In 1996, the Bridgeport Public Education Fund (BPEF) joined a national demonstration project led by Public Agenda and the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL) to explore possibilities for public dialogue about education reform among diverse stakeholders.

Our report, Transforming Public Life: A Decade Of Citizen Engagement In Bridgeport, Ct., tells the story of how this project led to a culture of engagement that has become embedded in the life of the community.

The demonstration project soon joined with a statewide engagement initiative called the Connecticut Community Conversations Project to significantly broaden and deepen the scope of that initial effort.

Formally launched in 1997, the Connecticut Community Conversations Project was a joint effort on the part of the Connecticut-based William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund, Public Agenda, IEL and the Connecticut League of Women Voters. Adopting the engagement model originally designed and developed through the Public Agenda/IEL national project, the Connecticut Community Conversations Project has since spread to over eighty towns and cities across the state. Thousands of parents, education professionals, students, local policy and business leaders, seniors and others have taken part in public dialogue on the purposes of education, closing achievement gaps, ensuring school safety, promoting school readiness, preventing bullying and many other youth-and-education topics.

While the Connecticut Community Conversations Project has been an important state-wide initiative, Bridgeport has distinguished itself in terms of both the quantity of Community Conversations (numbering roughly 40 so far) and in how the very fabric of public decision-making has evolved.

Click here to download the report, Transforming Public Life: A Decade Of Citizen Engagement In Bridgeport, Ct., and learn more about the impact of public engagement on this city.

In the spring of 2004, the Nebraska State Board of Education was looking for a way to allow a cross-section of residents to weigh in on the recommendations they had developed and laid out in a document called Equitable Opportunities For an Essential Education For All Students-Recommendations for Nebraska Public School Districts. Although the state board was looking to move ahead with its ideas, they knew from previous experience with public engagement how valuable and important involving citizens directly in the policy development process could prove to their efforts. In 1996, Public Agenda had helped the state board engage hundreds of Nebraskans on the then contentious question of statewide standards. Parents, students, educators and community members participated in Choicework discussion forums where they wrestled with various approaches to the standards issue. Building off the results of these discussions, the state board was able to adopt new statewide guidelines--confident that the perspectives and values of a large number of residents had been heard and reflected in their efforts.

So, with their past success in mind, the state board again asked Public Agenda to help design and implement a public engagement process--this time to address the issue of an "essential education" for all students. Toward that end Public Agenda conducted focus groups and helped selected districts facilitate discussion forums with more than 370 parents, students, educators (teachers, principals and superintendents) and members of the general public that all told, represented roughly 25 districts. In addition, we trained local organizers, moderators, and recorders in each of the districts where forums took place.

The state board learned people have an expansive vision of the educational opportunities that should be available to all students, and furthermore, that their views were generally consistent with the state board's thinking. The focus groups and discussion forums generated commentary on where Nebraskans felt the gaps were in the existing essential educational opportunities, as well as any cautions or concerns of which they wanted the state board to be aware. Perhaps most gratifying for the state board itself, participants felt that it was very appropriate indeed for the state board to take a leadership role in defining an "essential education" and setting policies in motion that would support the concept.

The relationship between communities and the police is often fraught with mutual distrust and skepticism. Our aim in this project was to explore possibilities for dialogue between average citizens and police officers on a variety of issues of mutual concern. We wanted to find out whether an honest and productive exchange of views among such participants was possible and if so, what kinds of discussions would develop, and toward what practical ends could they be applied? Could dialogue between community members and police increase public safety, promote healthier neighborhoods or alleviate tensions between the police and residents?

With support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the New York Community Trust, Public Agenda conducted fieldwork in New Haven, Connecticut; San Antonio, Texas; and New York City during the latter half of 2004. Across the three sites, we interviewed numerous law enforcement officials, from patrol officers to upper brass, and held 12 focus groups with various kinds of residents. In addition, we developed four new Choicework guides (Preventing Crime, Promoting Public Safety; Improving Police-Community Relations; Ensuring School Safety and Preventing Terrorism and Protecting Civil Liberties) that were used to structure five dialogue sessions held across the three sites.

No matter in what capacity they serve, for most officials, "community forums" with the general public are often unproductive, unpleasant affairs; more gripe sessions than true problem-solving opportunities. In this project, we experimented with ways of organizing such dialogues that would avoid these problems and result in a constructive exchange of views leading to practical steps and solutions.

These sessions brought together several police officers and anywhere from eight to 30 members of the general public. In New York City for example, a special bi-lingual dialogue was held between members of the Latino immigrant community in Queens, and officers from the Community Affairs Department. We discovered that strong majorities of residents in all three cities wanted more contact and dialogue with the police. For their part, the police tended to be more divided on the issue--some saw developing their relationship with the community as integral to doing their job well, others were much more ambivalent about community involvement.

Yet whatever the starting point of participants, the pilot dialogues involving "regular" people and the police turned out to be highly civil, productive affairs that often led toward actionable results. Based on our experiences in this initiative, we believe that police-community dialogue offers a powerful tool to improve the relationship between communities and the police, as well as offering a complement to more traditional community policing strategies.

