We have facilitated hundreds of public meetings over the past 18 years. All are memorable in their own right, but some have special moments that are unforgettable.

At our Creating Community Solutions DC meeting on Saturday, October 12th, we facilitated a day-long meeting for 400 participants on mental health in the District. We had a fantastic turnout, literally standing room only, and particularly of youth aged 15-24, with more than 120 participating.

In every meeting, we try to feature local talent of one type or another – whether it be a band that plays prior to the beginning of a meeting or an exercise leader who leads an energetic stretch break for participants 4 or 5 hours into the meeting.

At Creating Community Solutions, we had the honor of including two very talented, precocious teenage spoken word artists, both from the DC Youth Slam Team.

Both artists – Amina Iro and Thomas “Vocab” Hill – have been performing for the past year, and have competed in national contests like the 2013 Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival.

Amina performed first, a powerful poem about the depression her mother has battled and the impact it has on her mom, herself, and her family. The crowd gave her an extended standing ovation.

Later in the morning Vocab performed a moving piece about his uncle, a veteran, who suffers PTSD after several tours in Iraq. He too brought down the house.

Whereas the rest of the day focused on conveying critical data and information about mental health and illness and featured in-depth and sometimes difficult conversations about what challenges youth face and how do we overcome these challenges, these artistic moments served to inspire, energize, and focus the audience on the critical nature of the convening.

Art can make an enormous difference in so many parts of our lives. And, even in unlikely settings like a public meeting on a public policy concern.

Thank you Amina and Thomas!

To read more about Creating Community Solutions DC, CLICK HERE.

Five forums took place throughout the region, each utilizing the same structure and meeting materials. Participants considered three scenarios developed to address congestion throughout the region, as well as the associated costs and benefits. The goal of the forums were to address the following questions:

• As people learn more about congestion pricing, will their attitudes about it change?
• Upon which factors (costs and benefits) does their acceptance hinge?
• What factors matter to people?
• How strongly do people feel about those factors?
• What factors cause people to change their minds?

The result of the project was a report that examined why the public is resistant to supporting various forms of congestion pricing as a means to both reduce congestion on the roads and serve as a vehicle for badly needed transportation funds in the region. Read more about the report in this AmericaSpeaks blog post.

AmericaSpeaks worked with OP to create and manage the online engagement portions of the project. Working with MindMixer, an online engagement platform, AmericaSpeaks helped bring over 150 participants together online to generate over 180 ideas for the Mid City East community. The MindMixer site provided an opportunity for Mid City East residents to stay actively involved with the planning process and gave residents who weren’t able to attend public meetings the ability to make their voices heard on issues facing the community.

Visit the Mid City East MindMixer site at engage.midcityeast.com

Wow.  What a week.  The federal government shutdown is over and the trains this morning into D.C. were pretty crowded again.  This latest round of dysfunctional governing and threatened global financial crisis might end up being just another act in this unfortunate drama surrounding the federal budget and economic health of the world’s largest economy. Hopefully, it will be a turning point towards a more bipartisan effort, led from the middle of American politics.

I want to use this blog though to turn our attention to something else that happened this week that in the long run might play an equally important role in putting middle America and moderate political interests back in greater control of our country.

News leaked that Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, is working to create a new and very large full-service news organization.  He considered buying the Washington Post this summer, and that got him thinking. Read his blog post to learn more about it.

One of his primary goals is to “find ways to convert mainstream readers into engaged citizens”.  That is an excellent goal, and is the thrust of a report that we wrote this spring under a grant from the Democracy Fund (a part of Pierre’s philanthropic work through the Omidyar Network).  The report examines how we might use new forms of media, digital platforms, and citizen engagement principles to “reengage the center and those who have turned out due to apathy and disgust”.  Hey, maybe Pierre read our report.  You’re welcome, Pierre.

Please check out the full report here.

It’s nice and short, less than five pages.  It does not answer a lot of questions, but it does discuss some of the issues that Pierre and others (that includes you Jeff Bezos) need to consider as they seek to bring the power of new technology and the digital world to the complexity of media, citizen engagement, and politics.  What needs to happen in this new news space to prevent many of the same structures of inequity, exclusion, and power from being recreated?  Let’s hope we figure it out soon.  I’m not sure how many more times we can survive our current cycle of failed leadership and governance.

