Community Development and Preaching to the Choir : Can It Be Avoided? (Week 12)

After attending several municipal meetings that are open to the public, it has become clear to me that the same people show up time and again.  These people take it upon themselves to engage with their local government, and to keep themselves informed as to the recent developments within their community.  However, they are a very small minority of the population, and thus, while it is a good thing, their engagement is not indicative of a successful community engagement strategy.

A large portion of the population is unaware of what is going on at the local level, and it is largely not their fault.  Many meetings are scheduled during normal work hours, and people that are living paycheck-to-paycheck have bigger concerns than trying to book time off work to keep track of everything that goes on at city hall.  Unfortunately, these are the people that most often are affected by things that are decided at these meetings that they are unable to attend, as they are the ones that utilize many of both the city and the Region’s social services.

Although all of this information is technically available online for anyone to access at any time, the amount of information that is made available to the public regarding the inner-workings of their local government would likely seem overwhelming to a newcomer.  These documents are often highly-technical and very thick; essentially requiring a full-time job and several degrees to fully understand what is being discussed within them.

So how do you reach people who do not have time to be reached?  I don’t have the answer, but offering abridged and annotated versions of council agendas and minutes could be one such direction municipalities could go, if they are not already doing this.  The Region of Waterloo has time-stamped all of their online archives of past-meetings, and I think this is a great step, allowing people to pick out parts of the meetings that are immediately relevant to their lives.  

To engage an extremely diverse community with different wants and needs the methods need to be extremely open, extremely accessible, and extremely visible.