Enrollment is at an all-time high. Agreements in place allow credits to transfer to most four-year colleges in the area. The debate team continues its march to national dominance. The college is expanding its space for technical education in a renovated facility. By most measures, the Kansas City Kansas Community College (KCKCC) is doing well. So why embark on an extensive listening project now?

“We believe that the best way to meet the needs of our community is to talk with the people who are counting on us,” Ray Daniels said. Daniels is the retired superintendent of the Kansas City, Kan., Public Schools and a trustee at the college. “We felt a deep curiosity about how people perceived the college and what role they want us to play in the future.”</

The trustees hired Consensus, a nonprofit with a 25-year history of engaging citizens and stakeholder in important issues. Consensus worked with a team of three trustees — Daniels, Cathy Breidenthal and Wendell Maddox — as well as Leota Marks from the college, to design a series of 15 focus groups.

The team identified the stakeholder groups they wanted to include and, in many cases, the individuals they felt should be invited. Four focus groups included current and former KCKCC students, one was with Sumner Academy students; others were with stakeholder groups like unions, neighborhoods, large and small employers, school counselors, nonprofits, and residents of Leavenworth, among others.

“We’re finding a strong feeling of goodwill for the college,” Jennifer Wilding said. Wilding is director of Consensus. “I had no idea what kind of reception I would get when I started inviting people to participate in these focus groups, and I’ve been very pleased.”

Cathy Breidenthal is chair of the board committee overseeing the project. She said, “There is already a buzz in the community about the project. I have had participants from several of the groups come up to me to express their appreciation for the opportunity to contribute and say how impressed they were with the process.”

The college and its trustees will use the results of the listening project to revise the college’s strategic plan and identify actions it can take to improve the college and its work in the community. This spring, Consensus will work with the entire board of trustees to analyze the focus group results and agree upon their priorities for action.

“We didn’t walk into this effort knowing the result we were going to get,” Wendell Maddox said. Maddox is a trustee and the executive director of the United Way of Wyandotte County. “It was an exploration, an opportunity to get a sense of how we’re seen in Wyandotte and Leavenworth counties. It’s exciting to think about the actions we might take as a college, based upon this information.”

Time Magazine is famous for its end-of-year top 10 lists, which cover topics such as the top 10 albums, feuds, celebrity breakups and more. One such list is the “Top 10 Underreported Stories.” According to Time, the most underreported story of 2009 was “Continuing Segregation Is Hurting U.S. Competitiveness.”

Author Laura Fitzpatrick writes:

Talk about a dream deferred. African-American and Latino schoolchildren are more segregated, according to a January report from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, than they were at the time of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, in 1968. Nearly 39% of blacks and 40% of Latinos attended schools composed of 90% to 100% students of color in the 2006-07 school year, the report found, and blacks and Latinos are far more likely than their white peers to attend high-poverty schools and “dropout factories” where huge numbers of students don’t graduate. With the segment of nonwhite American students at 44% and climbing, the potential economic consequences are dire. “In a world economy where success is dependent on knowledge,” the report said, “major sections of the U.S. face the threat of declining average educational levels as the proportion of children attending inferior segregated schools continues to rise.”

Isn’t interesting that, 41 years after King’s death, segregation and education inequity rank as the most underreported stories of 2009? Isn’t interesting that segregation and educational inequity are the most underreported stories at the end of President Obama’s first year in office?

Greater Kansas City, even today, remains one of the most segregated regions in the nation. So how can we expect our underperforming schools to improve without dealing with the structural inequities that weigh them down? Can we talk about race, segregation and racism openly and with candor? And most importantly, can we do it among others who are not the same race as us?

Is it time for us, as citizens, to start talking to each other about the realities of structural inequity? You tell me.

Kinky Friedman identifies the area between New York City and Los Angles as “flyover country:” the land you fly over when traveling from New York to LA or vice versa. The Kansas City region is located in the heart of flyover country, and it might just be the definitive flyover city. Friedman implies in his writing that nothing of importance occurs in flyover country. 

