setting our city’s priorities for short and long term recovery and planning. Millions of dollars have been spent (sometimes in overlapping fashion), during the last 4 years largely to pay expert planning and architecture firms to guide us through a process of public discussion on everything from the appropriate location of school facilities to potentially removing the I-10 overpass that runs through downtown New Orleans into the CBD.

Through all this activity the people of New Orleans are becoming more aware and savy about what their role in public decisions is and should be. People have expressed a desire to be more formally included in the public decisions that they care most about. City residents want to ensure that civic engagement is sustained and supported by their city government. Increasing civic engagement has obvious benefits to our communities but also to the efficient and just operation of our city government. Supporting formal and organized civic engagement is no longer an option but a requirement in order for governments to operate effectively in an increasingly complex environment.

Still the question continues to arise as to how much should our city be willing to spend in order to sustain and increase current levels of civic engagement in public decisions?

The following poll is an attempt to get  your ideas on how much the city should spend on funding a viable citizen participation system. The figures are based on CPP budgets from high and low end cities. The highest being Los Angeles with close to $9million being spend annually on its Council of Neighborhoods System and one of the lowest being Washington D.C. with just under $1.2million spent annually on its Advisory Neighborhood Commissions.

Please take some time to answer our poll below so that we can get some indication of how much the residents of New Orleans want our city to prioritize sustained citizen participation now and into the future.

NOLA-CPP Draft Model Executive Summary

New Orleans Citizen Participation Project  Draft Guidelines and Standards

Executive Summary

 Keeping the people’s voice strong…

…for our recovery and our future

 The mission of the New Orleans Citizen Participation Program (CPP) is to enable citizens to effectively participate in city government’s priority-setting and decision-making, and to give government officials a clearly defined way to communicate with the people.  CPP is a tool to establish a continuing dialog between communities, neighborhoods, and city government, taking into account the rights and needs of all communities and striving toward a consensus-based decision-making structure that benefits the city as a whole.

Forum on Citizen Participation

On Saturday, January 16th, the New Orleans Citizen Participation Project is sponsoring a Community Forum on the different proposals for formalized citizen participation currently being discussed in our city.  These proposals include Chapter 15 of the Master Plan, the 2009 Draft Model for Citizen Participation, and recommendations from the Bureau of Governmental Research.  The forum will provide information on all of the proposals, and will gather input from the community.  Come out and get informed, and make sure your ideas and opinions regarding citizen participation in our city are heard!

Forum on Citizen Participation
Saturday, January 16th
9:30am until 12:00pm
at the Urban League New Orleans at 2322 Canal Street.

Citizen Participation Forum

The New Orleans Citizen Participation Project will be hosting a forum to discuss citizen participation this January!  The Forum will serve as an educational meeting, comparing the various CPP proposals that are currently being discussed, from the NOLACPP Draft Model to Chapter 15 of the Master Plan and the Bureau of Governmental Research recommendations. We strongly encourage people to come out, look over the proposals, and provide input on the proposals.

This forum will take place on:
Saturday, January 16th
9:30am until 12:00pm
at the Urban League New Orleans at 2322 Canal Street.

We will be posting materials that will be used at the forum for reivew in the coming weeks.

Additionally, we will be holding a few working sessions to prepare for the forum.  These sessions will be on:

Wednesday, January 6th
3:30pm – 7:30pm
4902 Canal Street, 3rd floor

This working session will be focused on reviewing the model, in order to make sure that the model at the upcoming forum is as close to representative of our multiple participants wishes as possible.  You do not have to attend the entire session; rather, the large window of time is meant to offer more flexibility for people to come at an opportune time for them.

The next working session will be:
Monday, January 11th
5:00pm – 7:30pm
4902 Canal Street, 3rd Floor

We will be reviewing materials for the forum and doing general forum planning at this meeting.

We will be sending out the latest draft NOLACPP model and the comparison matrix handout for the forum on Dec. 30th.

All of us at NOLACPP wish you a safe and happy holiday season, and a Happy New Year!

Next NOLAPP Public Meeting

Due to inclement weather, Monday, Nov. 9th’s NOLACPP meeting has been postponed.

The next NOLACPP meeting will be Wednesday, Nov 11th, and will be a great opportunity for our volunteers to get together and help us plan our next steps! We will be working on planning an upcoming citywide forum on Citizen Participation, and working out steps in our implementation process. In this period of transition towards implementation, we will greatly need and rely on advice and participation from the volunteers who have helped us design the 2009 Draft Model of Citizen Participation. We greatly hope that you can come out next Monday and help us move forward!

