On the Ground Lessons from Engaged Cities

The resulting findings come from our analysis of the workshop takeaways and the individual case studies. We hope they will provide valuable insight into the concrete ideas and applicable tools that these innovative cities are using, and that this report can help inform local work by civil society and organizations, academia, city staff, grassroots movements, and philanthropy and the private sector seeking to deepen civic engagement.

With the international scope of our sample, this research can think more creatively about the challenges and opportunities that cities face in building more innovative civic engagement. While the governing structures and contexts are different, these case studies still offer useful comparisons and contrasts, and can spark new ideas for communities on any continent. For example, while trust in government in Finland is much higher than the United States,¹ both countries can still learn from how the other works to build collaborative governing with their constituents. After all, if cities are the new laboratories of democracy, it will be increasingly important to share lab notes.

Based on this research, we identified six challenges that every city should consider when applying new models of collaborative government:

• Balance long-term versus short-term engagement
• Leverage multi-sector engagement
• Build new infrastructure
• Ensure diversity and equity
• Include intergenerational perspectives
• Overcome obstacles and manage expectations

No one civic engagement project, no matter how perfectly designed or well-funded, can realistically expect to address all six of these challenges. However, keeping them in mind can help better inform new strategies throughout the design and implementation process. Informed by these findings, we also have included five recommendations for cities implementing collaborative governance models and areas for future research.

Politics, at all levels, can be a long, slow, and frustrating process. Even within city government, feedback as simple as updating the speed limit on a neighborhood street can take years to implement. Obstacles like the political dynamics between the city executives and city council, layers of local bureaucracy, limited budgets, changes in administration, or preemption conflicts between local and state government² can all slow down small changes that seem easy to implement.³

This reality of the political process can be at odds with the passion and energy that usually motivates residents to become engaged in the first place. People understand that political change is not delivered instantly. But even when grassroots motivation survives the frustrating timeline of politics, the duration and procedural complexity can mean that those who typically stay involved are residents privileged with time, financial resources, schedule flexibility, relationships within government, and higher education.

Therefore, encouraging inclusive, longer-term engagement also requires building tangible wins into the process that show progress. To use Sherry Arnstein’s classic 1969 “ladder of citizen participation” theory,⁴ these tools often fall in the categories of informing the public; consulting citizens through tools like surveys or neighborhood meetings; or granting individual, carefully-selected citizens limited-power advisory roles on committees. Tactics can include announcing resolutions, hosting listening sessions, or other concrete ways to respond to community complaints. These practices offer valuable recognition and progress to residents, and are especially helpful for collecting residents’ localized knowledge and expertise that can later inform important governing decisions.

However, as Arnstein notes, short-term opportunities based on informing, consultation, and placation practices like those above can also be considered tokenism or bureaucratic dismissal when not developed any further. Therefore, efforts to include tangible wins and short-term outcomes cannot remain the end goal of engagement.

As Arnstein argues with her ladder theory, true civic power comes with models that build partnership between citizens and bureaucrats with decision-making responsibilities, or delegating citizens to a majority on committees. Though these models, of course, take more time to implement.

Finding the correct balance, then, between short-term wins and long-term engagement is vital for developing an infrastructure of inclusive participation and civic power. Within the Cities of Service sample, there are innovative examples of how to achieve this balance.

Case Study: Murcia, Spain

In 2015, the southern Spanish town of Murcia was in a difficult situation: Citizens were experiencing a low quality of life because of the town's blight, physical deterioration, and a lack of playgrounds and green spaces. As a result, Murcia was also missing a shared identity among neighbors, and, over time, the decreased liveability meant a notable increase in families and middle-class citizens moving away to the suburbs. Murcia citizens recognized these problems, but they did not have ways to partner with the city to problem-solve, and the city staff felt demotivated to engage citizens.

In response, Mayor José Ballesta introduced the Urban DNA project,⁵ a participatory design-based civic engagement approach to rebuilding the relationship and channels of collaboration between the city and the residents that Murcia’s challenges most directly impacted. Urban DNA included eight “agorae” forums, urban labs, urban games, and online engagement tools for submitting proposals with interactive maps, among other efforts. Urban mapping was another important tool, especially as a means of directly engaging with different demographics. To create these maps, the Urban DNA program built teams of families, elderly citizens, disabled citizens, students, and parents with children who all identified different neighborhood problems and needs. The City then held two weeks of interventions, including painting walls; modifying streets and buildings for better accessibility; adding lighting, drinking fountains, and green spaces; and revitalizing elderly centers and women’s centers. In total, 35,000 ideas and proposals turned into 3,600 interventions, 300 citizen-organized cultural events, and 2,500 surveys collected on satisfaction and impact, which showed that residents felt more engaged, heard, and empowered. Beyond these specific tools, part of the program’s success is due to the years that Murcia City Hall had already spent developing citizen participation initiatives—through stakeholder and facility mapping, territorial diagnosis and vulnerability assessments, and indicators for monitoring and evaluation—before starting the citizen participation phase.⁶ Since its first iteration, the Urban DNA methodology has already been replicated 13 times within the city.

With this approach, Murcia applied a theory officials call “urban acupuncture,” where hundreds of small, targeted interventions combine to make a major impact. Just because the projects were small, however, doesn’t mean that citizen participation had to be superficial. According to Mercedes Hernandez Martinez, the head of the European Programmes Department in the city, “Citizens did not help [simply] identify, define, and refine the problem, they [addressed the problem] themselves.” Even with the “proposal of solutions, the municipality merely assisted and reallocated resources, interacting with residents and establish[ing] lasting, fruitful relationship with a common goal.”⁷ Therefore, Urban DNA allowed Murcia to address a long-term, existential issue like quality of life through small, accessible projects that let citizens engage over concrete, meaningful wins. The Urban DNA program continues today in three main neighborhoods, acting as a uniting framework for continued, small-scale engagement.