Many New Jerseyans have long been dissatisfied with the structure of their tax system--a system which relies very heavily on local property taxes. The result is a distribution of the tax burden among individuals and jurisdictions that is widely believed to be unfair and inequitable. Many citizens, business leaders, and current and former public officials shared a frustration with the inability of elected officials--indeed, of the political system itself-to resolve this longstanding issue. In 2003, a New Jersey based grass-roots organization called Coalition for the Public Good turned to Public Agenda for help in creating a different kind of forum in which residents from across the state could engage complex questions of tax reform and demonstrate that reasonable solutions to the current gridlock are possible.

Specifically, Public Agenda helped the Coalition for the Public Good to organize and conduct a major statewide "Citizen's Tax Assembly," a two-day event held in the capitol building in Trenton in September 2003. The New Jersey Citizens' Tax Assembly brought together close to 100 diverse "delegates" from every county in the state to engage one another in a dialogue on possible approaches to tax reform.

Public Agenda created print and video Choicework discussion starter materials for the two-day assembly, and trained moderators and recorders who facilitated small discussion groups throughout the assembly--engaging participants in the detailed analysis and negotiations concluding in a set of concerns, values, priorities and recommendations.

The Coalition for the Public Good produced a report on the assembly and took their recommendations directly to the New Jersey Legislature in a set of special hearings. In June 2004, the coalition held an additional statewide follow-up assembly, in which the same delegates reassembled to continue refining their recommendations and to tackle the issues in more detail. More recently, in October 2004, the group organized four regional tax forums (in Cherry Hill, New Brunswick, Jersey City and Morristown), each with its own set of delegates, in order to expand the number of citizens involved in the process of deliberation. Currently, the coalition is working to influence the findings of a new task force recently created by the state legislature to consider holding a property tax constitutional convention.

Clearly, the citizens of New Jersey are willing and able to partner with the state's leaders and elected officials and take action on this complex and contentious issue.

Download the Coalition for the Public Good's report here.

Public engagement--in contrast to traditional school communications--was new to the superintendent and school board in San Jose, California in the 1990s, but they wanted to try it as a way to inform school policy and open up communications with the district's highly diverse community. Now, almost a decade later, public engagement is an established mode for communications and collaboration within the district and an integral part of its planning process.

The district started in a small way, asking Public Agenda to conduct focus groups with Anglo parents, bilingual Hispanic parents, Spanish-only Hispanic parents, students of various backgrounds, and teachers on the topics of student achievement, diversity, and equity. One district official called the findings "an eye-opening experience" because parents of all backgrounds, along with students themselves, called for high expectations for student achievement. Largely in response, the school board raised its graduation requirements.

The district then moved on to a broad-based community conversation about "Standards and Expectations for Our Students" with Public Agenda assisting by training conversation organizers and moderators, and by developing discussion materials. Although the district initiated and sponsored the forum, a committee that included parents, members of the clergy, employers and others took over the planning and operations. The forum, held at a downtown church, drew about 140 participants; some discussions were conducted in Spanish with translated materials and a bilingual moderator and recorder.

Several themes emerged: the need for higher expectations for all students; concern about inadequate parental involvement; and the need to address communication gaps between school and home, including a lack of clarity about district standards already in place. A reporter from the San Jose Mercury News captured the process in a positive article that appeared on the front page of the next day's metro section.

The result? The district developed an action plan to increase parental involvement, began regularly surveying students and parents, and started holding neighborhood conversations on standards policies and other school issues. It created a department specifically for public engagement programs, which includes the new annual district survey and report cards, as well as ongoing forum work. The National School Public Relations Association awarded the district a top award for its public engagement model. To this day, focus groups, surveys and community conversations remain an integral part of the district's work.

In the mid 1990's research commissioned by the Graustein Memorial Fund in Connecticut and conducted by Public Agenda revealed significant gaps between the general public, community leaders and educators concerning the problems facing Connecticut's schools. In response, the Fund decided to support a process that would, according to its Executive Director David Nee, "change the conversation about education in Connecticut." This meant real dialogue between educators and the public, not finger-pointing or traditional, formal public hearings. In 1997, Public Agenda and the Institute for Educational Leadership were asked to help design and implement a statewide public engagement initiative in collaboration with the state's League of Women Voters, which ultimately became known as the Connecticut Community Conversations Project.

To kick off the project, hundreds of organizations--school districts, parent groups, community-based organizations, etc.--were invited to participate. Initially, eight local sponsors were chosen, covering 17 towns. By design, they were to work as a network to build statewide capacity for civic dialogues on the range of issues facing Connecticut's schools. Each site received a modest stipend and technical assistance from Public Agenda.

Each site began by holding community conversations on an education topic selected from Public Agenda's menu of prepared materials and then followed up according to their initial results. While Public Agenda provided the first rounds of training and support for the early rounds of the Connecticut Community Conversations project, eventually Graustein decided to bring the capacity to train in-state, and Public Agenda conducted "train-the-trainer" sessions with League staff, who have managed the state's training needs ever since.

Since the initial conversations in the eight pilot sites, over 70 cities and towns across the state have participated and the initiative continues to grow. Often, the conversations have led to specific action, as in Stonington where several discussions on the lack of quality child-care centers let to the town reopening several day care centers. In Putnam, school administrators discovered that residents did not feel comfortable coming into the school and responded by opening the new school auditorium for community events, holding a weekly free movie night, and establishing a corps of high-school volunteers to teach basic computer skills to town residents. And some towns, like Bridgeport and Norwalk, have held dozens of community dialogues, creating an ongoing mechanism for connecting the public and the public's schools on a range of issues.