Historically, Kansas City has been seen as a cow town, the home of a certain style of jazz, and a barbeque Mecca. I’m sure there are other identifiers for Kansas City, but I don’t think any of them completely remove the “flyover” designation.

We’ve heard and read over the years about initiatives that could make Kansas City a “world-class city:” a destination for visitors, businesspeople and new residents. There was the downtown baseball stadium, light rail and public transit, and other large-scale projects. Should Kansas City be striving to become that city? Or are we better off thinking of ourselves as a “big town” rather than a world-class city?

My question to you is: Should the Kansas City region become a “world class city,” a quality “big town,” or something else in between? What do each of those look like?

State and local governments are feeling the effects of the ailing economy. Many have already slashed programs and services to reduce spending. What role should citizens play in determining which programs get cut and which survive this crisis? How can the public be involved in making these difficult decisions?

A 2009 study conducted for the U.K. Department for Communities and Local Government, Empowering communities to influence local decision making, identified a process known as participatory budgeting as “a tool for empowerment that can have a significant impact in a range of contexts and settings and the potential to provide transformational political change.”

The following is an edited excerpt from the study:

Participatory budgeting gives citizens an opportunity to be involved in spending decisions in their neighborhoods, localities or with a specific public agency. It is not a simple consultation device; it is an exercise in deliberative, participatory democracy that empowers citizens to make significant contributions to public spending decisions.

Participatory budgeting is about deliberative mechanisms, which delegate power over public investment priorities to citizens. Proponents of participatory budgeting say that services can be better tailored to local needs as people take more ownership of their communities. Beyond that, key benefits for citizens include:

• Increasing individuals’ political skills, particularly in relation to setting budgets
• Enhanced impact on local decision making
• For deprived neighborhoods, participatory budgeting can provide a better focus on issues of social exclusion and neighborhood renewal, bringing clear benefits to the poorest neighborhoods

There may also be wider benefits:

• Improving relations between citizens and local government and increasing positive perceptions of local government
• Bringing diverse people together
• Cost-efficient improvements in service delivery

The study determined that successful use of participatory budgeting depends on five factors:

1. The discussion should be on the budget process and deal with the problem of limited resources
2. The process needs to stretch beyond the neighborhood level to link to high-level decisions
3. It has to be a repeated process
4. The process must include some form of public deliberation within the framework of specific meetings/forums set up for that purpose
5. Some accountability for the output is required

Given the present crisis facing the public sector, do you think Greater Kansas City is ready to accept direct citizen input on government budgets?

Farmers, historians, businesspeople, environmentalists, people who make their living taking sand or water from the river, and those whose livelihood depends on recreation all gathered Oct. 2 at a hotel meeting room in Jefferson City. Their job? To discuss how best to restore the Missouri River basin ecosystem. Consensus was selected by the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution to convene the Missouri meeting, one of eight held in states in the river basin.

Congress has required that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service restore the ecosystem in order to lessen the loss of habitat and recover native fish and wildlife. (Of 67 native fish species, 51 are now rare, uncommon or decreasing.) The plan requires that the restoration also consider social, economic and cultural values for future generations.

At 30 participants, the Consensus meeting was the second largest of the eight meetings. Each state needed to get answers to the same questions, but each convener had free rein over the meeting design.

Group members began by interviewing one another about values related to the river. Many people who live and work near the Missouri River value its history and culture, ecology and recreational opportunities. But more than anything else, they see it as a source of business. People live near the river because they can farm, transport goods and make a living on tourism. They view it as an asset as well as an unpredictable interference in their lives. The most often mentioned value was balance: the need to balance the natural state of the river against the economic livelihood of farmers, the navigation industry and others.

In general, Missouri participants saw possibilities for the river to add to quality of life and tourism, but those possibilities are not nearly fully realized, with towns often cut off from the river by train tracks and the perception that the river is dirty and dangerous. They also underscored the importance of the river for navigation, particularly navigation in support of farms in the basin, and said that fluctuations in water levels can make navigation difficult.