Case Study: Flint, Mich.

After the auto industry left Flint, the city’s economy disintegrated. The population decreased by 50 percent since the 1960s,⁸ and one-third of all properties became vacant. Arson, vandalism, and sanitation problems then increased. As a result, the city faced estimated demolition costs of $71.88 million. Yet Flint lacked the budget and support staff necessary to tackle its monumental blight challenges. Although the City of Flint had previously adopted initial frameworks for blight elimination—conducting neighborhood inventories where resident groups gathered blight data—they were short on funding. And as properties around the city continued to deteriorate, so did trust in local government. So in 2017, the City tried something new: Working with the Genesee County Landbank, the municipal government launched the Flint Property Portal, an app and website that allowed residents, city staff, and organizations to look up and contribute user-generated information about properties.

The portal accomplished two goals based on short-term civic engagement. First, it helped the city collect previously missing data on the status of all 56,000 properties across Flint.⁹ Second, the portal helped open new channels of communication between residents and the City of Flint, with over 120,000 messages sent through the portal. The City was then able to leverage these short-term benefits into longer-term engagement and positive change for Flint. For example, the reliable geographic data from the portal allowed Flint to implement more strategic blight elimination, as well as to receive funding from outside agencies. The City, in partnership with the Genesee County Landbank, received more than $60 million of blight elimination grants from the U.S. Treasury Hardest Hit Fund.

Thanks to the portal, Flint is now making better, resident-informed decisions, and has created a volunteer infrastructure for future engagement. Residents have continued to use the portal to keep data up-to-date and to help develop community volunteer projects. They’ve since helped maintain and care for 690 vacant lots. Ultimately, residents also noted a morale boost for themselves and their neighbors, and reported a sense of pride in helping take care of their communities.

As these two cities show, using a framework of a long-term goal can help unite small, short-term projects to make meaningful and visible change, even if it is just incremental. Particularly in Murcia, breaking down a larger goal with the “urban acupuncture” theory carries the dual advantage of making change more feasible and effective for city hall and making those opportunities more accessible for residents. An entirely government-led plan to address those challenges—one that most likely would feel abstract and disconnected from everyday residents—would not only have taken extreme staff capacity, but it would have also led to frustration and disengagement with residents, who wouldn’t necessarily have seen their feedback leading to any clear outcomes.

While not all residents may have the time, expertise, or resources to participate in a multi-year deliberative process, both the Murcia and Flint models show two very different approaches for meaningful, come-as-you’re-able engagement. For Murcia, residents could participate in all forums, urban mapping, online tools, or interventions as they could. In Flint, residents could submit data on blight as they saw it, without having to commit too much time or additional transportation. Residents in either city who had more capacity could engage in later cleanup events, but more resource-limited residents could also participate to the degree they were able within an accessible scale.

Finally, for residents in both cities, submitting the blight data or participating in events and interventions created an instantly tangible and gratifying win. Yet, these early wins were made more meaningful because the city government followed up on the proposed plan towards long-term change.

In addition to residents, city staff, and elected officials, structural change and supported movements for civic engagement cannot happen without participation and buy-in from third parties. Taking a holistic and multi-sector approach that includes other community entities, from local businesses to philanthropy to civic organizations, can help provide a collaborative government effort with additional capacity and expertise that citizens or city staff may not otherwise be able to contribute.

These partnerships can take place externally or internally to municipal governments.

First, external partnerships can be helpful because legally and practically, municipal governments cannot provide all the expertise, funding, or strategic support necessary for ambitious engagement models.¹⁰ In these cases, as Xavier de Souza Briggs explains, “civic intermediaries compensate in specific ways for a lack of civic capacity because of what government, business, or civil society organizations are not able, or not trusted, to do, and also—along a more temporal dimension—for process breakdowns, such as impasse, polarization, and avoidance, that thwart collective problem solving.”¹¹ Similarly, businesses and philanthropies are uniquely positioned to provide game-changing financial support to help get projects off the ground or to help institutionalize new models.¹² Additionally, organizing groups can reach out to and motivate residents who otherwise may not participate.

Second, internal partnerships that incorporate individuals with multisector backgrounds and skillsets can also make monumental improvements to city government processes. Through structured projects like fellowships ¹³or crowdsourcing models, or by simply opening up the hiring process to nontraditional backgrounds, innovation teams can take an interdisciplinary approach to a range of procedural collaborative government steps, including “data, design, research, and project management.” By combining different skills and expertise, municipal governments can better solve “some of the highest-level and most complicated city priorities, such as lowering the homicide rate, devising a climate action plan, or addressing persistence poverty.” As a formal model, these innovation teams have spread throughout the country, and could be found in 66 cities as of 2016.¹⁴

Case Study: San Francisco, Calif.

Like many cities internationally, San Francisco faces challenging issues like homelessness, lack of affordable housing, and climate change—problems that disproportionately affect marginalized communities. And like many other major cities in California, San Francisco also hosts a high concentration of tech companies and startups, and a resulting culture of innovation and technology.