Meeting details:
Monday, Nov. 9th
6:00pm
4902 Canal Street, 3rd floor, Suite 300

Predicting the Future: Why Citizen Engagement No Longer Is Optional

Predicting the Future: Why Citizen Engagement No Longer Is Optional

by John Nalbandian

http://icma.org/pm/9011/public/special_feature.cfm?author=John%20Nalbandian&title=Predicting%20the%20Future%3A%20Why%20Citizen%20Engagement%20No%20Longer%20Is%20Optional

For years, we who are involved in local government have treated citizen engagement as an option to enhance policymaking and community building in local government. I would argue that now engagement no longer is an option; it is imperative. It is made mandatory by the challenging and often confusing context of contemporary local governance, increasingly characterized by the ad hoc presence of foundations, nongovernmental organizations, private firms, and other nongovernmental actors in processes and decisions that significantly affect community development and well-being.

If we are to anticipate effectively and plan for coherence in community building as an overarching goal of professionalism in local government, we must find a way to channel toward the collective good the diversity of actors, their energy, and their collaborative minds. One way to do this is through a significant commitment and more systematic approach to planned citizen engagement.

To understand the role of engagement, first we must distinguish two types. The initial form is spontaneous. This is the expression of citizenship that local government professionals have grown to expect and often dismiss as emotion driven, self-interested, and influence yielding.

Planned engagement, an alternative form, has taken time to reach a place of legitimacy in the administrative arsenal in part, I would maintain, because we lump all engagement under the same rubric—the one we would prefer to avoid! But we must realize that planned engagement is different. It leads to an expression of the rational community mind as it deals with issues of community importance, as a balance to the emotion that comes from the heart in spontaneous engagement.

NOLA-CPP ask for your support.

Dear NOLACPP Stakeholders and Volunteers-

The New Orleans Citizen Participation Project is in the final stages of finalizing the 2009 Draft Model for formalized Citizen Participation for the city of New Orleans.  Over the past year and half, we have attended upwards of 50 neighborhood meetings to speak about the project, convened dozens of thematic meetings around issues that need to be addressed in-depth by the 2009 Draft, held a Citizen Participation Summit in July of 2008 that brought nearly 175 New Orleanians together to discuss formalized Citizen Participation, and just recently, in February 2009, held a Community Breakfast to unveil the Draft Model and solicit comments and critiques from citizens.  We’ve had quite a busy past 18 months, and look forward to continuing our work by finalizing the Draft Model and taking the first steps towards implementing formalized citizen participation for our city!

We are currently soliciting donations to help keep the NOLACPP project going in the coming months.  Donations of any amount are gladly accepted, and will be an important contribution to keeping the NOLACPP moving forward as we start developing pilot projects around the city of New Orleans.  Checks can be mailed to:

CBNO/MAC Foundation
3500 Canal Street, Rm. 221
New Orleans, LA 70119

Please put NOLACPP or Citizen Participation on the memo line.

We thank you in advance for your support, and look forward to continuing to work within the various neighborhoods and communities to ensure that citizens can actively participate in the decisions that affect their lives!

CORE PRINCIPLES for Public Engagement

 CORE PRINCIPLES for Public Engagement

Developed collaboratively in Spring 2009 by dozens of leaders in public engagement,
with the expectation of ongoing dialogue and periodic revision.

May 1, 2009
In a strong democracy, citizens and government work together to build a society that protects
individual freedom while simultaneously ensuring liberty and justice for all. Engaging people around
the issues that affect their lives and their country is a key component of a strong democratic society.
Public engagement involves convening diverse, representative groups of people to wrestle with
information from a variety of viewpoints all to the end of making better, often more creative decisions.
Public engagement aims to provide people with direction for their own community activities, or with
public judgments that will be seriously considered by policy-makers and other power-holders.
The more any given public engagement effort takes into consideration the following seven Core
Principles, the more it can expect to effectively build mutual understanding, meaningfully affect
policy development, and/or inspire collaborative action among citizens and institutions. These seven
interdependent principles serve both as ideals to pursue and as criteria for judging quality. Rather
than promoting partisan agendas, the application of the Core Principles creates the conditions for
authentic engagement around public issues.