The group identified opportunities related to the restoration, including joining together to clean up the river, increasing docks and marinas, connecting the river to tourism in river towns and along the Katy Trail, reinventing barges to tailor them to the Missouri (rather than the Mississippi), and “reinventing American” by strengthening small towns.

Consensus puts the public in public policy for clients in metro Kansas City and around the U.S. For more information, visit www.consensuskc.org.

On Feb. 28, 2001, I was sitting in an archaeology lecture on the third floor of Gowen Hall, an old, red-brick building on the University of Washington campus in Seattle. The room had an enormously high ceiling with lights like upside-down salad bowls suspended on the ends of long rods. There were perhaps 150 students sitting in the long rows of continuous, curving desks in the drab, theater-style room.

The ground started shaking around 11 a.m. It was gentle at first. Students around the room perked up, wide-eyed, assessing the severity of the situation. Then it got worse. The hanging lights began to swing back and forth several feet in each direction. The building swayed. Small pieces of ceiling tile rained down. We dived for cover underneath desks barely wide enough to cover us.

After 45 seconds, it was over. The Nisqually quake had a magnitude of 6.8, injured about 400 people, and caused damage to property and infrastructure across Western Washington. But it could have been so much worse.

This is why we need to care about the actions our governments are taking to protect people and structures from the consequences of natural disasters. That day in 2001 made me thankful for the codes that ensured most buildings were able to withstand the force of the quake. I’m glad that as a kid growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I had been taught what to do during an earthquake. These things made it possible for me to be here today.

Earthquakes may not be common in the Kansas City region, but floods, tornadoes and severe winter weather are. If you’ve taken shelter in a basement because of a tornado warning, or lost power because of a winter storm, you’ve been affected by a natural disaster.

Fortunately, the Federal Emergency Management Agency requires state and local governments to develop plans to help lessen the impact of potential natural hazards, and right now in Greater Kansas City, those plans are being updated. November is your chance to give feedback on the steps your community is taking to prepare; don’t wait until you’re caught in the middle of a natural disaster to care. Share your own disaster story or learn more about giving feedback on local plans.

What is the relationship between social research and public involvement? And are the two fields mutually exclusive? Not exactly.

For decades, social researchers have made careers and answered questions using quantitative and qualitative research methods. The designs are ideally carefully constructed to ensure that the results are representative of the population being studied and can be generalized to other areas or different circumstances.

Public involvement has long sought to link citizens to decision-making processes on a wide range of topics. Public involvement is many things — an exercise in community cohesiveness, an agent of cultural change, a way to break down barriers among stakeholders — but in and of itself, it is not social research.

But public involvement practitioners may benefit from looking at their methods through the lens of a social researcher. What population am I studying? How can I ensure the voices that need to be heard on this issue are included in the process? Can I make the assumption that people who are similar to my participants feel the same way about the topic we discussed? If the process intends to get a glimpse of a broader community’s feelings on an issue, calculated steps should be taken before the process begins to answer these questions.

By increasing their familiarity with social research practices, public involvement practitioners can broaden their scope of potential approaches to process development. The process itself will ultimately be cleaner and better planned. After all, sometimes when we need to do social research, we instead do public involvement, either because of limiting factors such as time or money, or because it’s what the client expects. As practitioners, we need to be clear enough on the relationship between these two fields to know what the project demands.

Sustainability is a word that is used today most often to refer to stewardship of the physical environment in order to preserve quality of life for future generations.

I spent nearly 20 years working with indigenous and often marginalized people in developing countries. Our use of the word recognized wise use of limited resources, but more importantly, sustainability dealt with the difference between involving people in community decisions versus treating the symptoms of disenfranchisement. Sustainable development is about creating equitable structures that enable the poor, voiceless and marginalized to not only participate in transformative change, but to be true partners in every aspect of the process. Sustainability is about creating interdependent relationships on equitable community-based structures instead of dependence on inequitable structures.