The City of San Francisco saw the innovation and skill housed in these companies as an untapped resource. They had previously tried one-off civic engagement opportunities like hackathons, but the output didn’t meet the city’s needs and volunteers were left feeling frustrated. However, the City of San Francisco had neither the capacity nor the infrastructure to support a more formal network of outside volunteers. Similarly, many companies who wished to provide pro-bono services did not know how to engage with the City—a special challenge because the rise in tech companies in San Francisco has been a major contributor to gentrification, homelessness, and unaffordable housing. In response, the Office of Civic Innovation established the Civic Bridge program in 2015 as a way to constructively and concretely bring together the private sector’s skills with local government’s expertise to address these local problems.

Through the Civic Bridge program, corporate volunteer teams contribute 20 percent of their time for 16 weeks to help solve public problems by reimagining and updating the logistics of public service delivery, such as improving the application process for affordable housing, or coordinating a referral system across legal aid organizations to provide legal counsel for all tenants facing eviction. By applying corporate strategies like design-thinking to the public sector, corporate volunteers can apply skills uncommon in the public sector. Combining these skills with city staff’s policy expertise, the program aims to find practical solutions to some of the city’s most pressing social problems.¹⁵

The key to the program’s success is its infrastructure within city government. Before moving forward with a project, Civic Bridge first invests substantial staff time and resources to appropriately scope out a project. This process alone can take roughly eight to 16 weeks, meaning that the program allots as much time to the internal scoping process as they do to having corporate volunteers work directly on the problem.

Civic Bridge also applies a strict standard in choosing and designing the project.

To identify a potential project topic, the program looks for a clear challenge or problem to solve, potential for impact on the lives of residents, and alignment with the City’s and mayor’s policy priorities.

Then, when designing the project, the Office of Innovation considers leadership, scale, and resources: First, a successful project requires clear procedural owners, and leadership from within the relevant city department. During the implementation stage, pro-bono volunteers work closely with city staff—from the Office of Innovation, as well as from the related department —who supervise the volunteers and closely manage the project. Having this buy-in ensures that volunteers have the necessary support to carry out the project, as well as to help address any obstacles that come up during the program. Second, the potential project must have a feasible and appropriate scale. Third, the related department must also have the resources necessary to actually implement the volunteers’ ideas.¹⁶

By simultaneously engaging stakeholders’ expertise, harnessing the private sector’s unique skill sets, and reinforcing the infrastructure of well-defined city initiatives, the Civic Bridge project tapped into a powerful multi-sector collaboration. In San Francisco, volunteers have clocked more than 24,000 volunteer hours, and the process has engaged 450 city staff from 25 city departments in about 49 projects, which received an estimated $3.9 million in pro-bono work.

Case Study: London, U.K.

As London has grown, the population increase has put new pressure on the city’s environment, infrastructure, housing, and jobs. Gentrification has become a particularly pressing problem, with minority communities affected most negatively, and many residents feeling like their communities are changing without their having a meaningful say in the process.

Recognizing this problem—and that strategic regeneration projects can take years have an impact—the Greater London Authority sought out an inclusive approach to managing London’s growth. The authority established Crowdfund London to create meaningful community engagement around planning decisions, pulling from different sectors to fully harness Londoners’ creativity.¹⁷ With a local startup, Spacehive, the City established a crowdfunding site for citizens to propose and contribute to community improvement projects. As projects move forward, the City assists in designing, planning, and building relationships, and offers financial support of up to £50,000 per project. Since establishing Crowdfund London, the City has contributed a total of £2.1 million to 118 successful campaigns, and raised £4.8 million in funding.¹⁸

Previously, the City of London tried to incorporate citizen consultation on development proposals, but those efforts failed to make lasting impacts within communities. The success of Crowdfund London, in comparison to previous citizen consultation initiatives, can be attributed in part to the multisector collaboration inherent in the project design.

First, the project required multiple levels of government support. Crowdfund London originated in the Mayor’s office and with the Regeneration Team, which focuses on “encouraging and shaping growth in London’s town centres, economic centres and high streets.”¹⁹ From this position, the project received a fund of £4 million through the London Economic Action Partnership (LEAP), a local enterprise partnership that connects the business community with the London Mayoralty.²⁰ Second, through the City’s private-sector collaboration with Spacehive, the company provided the necessary technological skills and a support network—comprised of partner councils, companies, foundations, and teams of experts—to help citizens execute their ideas. Finally, the City collaborates with the citizens themselves, who contributed the community voices, ideas, funding, and buy-in necessary for civic engagement success.

Ultimately, this model allows the City to extend their resources by constructively collaborating with civic society groups, local residents and trade associations, business improvement districts, social enterprises, and local charities. In doing so, London can not only effectively address issues of growth and neighborhood change, but also do so with the many stakeholders affected.

In both of these examples, collaboration with stakeholders beyond the traditional government-resident relationship brings in new perspectives, skills, resources, funding, and legitimacy that can help ambitious civic engagement projects achieve their goals more efficiently and more inclusively. Doing so means that city governments must also clearly and publicly communicate their limitations. Admitting those limitations may be difficult, but it can help identify opportunities for collaboration that experts or other stakeholders outside of government may not have otherwise seen.

While institutionalizing these kinds of teams as formal staff is ideal, it may not always be possible given hiring policies or budget limitations. For private-sector experts, it can also be difficult to recruit them away from high-paying corporate jobs, or roles with more flexibility than exist in a municipal system. A hybrid system like San Francisco’s can help find a compromise structure, one that doesn’t require private-sector experts to leave their jobs and don’t necessitate new hires.

