The movement to engage citizens more fully in public life has grown substantially over the past decade, and the new Center for Advances in Public Engagement (CAPE) will be at the forefront of efforts to research, develop and disseminate new insights and best practices that build the field's capacity.

CAPE aims to take a leading role in a field dedicated to creating new and better ways for citizens to confront pressing public problems. CAPE is housed within Public Agenda, a nonpartisan, nonprofit opinion research and public engagement organization founded in 1975 by social scientist and author Dan Yankelovich and former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.

For nearly three decades, Public Agenda has been working in communities to help citizens understand complex problems and create momentum for change by building common ground, managing differences and creating new partnerships. Even as Public Agenda continues its hands-on public engagement work, the new Center will work to serve the field by advancing three distinct but interrelated strands of work:

• The Public Engagement Research Project will conduct and disseminate studies that clarify the dynamics and impacts of specific public engagement practices. Among the questions it will explore are: What are the short-and-long term impacts of public deliberation on citizens, communities, leadership and public policies? What are the impacts of framing public issues for deliberation in contrast to framing them for purposes of persuasionand what are the democratic implications of those differences for the media, political and civic leadership and civic participation? Why do deliberative democratic habits and practices take root in some communities more than others? And how can deliberation practices best go to scale, and be applied beyond the level of individual communities?

• The Digital Engagement Project will experiment with and explore new internet-based tools and their application to engaging citizens in public deliberation and problem-solving. Can the internet only be used to link together like-minded people, or are there effective ways to produce greater boundary-crossing online, bringing diverse citizens together to better understand their differences? Can blogging contribute to deliberative public engagement, or only to partisan electoral or interest group politics? Is deliberation feasible within online communities?
• The Theory-Building Project will promote greater interplay between researchers and practitioners to improve the fields understanding of how public deliberation works and how it can work better. How does the public come to judgment? How does public deliberation relate to political and social change?

The deliberative democracy/public engagement movement is really exploding right now, with scores of new practical initiatives underway, as well as a growing number of academic studies, and an increasing number of groups forming and getting involved, said Will Friedman, Public Agenda executive vice president and director of the new Center. While all of the activity generated from these trends is fantastic, it's important that there be ways to really get a handle on what strategies and practices work, and which approaches tend to keep us in the same ruts. For practitioners in the field as well as communities that are considering devoting time and resources to these kinds of efforts, there is a great need to understand public engagement at a deeper level. That's what CAPE is designed to do.

Major support for the Center to date is being provided by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The Center is also engaged in research collaborations with the Kettering Foundation, and discussions are underway with several other foundations to advance specific lines of inquiry and capacities to promote greater effectiveness within the civic engagement/deliberative democracy field.

For more information on CAPE and Public Agendas public engagement work, contact Alison Kadlec, CAPEs associate director, at 212-686-6610 x 40 or akadlec@publicagenda.org. Also, visit the public engagement section of our website at http://publicagenda.org/public-engagers/cape.