AmericaSpeaks designed and facilitated the 2^nd annual gathering of members to address high tech solutions to social issues on October 3-4, 2012. The gathering featured three new social innovation projects from the following organizations:

• The National Military Family Association (to develop an online user feedback system to improve the lives of member families);
• Living Cities (to implement pilot programs in up to four cities that utilizes municipal analytics and data tracking that focus on problem prevention in communities and neighborhoods); and
• The Military Child Education Coalition (to develop a digital portfolio tool that allows children of military parents to track their academic progress and ease education transitions for those families who must move frequently)

To read about AmericaSpeaks prior work with ConvergeUS, please click here.

The four hour meeting was a space in which participants could work together with their neighbors and meeting presenters, Alice Rivlin, former Cabinet official and budget expert, and David M. Walker, former Comptroller General and Founder of the Comeback America Initiative, to explore possible solutions to the fiscal challenges confronting our country. Reform proposals were presented across 8 different policy areas and nearly all of the reform packages received more than 70% support (somewhat or strongly support) from both Ohio and Virginia audiences.

The female participants discussed issues ranging from the national debt to hate crimes legislation, as well as heard from pollsters who had recently conducted a national survey on women’s political views, entitled “What Women Want 2012: A YWCA USA National Survey”. Women represent over half of all voters and thus, it’s important for women to understand the issues that impact their families and communities.

Click here for the report of the day’s outcomes. Click here for the Participant Guide for the day.

In order to get WMATA the information they needed from area residents, AmericaSpeaks conducted a series of four forums during December 2012. The first three forums brought together a total of 100 residents who were demographically representative of the WMATA service area—the city of Washington, DC as well as several counties in northern Virginia and suburban Maryland. Participants almost exactly matched the local demographics in terms of age, race, gender, income, and geographic location. After those three forums, AmericaSpeaks conducted a special forum for 33 members of the region’s fast growing Latino population. That forum was conducted in Spanish and provided an opportunity for residents whose voices are sometimes ignored to share their insights about what is important for the future of Metrobus and Metrorail service.

Each of these small forums utilized the elements that are a standard part of AmericaSpeaks’ 21st Century Town Meeting model—facilitated small group discussions, computers at tables to collect insights from participants, a theme team to identify the most common ideas expressed and keypad polling to identify priorities. As a result of the four forums, a tremendous amount of information was gathered that can be used to develop important recommendations about the future of public transportation in our Nation’s Capital and the surrounding areas.

Read the WMATA Draft Strategic Plan here.

The day-long, interactive session also produced strong support for more collaboration among the area’s local jurisdictions, perhaps through a regional decision-making and implementation authority. The meeting focused on transportation and land-use concerns, which grew out of a series of strategies called Economy Forward developed in recent years at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.  The strategies aim to connect a diverse web of Activity Centers – or mini-downtown locations that include residential, business and retail segments – to convenient transit and transportation hubs.

Authored by the Urban Institute after extensive input from and deliberation with the 42 task force members, the model policy is unique in several ways:

• The policy is one of the first in the nation to address bullying at a citywide level, acknowledging bullying happens beyond the schools and occurs in libraries, recreation centers, the transit system and other public spaces.
• The policy uses a public health framework to effectively target prevention efforts and interventions.
• The policy is evidence-based, using research and best practices that are tailored to fit the realities of the District.

This initiative was a unique engagement for AmericaSpeaks to facilitate, as we are most known for our facilitation of large-scale meetings and processes and are rarely involved so extensively in the formal policy-making process. It was a special opportunity for us to begin our involvement immediately after the signing of the Bullying Prevention Act of 2012, and help OHR and the Task Force see it through to the creation of a formal city-wide model policy in January 2013. The policy will require all city agencies, educational institutions, and grantees that work directly with young people to implement an anti-bullying policy before the end of 2013.

The model policy can be viewed at ohr.dc.gov/bullyingprevention/policy. Read the Washington Post’s coverage here.