One important downside to this model, though, can be the short tenure or high turnover of volunteers. If projects are designed without this transfer in mind, technology that is straightforward for someone with corporate skills may become less manageable once their fellowship is over, or when the system has an unexpected bug in the code. It’s also important that new experts are brought in within a structured framework that continues to build upon existing projects in a sustainable way, rather than have each cohort begin an entirely new project. In San Francisco, the Office of Innovation’s early stages of project scoping are imperative to making sure that projects can actually get accomplished within a 16 week timeline.

However, just because a program is time-limited doesn’t mean that the partnership ends at the same time. San Francisco found that volunteers stayed engaged with their government team even after their 16 week fellowship ended, partially because participating gave them a better understanding of the city government process and they were encouraged by seeing how their contributions were affecting real change.

High turnover doesn’t just apply to the volunteers, though; city staff also experience high rates of turnover. Local bureaucracy is difficult work, and projects like Civic Bridge require high degrees of investment from city officials. For these programs to succeed, staff have to welcome working with outside volunteers, as well as being willing to collaborate precisely with other city agencies. It also requires a willingness on behalf of city employees to learn new skills, such as design thinking.

In the case of Crowdfund London, one benefit to its model is its institutionalization within the municipal government and community with an outside, organized private-sector partner institution, rather than individual volunteers. However, as part of the mayor’s office, the project is also more prone to instability during administration changes. Continuing the program or not will be entirely at the next mayor’s discretion when they come into office. Of course, administration changes can also be positive: While Crowdfund London began under the previous mayor, current mayor Sadiq Khan has grown the program and increased its budget. But ultimately, administration changes at the local level can influence a program’s viability. Additionally, because the Greater London Authority is comprised of many different cities, buy-in from local authorities is crucial for genuine, sustained engagement to continue.

To be successful, civic engagement at all levels has to transcend the one-off method of “thin” engagement—a common pitfall with traditional one-off volunteer or voter outreach, for example.²¹ And doing so requires ensuring that those processes have a corresponding infrastructure of procedural support. Meaningful engagement, especially the form that includes traditionally excluded voices, can only happen when the process has an infrastructure of support from beginning to end.²² This may mean opening new city offices, assigning full-time staff to the project, or increasing project funding.

Building the appropriate infrastructure to realize a new model of governing helps the project function smoothly. It also demonstrates to residents that the project is a priority for the city, one that’s a good use of time and energy and, therefore, worth engaging with. If constituents suspect that a new civic engagement endeavor is more superficial than structural, it will diminish their interest in participating, their trust in government, and morale.

Case Study: Bologna, Italy

In 2011, residents of Bologna decided they wanted to repaint a community bench. However, the Bologna bureaucracy prohibited residents from operating in public spaces, so citizens had to get approval from five different offices for one small beautification project. These layers of distance between residents and government were indicative of larger problems in the democratic partnership: Bologna also saw a serious decrease in voter participation at the regional level. In the 2014 elections, only 37.71 percent of voters went to the polls in comparison to 68 percent during previous elections. While this pattern reflected an overall European trend of increased apathy towards civic engagement and decreased trust in institutions, it was especially noteworthy in a city with Bologna’s history of wartime resistance and political engagement. As the bench example shows, however, the problem was not that citizens were apathetic. Instead, the city’s bureaucracy was stifling their desires to participate.

The City of Bologna, in response, created an entire new civic engagement infrastructure that would open up the government process and lower the barriers to participation, though these infrastructure changes didn’t happen all at once. The efforts began in 2010 with the Incredibol! program, a competition for startups in creative and cultural industries. But after residents became frustrated with the city bureaucracy in 2011, the City took time to try and find new solutions that would encourage civic participation, not discourage it. In 2014, a new regulation passed creating “public collaboration regulation pacts” focused on taking care of urban common areas, as well as a website to host them. In 2015, the government redivided the city into districts with their own councils and presidents. Two years later, through a partnership with the University of Bologna, the City established a six-person Office of Civic Imagination, which supports one “lab” per district to build connections between government and citizens. In 2017, that same year, the City implemented participatory budgeting, a program also supported by the Office of Civic Imagination. This partnership between the City and University of Bologna originated as the Urban Center, founded in 2005, but in 2018, it became the Urban Innovation Foundation.

In creating this new infrastructure, Bologna also kept in mind traditionally excluded populations, like refugees and underage youth, something especially important in a town with a large student and migrant population, and in a country where residents must live in Italy for 10 years before they qualify for the right to vote. For example, voting in Bologna’s participatory budgeting process is open to anyone over 16 years old who lives, works, or goes to school in Bologna, enabling much more participation than traditional municipal elections.

The city’s efforts have also required serious funding: Winners of the Incredibol! competition can receive up to €10,000 ($11,300 USD) each. Bologna committed approximately €150,000 ($170,000) for the collaboration pact budget. And the City sets aside a million euros ($1.13 million) for participatory budgeting projects.

Undoubtedly, Bologna's project was a massive undertaking, and it was also very successful: It saw an increase in voter turnout, 508 collaboration pacts, 15,000 square meters of city walls cleaned and 110 city benches renovated, the establishment of new businesses and community projects, and 27 submitted participatory budgeting proposals. Overall, by 2018, of the 388,000 people in Bologna,²³ 14,400 people voted in participatory budgeting projects and 1,700 citizens participated in district labs meetings. In 2017, one woman attending the opening of a retrospective exhibition said, “I am a simple citizen and I wish to thank you because you involved me. You understood that citizens want both bread and roses, that they want to be involved, so I thank you.”

