Community Engagement Podcast

It is highly possible for citizens to discuss their way into solutions. But that’s not how the political process works. There you have an agenda and people must dialogue along those lines or they are excluded. But what would happen if an agenda was worked out later in our discussions. This is what happens in […]

To create meaningful dialogue, good citizens display empathy more than emphasis. To understand and respect where the other person is coming from is one of the hallmarks of civil society – a trait made all to rare these days by a partisanship that’s gone mad. We all have our points of view – interests – […]

True dialogue can begin with positions, but it should end in understanding. “Before the tongue can speak, it must lose the power to wound,” said an old philosopher, and we need that insight now more than ever. Free riders come to community engagement exercises with only one purpose: to impose their views on others. They […]

The genius of democracy is not how right, or even how smart we are. It is how open we are to find compromise that will permit us to move ahead as a citizenry. Our present democratic state is mired in rigidity, in policies that won’t budge, and in characters than think having a strong opinion […]

Just two weeks left in these podcasts, but this is an important one. What happens if we get a chance to build an effective democracy as citizens and no one shows up? Sad to say, this is repeatedly occurring in various citizen engagement activities around the world. The regulars show up, and through their dedication […]

Political dysfunction has resulted in numerous efforts at citizen engagement across the board. Yet a sincere questions remains: are citizens mature enough to handle that responsibility? The answer to that seems fairly clear when about half the citizenry doesn’t even vote. We are in an evolutionary phase in the democratic experience – a time when […]

It’s amazing that politics has so few referees. In times past it worked because there was a certain sense of nobility, respect, and cooperation among politicians and citizens. No more. As citizens bemoan the divisive partisanship of the political order, they themselves have become harder to bring together for the sake of our country. Like […]

How we respond to developments is often predicated by how we were heard. Children learn early and instinctively that if they express an emotion that gets a quick and positive response for their caregivers then they are appreciated. Tone deaf parents often leave a legacy of children feeling frustrated and victimized. Citizens experience similar emotions. […]

A collective purpose or elite agendas. London, Ontario’s large citizen engagement initiative, ReThink London, will end up with one or the other of these outcomes. It is a city looking for a new kind of future, but it could end up with the regular special interest groups vying for the dominance of their agenda, or […]

How is it that Canada – so well-respected for its peaceable efforts around the world – is now failing to bring peace to its own political order? And why is it that citizens, recognizing the tone-deaf actions of the political elites, choose to opt out instead of getting engaged and bringing on a quiet revolution […]

Great citizens don’t latch out and grab onto rigid ideologies that bring on political warfare. Great politicians don’t either. No one party has all the truth. Neither does any citizen, or group of citizens. Yet as we become more impatient with the political structures of our land, we can often reflect the rigidity of hyper-partisan […]

If citizens check out of the political process, then it becomes increasingly easy for governments to do as they wish. We all know that. And yet, with voter turnout declining in most democracies around the world, the democratic estate is becoming increasingly ineffective. There’s an ancient name for people who don’t wish to take up […]

For millennia people have regarded history as a linear event – moving forward at a steady pace over the years. But our present generation is experiencing change in such rapid instalments that it’s becoming increasing impossible to handle where our future is going. Some of our greatest challenges are coming from this kind of warp […]

Political policies in the modern era have turned pitting the different generations – Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y – against one another. At the community level this can have devastating effects, as many cities watch their younger creative classes exiting for opportunities better acquired elsewhere. It’s time to obliterate the generational barriers that limit […]

We are living in age where we neglect public duties in favour of private delights. It comes commensurate with the great shift of our generation from citizen to consumer. We continue to talk about citizen engagement as though it solely takes place between the citizen and their political representatives. Yet ultimately it is how we […]

About 85% of the world’s youth live in developing nations – and they are growing restless, frustrated at the lack of opportunity afforded them. In Canada, a greying nation, our younger generations are expressing their own disenchantment over the lack of access to opportunities their parents once enjoyed. We are slowly witnessing the decline of […]

1967 was not just our 100th birthday as a nation; it was the year Canada came out on the world stage looking young and vibrant. The government of the day placed its emphasis on the future and the young (today’s Baby Boomers) rose to that challenge. Today’s politics looks nothing like that, and as a […]

