Actively going to residents for public feedback — instead of expecting them to come to you
How public agencies can solicit better, more precise, and more useful public feedback by thinking beyond the public meeting
“The only way we can make informed decisions as staff and make recommendations to the city council is if we really hear from our citizenry.”
— Melissa Carter, City of Savannah Office of Budget (source)
The concept of the ‘public forum’ as a way of gauging resident feedback by public agencies on issues of civic importance has been on my mind quite a bit lately. As we’ve observed time and again in Savannah and Chatham County during my work with OpenSavannah, the problem with ‘public forums’ is that, well, no one shows up…
But blaming resident apathy is too easy of an excuse, and it’s also not a fair assessment to make given the limited demographics who can attend public forums. As one of the most civically-engaged and natural thought-leaders I know, I’ll defer to Caila Brown — OpenSavannah’s Chief Storytelling Lead — to sum up the matter with a case study from Barcelona:
Here’s the piece Caila links to about Barcelona’s approach to inclusive engagement:
Basically, the City of Barcelona decided that — instead of holding public forums or assembling citizen committees, as has been the norm — City leaders would employ a more guerilla, low-tech, tactical approach to getting feedback from residents: It set up a series of ‘carritos’ — or public idea collection carts — throughout the city. It literally met residents where they are.
As we wrestle with the ambitious goal of building a more robust local democracy in Coastal Georgia, we, too, should push our public servants and elected officials to think beyond the public forum when it comes to resident feedback.
If we truly want an inclusive democracy, we may need to expand our outreach channels to fit the communication methods and the lifestyles of residents in the 21st century. We may even need to get out on the streets and talk to people in the Georgia sweltering heat. We may need to go to the people instead of asking the people to come to us.
As I wrote in a recent column for Savannah Morning News, “Involving everybody requires meeting underrepresented communities where they are — literally — not expecting them to come to our meetings, on our turf, on our schedule.”
Maybe poor attendance isn’t an issue of apathy.
Maybe it’s not an issue even of cynicism.
Maybe it’s just an issue of accessibility.
Stay tuned in the coming weeks as OpenSavannah hopes to announce plans to make this style of public engagement a reality locally.