Case Study: Santiago de Cali, Colombia

After the civil war in Colombia ended, Santiago de Cali still experienced high rates of violence and low levels of trust in communities and with local city staff. The city had one of the highest homicide rates in the world—over 60 per 100,000 people—and neighborhoods still saw small-scale drug trafficking and violent disputes. Often, neighbors did not talk to each other and were afraid of crossing “invisible borders” within the city that existed as legacies of narco-trafficking. These problems were a matter of life or death, but the government had a difficult time intervening.

In response, the City of Cali decided to create a new civic engagement-based infrastructure to rebuild positive relationships within the community, between the community and government, and with public institutions, NGOs, and the private sector. The La Secretaría de Paz y Cultura Ciudadana (Office of Peace and Civic Culture) created community round tables, “Mesas de Cultura Ciudadana para la Paz” (Tables of Civic Culture and Peace), made up of local residents.

With support from the City, these residents then created neighborhood programs within their own communities, addressing problems of “coexistence, public spaces, and democratic participation.”²⁴ The program did not catch on overnight. But within two years, 450 residents across 15 local councils participated in the mesas, representing different religious, cultural, ethnic, social, and artistic groups. Due to the mesas’ work, Cali had implemented over 200 community initiatives by 2018, focusing on short-term projects like cleaning parks, as well as longer-term goals like rebuilding community trust. In one example, 513 volunteers revitalized public spaces near two schools, helping erase the invisible borders of rival gangs in the neighborhood, and cleaning up areas that were previously hubs for drug activity. Moreover, the city saw a dramatic difference in their community: The homicide rate dropped to the lowest level in ten years, and there were 30 percent fewer fights during the city’s annual cultural event.

Creating this new infrastructure took substantial resources from the City. Cali provided physical resources; human resources, including psychologists and social workers; financial resources of a $500 USD stipend per council per year; technical support; and logistical resources, like citizen trainings through the mayor’s office.²⁵ But ultimately, this project completely redesigned the city’s community infrastructure, and offered new opportunities for democratic participation that can be adapted to suit participants’ level of interest, time, and resources.

As these case studies show, building the appropriate infrastructure for innovative civic engagement takes significant and intentionally-allocated resources, including staff time, budget allocations, and physical and logistical capacity. However, massive projects of this scale may not require as much money as an observer might expect. For an annual total of $38,000 in 2018, Cali has created dramatic and meaningful change in cities that desperately needed it through funding the councils.²⁶ Similarly, though the collaboration compacts make up only one part of Bologna’s restructuring efforts, they could also be replicated in cities with limited budgets, as they only required $170,000 per year as of 2018.²⁷

Another key to making projects of this scale feasible is that both cities developed infrastructure in the community and with multisector partners, not just within their own governments. As discussed earlier in this report, this kind of collaboration is key to long-lasting, stable projects, helping build project infrastructure on a more stable foundation of support.

With the proper resources and partnerships, both case studies speak to the power of investing in real institutional and infrastructural change. Though they represent doing so on the largest scale possible, more limited cities could still implement individual portions of the Bologna and Cali models and see a benefit.

When cities introduce new civic engagement opportunities, it’s important that they’re thoughtful about who they’re trying to engage, and careful not to simply recreate structures of inequalities and oppression. In other words, if those who already participate frequently or have wealth and privilege are the only ones participating, it should be a big red flag. Engagement needs to take a broad approach to include multiple types of diversity, including individuals’ background, gender, socioeconomic status, geographic diversity, education, disability status, education level, and previous levels of participation.

Achieving this degree of intersectional diversity in civic innovations requires thinking carefully about all aspects of an engagement model.²⁸ From recruitment to meeting times and locations, to childcare and outreach methods, every choice can inherently build in exclusivity and inaccessibility. For example, residents with caregiving responsibilities or shift work may not be able to attend evening town halls. Low-income residents may not be able to afford the cost of gas to drive across the city for an event. Vulnerable and marginalized groups may feel uncomfortable attending a deliberation session held within the police headquarters. And historically disenfranchised residents may not find out about civic engagement opportunities advertised through traditional channels.

This is especially true with respect to innovations leveraging new tools, technologies, and approaches. As Miguel Gamiño, then chief technology officer for the City of New York, noted at the launch of the Innovation Lab in Brownsville, Brooklyn, “Rapid technological advances hold the potential to transform our cities, driving quality of life improvements for millions of New Yorkers. Our challenge—and responsibility—is to ensure these technologies reach and benefit all New Yorkers, not merely a select few.”²⁹ Even in 2020, not all citizens have equal access to or familiarity with many types of technology, including a consistent internet connection, a smartphone, a computer, or a printer. In the United States, three out 10 homes still don’t have broadband access,³⁰ and as of 2018, over 15 million Americans “in rural and tribal areas still lack access to high-speed broadband.”³¹ Therefore, if participation or communication about these opportunities rely too closely upon these methods, the population participating will be inherently less inclusive.

When properly channeled, the power of civic engagement is that it opens up communication between residents and their governments. But improperly implemented, the wrong kind of civic engagement model can unfortunately block this communication for residents who may need it the most, and with long-term consequences.