Call it the “grey tsunami”. It’s about ready to wash over our communities, as within the next decade a quarter of our population will have reached retirement age. That generation, after working hard and providing for their kids, will naturally want to maintain the lifestyles they presently enjoy. The problem is that we are slowly […]

In a time of diminishing returns, nothing seems sure anymore. Where older generations took less for themselves in order to pass on more opportunities to their children, the Baby Boomers thought the could have it all. It didn’t work out. They watch as their kids come to terms with a future that is no longer […]

Our communities will be as successful as they will be at transferring responsibilities and opportunities to the next generation of citizens. Sadly, Baby Boomers, for all their generosity towards their own children, are not as inclined to build up public investments so that all can share in future prosperity. In 1984, older North Americans made […]

If the future of our cities is in our youth, then what is the future of youth? It’s a simple question that carries profound implications for our communities if we don’t get that answer right. Some communities in North America have been working hard at creating diverse and welcoming initiatives designed to attract and retain […]

Our civic duty is to invest and prepare for the next generation. Yet our present Baby Boom generation has actually taken away opportunities from the future to pay for their lifestyles of the present. We will be the first generation in the modern age to fail to lift the next generation beyond our own prosperity. […]

It sounds counterintuitive, but our governments are banking on decline. Running low on resources, they inwardly know the future will be something less than what Canadians would have hoped for. The Baby Boomers, flush with the policy privileges supported and financed by their parents following World War Two, now want to maintain those same benefits […]

For almost the entirety of human history communities moved in cyclical fashion – following the sun, moon and the seasons. Yet not all that long ago they learned that through science and ingenuity their communal life could move out from its historic environments and begin progressing. Today, our community in Canada feel as though have […]

It’s time to start building a local language of meaning. Our political vernacular is not longer the language of community but of the partisan professional. Jargon is used to convince us that we matter to senior levels of government, but the language is strangely hollow and doesn’t really communicate in ways that bring vision and […]

While various forms of community renaissance are going on around the world, Canadian cities remain stuck in neutral, in part because of their lowly place within the Canadian constitutional structure. At the founding of our nation, the vast majority of citizens lived in rural landscapes and the power structures reflected that reality. Today most of […]

Say what you like about globalization and free trade, for our communities such supposed advantages left them with fewer options. When prospects like the potential Canada/Europe Free Trade Agreement, for all of its advantages, mean that we might not even be able to use our own local labourers to construct our buildings, then an even […]

The longer someone stays in politics, the more remote they become from their home constituencies. The throb of political life these days occurs at the centres of power, not in our scattered communities. The farther away power gets from those places where we live, the more irrelevant it becomes – a natural consequence. Colonial America […]

We might very well be walking the road to greater independence of our respective communities if the more senior levels of government don’t stop treating them like distant cousins. None of us wants this. We would prefer a place at the table, maybe even some constitutional reform that would recognize that some 80% of Canadians […]

A surprising call from a Conservative MP out West. Political theatre that is becoming increasingly remote. A partisanship that cripples our democratic estate. Yet despite such realities, Canadian communities, like those American ones just prior to the American Revolution, are teeming with new ideas for arresting their decline. Some of the brightest lights of democracy […]

it becomes an increasing difficult reality when more senior levels of government swoop into our communities during campaign seasons in hopes of securing our votes, then disappearing back to their capitals as though we didn’t factor into their policies. Prior to America’s early Revolution, the home government in England continued to manipulate the activities of […]

Desperate times cause politicians to do desperate things. It’s tough enough for our communities to face difficult times, but when we take on the process of undermining our efforts at building for the future by attacking one another, then there is no hope for rebuilding. Being at the receiving end of government dysfunction doesn’t mean […]

Emerging entities – globalization, mass culture, the transcendence of money over meaning – have arisen in recent years to lay something of a choke hold on citizens and their ability to come together for greater purposes. Despite impressive efforts by communities and citizen groups, more of a critical mass needs to be developed that can […]

Communities are feeling increasingly abandoned. Funding formulas among senior levels of governments have left our cities and regions on the outside looking in. But the effects of poor policy and an under-performing economy have left communities themselves bearing the overall brunt of such performances.