Through the recent Imagine KC project, citizens told us that creating vibrant, walkable, mixed-use villages connected by multiple transportation options was highly desirable. They also told us that some social and economic equity issues need to be addressed; that redevelopment of the urban core should not create gentrification that pushes disenfranchised groups to new areas of marginalization. Reinvestment in the inner city requires increased integration and improved opportunities for all citizens.

The news lately has been full of radical responses to inequity, discrimination and ethnic tension. We read news reports about violent hate crimes, such as the shooting at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. A recent Supreme Court ruling calls into question the role of race in employment policy and practice. Locally, there have been accusations of discrimination related to the dress code at the Kansas City Power & Light District.

What are some of the equity issues that need to be a part of the Kansas City region’s sustainable development over the next 30 years? Should we begin frank, open discourse about equity in public education, race relations, health and health care, affordable housing and workforce development? How do we begin? Who needs to start the conversation?

What is the role of the citizen, in citizen engagement?

We recently completed two major projects that have the potential to have a great impact on quality of life in the Kansas City region over the next 20–30 years. The first, Imagine KC, asked citizens to imagine a sustainable Kansas City — where growth and infrastructure are managed, and personal and corporate behaviors adapt to create an environmentally balanced region. The second, Transportation Outlook 2040, looked at regional policies that will guide future transportation investments.

They were huge successes, with participation from large numbers of citizens in open and candid discussion about difficult issues. In the case of Imagine KC, the conversation reached into about 73,000 households through a live telecast on KCPT public television. Transportation Outlook 2040 engaged citizens across demographic categories and in every county in the region.

Although we had record numbers of participants in these projects, we know some either chose not to participate or didn’t hear about the opportunity to contribute their voices. How do we engage them? Are the voices of some segments of our population simply not heard? What role does individual choice play in engagement?

I recommend you take a few minutes out of your busy day and view the “Song of a Citizen” series of op-eds. Song of a Citizen’s producer, Jeffrey Abelson, has recorded eight great thinkers (so far) who share their thoughts about democracy, or in his words, “re-linking the self to self-government.”

I especially suggest you watch Michael X. Delli Carpini’s (dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at UPenn) piece entitled “Constant Vigilance” and Rick Shenkman’s (historian, NY Times best-selling author, and founder of the History News Network) video entitled “Are citizens up to the job?”

What are your thoughts on these videos? What is the state of citizen engagement in the Kansas City region?

Are you participating in the Open Government Dialogue? If you’re not, you should be. Go to Open Government Dialogue, where you can see more than 2,500 ideas for making our government more open and transparent submitted by individuals and organizations. You can also vote on the ideas you like or don’t like. This White House-sponsored initiative is taking your ideas and comments through June 19. A discussion phase based on the ideas and comments received began today. I encourage you to participate in this project and pass the link on to your colleagues and friends.

But here’s the real story: I applaud this effort. I do. Reaching out to the public to solicit ideas isn’t common practice for our elected officials. But let’s get real: Do I, as an average citizen, have time to read more than 2,500 ideas? No, but at least I’ve given it a reasonable effort. I wonder what the response would have been if this initiative was truly promoted? Oh, the power of the White House.

So, in the end, these are the (mostly realistic) things that I hope this effort will help accomplish:

• I hope the ideas will be read and analyzed by decision makers in the White House.
• I hope that the ideas coming from special interest groups (or leaders in the field of public engagement) will not be the only ones given full consideration.
• I hope that during the discussion phase, everyone who wants to participate gets a chance to do so.
• I hope that people’s thoughts will be listened to, and that changes to open government policy are instituted soon.
• I hope that this is more than public relations or good politics.
• I hope there are plans to keep the conversation going, and to “take it to the streets,” rather than focusing on people in the field of public engagement.
• I hope this is not just a fad, but a true turning point in how our government and the people it serves interact.

Editor’s note: The Open Government Dialogue site has recently received an influx of spam messages. You may have to dig a little to get to the meat.