Case Study: Austin, Texas

Based on census data, the City of Austin knew that their population was becoming more diverse, with 51.3 percent of the population belonging to a wide range of minority groups. However, the demographics of who participated in local civic engagement efforts was not. Participation in previous surveys, community conversations, town halls, and city council meetings were largely white or Caucasian. According to Chief Service Officer Sly Majid, this problem meant their decision-making processes did not reflect a full picture of Austin communities’ experiences or needs, and that neglecting these populations could have long-term consequences, like food instability or unemployment, as a product of insufficient public services. Ultimately, certain communities were making decisions on behalf of the entire city, and that problem was set to continue as Austin continued to become even more diverse.

The problem city staff identified was that Austin's city government was largely inaccessible to minority groups and did not adequately consider the city’s diversity. Their solution was to create the Conversation Corps, a targeted outreach program that focused on “minority groups, seniors, people with disabilities, people with limited English proficiency, people under financially challenging situations, renters, education, and levels of acculturation.” The Conversation Corps started by recruiting diverse community members to receive facilitation training and guides from Leadership Austin, the Conversation Corp vendor. The half-day training aimed to be as short as possible to decrease the time and transportation resources required to attend, and were initially provided in Spanish and English, though the City is working to include more languages. After training, facilitators held community conversations based on discussion topics identified by public partners, assisted by a facilitator’s guide to help plan discussions. After each conversation, the facilitator summarized the conversation, which is then published online.

In addition to Leadership Austin, the program’s other partners include the Austin Independent Schools District and the Capital Transportation Authority. Together, these partners all contributed $15,000 per year and were responsible for promotions and supporting outreach.

Since 2015, the Conversation Corps has had almost 700 attendees, who participated in over 200 conversations, covering topics like mobility, water, transit, and parking. Beyond English and Spanish, the conversations have also included citizens speaking Tagalog, Farsi, Chinese, and German. Gender representation of participants is almost 50-50, and ages range between 15 and 65+, though the majority of participants are over 65. Attendees’ income also ranged from $10,000 to over $105,000. The conversations were held at around 50 different locations, and the program aimed to hold meetings in comfortable, familiar spaces. Word of mouth promotion was also an important part of recruiting participants who do not typically participate in civic engagement programs.

The feedback collected from these efforts has impacted municipal policy on a range of issues, such as parking rates and transit options, agency budgets, recycling and composting services, use of public parks, and affordability. As a result, the Conversation Corps has become an important part of policymaking infrastructure, one that elected officials and other city staff reach out to. Based on surveys, the City has also found that participants feel more connected to the policymaking process, even when their preferences do not directly translate into policy outcomes.

But despite these measures of success, participation rates by residents of color are still low. In this sense, the City’s outreach efforts are still an ongoing process. The program experimented with holding conversations in different locations, through different venues, and in different times of day, but still see low attendance from communities of color. The City views this challenge as a historical one: The City has previously not prioritized engaging with residents of color, and that history of disconnect will take time, new models, new grassroots partners, and applied feedback to undo.

Case Study: Philadelphia, Pa.

With over 400,000 people living below the poverty line,³² Philadelphia has an incredibly high poverty rate, one of the highest in the country. As a result, the Office of Homelessness Services (OHS) has expanded public services like adding more housing units and providing more daytime services, but the director has also prioritized improved internal systems transformation to be “housing-first, person-centered, trauma-informed, and data-driven.” To shift the services process, the OHS teamed up with the Office of Open Data and Digital Transformation (ODDT) and the Philadelphia Participatory Design Lab, a program within the mayor’s office that uses behavioral economics and human-centered service design to improve public services.³³ Together, the Design Lab and OHS teams worked with city staff, designers, and trauma experts to update the OHS’s three-part homeless prevention and shelter services. In doing so, the teams also included a thorough participation program to include the perspectives of Philadelphia residents who access OHS services, those who refuse services, and staff.

By definition, traditional civic engagement methods like town halls or online surveys often cannot help improve policymaking to better suit residents experiencing homelessness. To collect residents’ perspectives, the team spent two months in the field with residents experiencing homelessness, conducting “1:1 interviews, observing the activities of access points, and shadowing staff.”³⁴ In total, the project involved engaging with 121 different participants and staff, which they used to inform 19 co-design sessions with staff to brainstorm ideas. With those ideas, the team then held design sessions with participants and staff, after which the OHS and Design Lab teams continued to collaborate on the project for several months. Ultimately, the teams implemented their findings through 2019. Thoughtfully conducting this project required a variety of partners, beyond the OHS, ODDT, the mayor’s office, and the Design Lab. It also required the Department of Public Property, the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual Disabilities, as well as the Public Policy Lab in New York City, to include expertise on the issues experienced by these particular residents.

Ultimately, the policy changes aimed to improve the experience of both the residents and the staff. Some were surprisingly simple: For example, residents told OHS and Design Lab staff that they often had spent the last of their money on food before entering the shelter—only to have the shelter require that they dispose of all food before they could be admitted. Many residents found that made an already difficult experience even more dehumanizing.

As these case studies show, key to diversification in civic engagement is recognizing that old civic engagement methods won’t necessarily work. After decades of structural exclusion and inaccessible engagement models, traditional civic engagement models run the risk of exacerbating existing power inequalities, especially in the United States. Both Austin and Philadelphia had to consciously reflect on why their current model didn’t work and redesign their participation processes to overcome the structural obstacles keeping out diverse participation.

In the case of Austin, it’s clear that this process is a constant and on-going one of reflection and analysis. While the City wanted to include groups traditionally excluded from participation, they did so with a very traditional model of accessing government: meetings. By definition, meetings require extra time and transportation resources, even if the meetings are conducted in an accessible and welcoming manner, instead of using a strategy based on meeting citizens where they are. The City has recognized that despite their efforts at diversifying participation, their meetings are still largely majority-attended. Their difficulty, however, reflects another important finding: diversifying participation is not something that will have quick effects. As they noted, it takes time to overcome a history of discrimination and exclusion.

