Matt Leighninger and Andrea Arnold spoke at the 2025 ICMA conference about how to think strategically about local democracy. Download the slides by completing the form to the right of this page. Email [email protected] if you experience any difficulty downloading the slides.
Session Description
Many different democracy innovations have emerged in the last decade, including citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting, deliberative public meetings, survey panels, and many different digital tools. While these processes have their own strengths and do well on their own for very specific aspects of engaging the public, they are limited if they are not part of an overall strategy, especially one that has the resources and framework to implement innovations at a system-level rather than as one-off pilots. How do you make these decisions? How do you involve other stakeholders in making them? What do you need to know about your community to make them? This session will help you learn about how to think strategically about democracy.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand important democratic innovations happening in different communities and local governments.
- Understand how to expand civic infrastructure to be more comprehensive, where different practices build upon and feed into each other.
- How to embed and institutionalize democratic innovations so that they endure over time.
Download ICMA Workshop: Creating a Comprehensive Local Democracy Strategy
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