Within a specialized demographic, like people experiencing homelessness, diversification efforts need to be particularly personalized. With vulnerable communities; it will be especially important to ensure their safety during participation. As in this case, that can typically mean meeting citizens where they are, not waiting for them to participate. In Philadelphia, this required spending time shadowing residents and staff at the point of service delivery. Similarly, in the San Francisco-based case study discussed above, redesigning the affordable housing portal also included shadowing and interviewing residents already going through that process to get their input. Human-centered design and design-thinking tactics like those used in these case studies are often more associated with startups and corporate ideation, not civic engagement. However, it’s important to recognize that these techniques still require time, patience, and, potentially, discomfort from the residents, and that participating is, in fact, a form of public service.

Improving diversity in civic engagement and collaborative governance efforts can be difficult and, occasionally, uncomfortable work. Ensuring that that public policy reflects the actual needs of constituents served, though, requires it, and case studies like those in Philadelphia and Austin can provide helpful starting points.

During our workshop, city representatives noted that in beyond traditional measures of diversity like ethnic background, socioeconomic status, and language barriers, intergenerational challenges were another opportunity and obstacle for innovative civic engagement practices.

First, designing engagement models with a generational lens can add another angle to participatory diversity: For example, while older citizens are the most likely to participate, as new civic engagement models become increasingly based around digital platforms, well-meaning outreach methods can further alienate and overlook an often-already isolated population.³⁵

Second, specifically targeting uniquely generational problems to improve policy challenges can also be an effective way of addressing social and democratic health for long-term benefits. Two examples include the Danish Ministry of Taxation, Employment and Economic Affairs’s project to improve youth financial literacy,³⁶ and Seoul’s Generational Sharing Household Service, which pairs older citizens with spare rooms with younger residents looking for housing, who then help the seniors with light chores.³⁷

Case Study: York, U.K.

Loneliness and social isolation had become a widespread, public health problem in York, U.K., especially for older citizens. In 2017, 37 percent of respondents said they felt socially isolated, and 62 percent wanted more contact with family and friends. Citizens experiencing loneliness were twice as likely to die early—rates similar to the risks of smoking and obesity. Because loneliness has also been connected with heart disease, depression, strokes, and cognitive decline, citizens were also accessing public health services more often. In response, City leadership decided to use the community and strategic impact volunteering to provide proactive solutions.

To do so, the City had local citizens act as community researchers to identify causes and solutions for loneliness through outreach, street campaigns, and by talking to over 1,000 citizens and 100 other stakeholders. The volunteers were trained in participatory learning and action methods, and were directly empowered to conduct this research and design and implement their solutions, thanks to project management training and seed funding. One solution proposed and implemented by citizens is opening a GoodGym York branch, a program that pairs younger runners with isolated older citizens who act as “coaches.” To exercise, the younger residents go on weekly runs to visit their coaches, who help motivate the athletes to stick to their exercise plans.³⁸ The project has been an intergenerational success, and brought together many citizens from across the city.

With support from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the three-year “Neighbourhood Approaches to Loneliness” research program focused on two neighborhoods, with residents in those neighborhoods reporting feeling less lonely and more confident, and experiencing improved well-being. Through another community-led project, Local Area Coordination, which assigns citizens as local points of contact in their communities, connected 700 vulnerable people experiencing mental health needs or disabilities to have a connection back to their community in 18 months.

York’s work highlights the potential to address difficult public policy issues through intergenerational connection, community, and policy forged through hyperlocality. With an intergenerational perspective, York could not only identify specific public service needs, but also uncover unique skills that particular demographics of volunteers can contribute to their community. The resulting program found a variety of civic engagement opportunities for residents of different ages and resources, as well as public policy solutions that wove together the challenges facing younger and older residents.

As with other case studies discussed in this report, it’s important to note that York did so by fundamentally changing the structures of governance and designing citizen participation that went beyond one-off, thin engagement. Residents could volunteer to help fill a capacity gap within the government by collecting research and contributing their lived experiences also helped inform better public policy.

Obstacles—from limitations on time to resources to procedural logistics—are abundant in local politics. These can act as deterrents to any stakeholder inside and outside government with a new and innovative collaborative governance idea. Governments are understandably averse to risk-taking for many reasons: budget cuts, the responsibility of spending taxpayer dollars, and the stakes of public policy failure. Even when citizens may support an experiment originally, that optimism may not survive the slow-downs, complications, and challenges that are guaranteed to follow in local politics. Similarly, residents who are initially excited to participate in government may find the process too frustrating. After all, implementing any new policy or change can take many years and multiple frustrating detours.

Therefore, while it’s easy to romanticize or over-promise the value of civic engagement efforts, it’s imperative to manage the expectations of residents, city staff, elected officials, and partner organizations throughout this process. Focusing on realistic expectations instead can help ensure that the relationships between stakeholders established through collaborative governance are built on trust. And open communication can help encourage everyone to persevere through moments of challenge.

Case Study: Mexico City, Mexico

When Mexico City drafted a new constitution, Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera decided to do so democratically. This was a huge project for a city of approximately 8.8 million residents, and for a country with historic low trust in democracy and government. Cocreating the new constitution, then, became an important part of improving the political environment and political agenda in Mexico City. The Federal Congress had only stipulated that the mayor had the exclusive right to draft the Constitution. He decided to do so in a transparent manner: by crowdsourcing the drafting process to regular Mexico City residents.

To make the project feasible, the mayor instructed the local Laboratório para la Ciudad (LabCDMX) to build a website platform to accept citizen proposals, which they did in partnership with Change.org to ensure that the website was accessible to residents with a range of familiarity with constitutional law and politics. To spread the word, outreach included high school volunteers and kiosks placed in public spaces, gamification, and through billboards. Once they accessed the portal, residents could submit their feedback through surveys or by creating online petitions. A drafting committee, made up of 30 “outstanding” citizens, representing academics, activists, artists, constitutional experts, and olympians, would then review the petitions. Called the Working Group, these citizens would bring suggestions to the mayor, who would not veto anything proposed by the petition and Working Group process. Petitions that reached 5,000 signatures were analyzed; 10,000 signatures meant the citizen could present the proposal to three members of the Working Group; and 50,000 signatures allowed the petition author to present to the mayor. The draft was eventually submitted to the constitutional assembly for approval, including 60 elected members and 40 members appointed by the mayor, president, and congress. This final part of the process was less transparent and included less resident input.

After 341 proposals with 400,000 followers, representing 90 percent of the neighborhoods in the city, the resulting document was the “most advanced constitution in Latin America.” The most progressive elements—like marriage equality, rights of indigenous and aboriginal people, pro-choice policies, and marijuana consumption—were supported by resident petitions and the working group members. Ultimately, the majority of the constitution was drafted by the working group, with about a dozen articles proposed directly by residents included in the final constitution. The resident survey responses, which focused on residents’ hopes and fears for Mexico City, also helped guide the working group through the process.

With the Constitución CDMX project, Mexico City created a truly remarkable civic engagement opportunity, both in scale and impact.³⁹ However, Bernardo Rivera Muñozcano, the former LabCDMX Open City Strategy Coordinator, noted that one key element to the entire project was to make sure they did not create false expectations among the citizens. Throughout the entire process, the City made sure to clarify what the potential scope and possibilities were for the new constitution and resident petitions. This caution was especially important because of Mexico City’s difficult political history around the time of the constitution drafting process. First, citizens already felt a disconnect between their expectations and what political institutions delivered. Second, the original constitution was created without any transparency in a highly undemocratic process, which meant that citizens had low expectations and hopes for their city. Managing resident expectations helped the City overcome these earlier mistakes and allowed residents to come together through a more democratic and participatory drafting process.

Case Study: Fort Collins, Colo.

Fort Collins, Colorado created the Budgeting for Outcomes (BFO) project in 2005 because they wanted the city budget to become a source of community and collaboration, rather than a cause of mutual frustration. While the City’s revenues stayed the same, costs of providing public services were increasing. At the same time, residents’ beliefs about the appropriate “price” of government services—or the rate of taxation—remained fixed. In response, the City set high goals: decrease public spending, continue providing high-quality services, and educate the public on the budgeting process for better mutual understanding.

To do so, the City intertwined public engagement and effective budgeting to build a more sustainable community. As a participatory budgeting process, the BFO was built around a two-tier system of engagement. First, the BFO built teams of community member volunteers by reaching out to residents who were already deeply familiar with municipal engagement: boards and commission members, alumni of the City’s nine-week public civic education class, and other volunteers. The program then conducted a targeted public engagement strategy, focusing subgroups around eight subgroups, from the business community to youth to low-income households to Spanish-speaking residents, through presentations, events, a mobile budget booth, and online resources. Through the BFO process, Fort Collins both adapted public service priorities to reflect community needs, but also was able to decrease the price of local government from 6.5 cents to 5.6 cents of every dollar earned.⁴⁰ Ultimately, they saw a 6 percent overall increase in satisfaction rating with the quality of services provided by the local government.

Throughout this process, it was important for Fort Collins to manage expectations from both ends of the participatory process: Residents had to manage their expectations for what public services the City could deliver on their limited budget, and local officials had to make sure they were meeting resident needs effectively, both in the cost of public services and the exact services they prioritized. For example, during the BFO process, some traditionally disenfranchised groups felt that input wouldn’t actually be incorporated, or that findings wouldn’t be accurately reported. Being able to translate these concerns into direct wins—increasing public transportation availability to 365 days a year⁴¹ and increasing human services spending—helped overcome this obstacle in trust and create more positive expectations. As a result of the BFO, the Fort Collins community has a new, constructive expectation of engagement around difficult decisions inherent to the budget, and the City has seen continued appetite for engagement from residents and organizations alike.

If the Mexico City case illustrates a case of civic engagement innovation to the extreme, Fort Collins’s approach shows how this can happen at a more standard scale of participation over an extended period of time. Both cases, however, have much in common.

First, they illustrate how good civic engagement models often include hands-on civic education that helps residents better understand the functional process of government. As a result, residents will be better prepared to follow municipal policymaking in the future and identify effective levers of power in the future. Long term, incorporating civic education also helps manage residents’ future expectations for their government because they have had a closer look at the politics, bureaucracy, timelines, and procedures behind local decisions.

Second, these case studies also point to the importance of not overpromising. While residents at the beginning of an engagement process may have limited knowledge of government, they still can sense when engagement efforts are disingenuous, unrealistic, or misleading. As these cases show, there are still ways to keep both residents and city staff motivated through obstacles and provide meaningful opportunities for power, while not damaging the trust between government and residents by over-promising.