Melissa Robinson is a champion and community leader who works with the Black Health Care Coalition, an organization that has a three-pronged approach to eliminating health disparities: advocacy, access to care, and health promotion activities.
The 2021 All-America City Awards gave communities an opportunity to reflect on the past year and take stock of what they had been able to achieve and overcome. Understandably, projects of this year’s ten winning communities fell primarily into two categories: pandemic response and racial equity efforts.
Policies addressing today’s most pressing issues require effective public participation, so it is necessary to build a broad-based understanding of what constitutes an effective public process and develop the capacity to improve community dialogue and catalyze public action.
For those who might now be hoping for another “upswing” in democratic reform activity, where might they look for signs of its emergence? More important yet, what might they themselves do to help it along? The good news is that there are quite a number of serious reform efforts already afoot, many of them guided and fueled by credible, indeed venerable organizations.
The originator of the “Belonging Index,” a tool designed to measure how connected people feel to their communities, was interviewed in April by National Civic League President, Doug Linkhart.
During Zoom learning exchanges in May and October of 2020, members of a leadership institute for Black public administrators were asked to discuss their experiences both personal and professional as they struggled to adjust to the new realities of the spread of COVID-19 and civil unrest in their communities.
In 2019 and 2020, a group of local government managers met twice a year to trade ideas and experiences on innovative forms of citizen engagement and democratic governance, and in some cases, to unlearn some of the lessons they may have been taught in their M.P.A programs.
In a time of local government budget cuts, it is almost inevitable that services will suffer. By taking equity into account, a local government can reduce the pain experienced by disadvantaged parts of the community and reduce the pain experienced by the community as a whole.
We are at a moment when some Americans may feel overwhelmed or paralyzed by the multiple challenges we face as a country. But it is during these difficult moments when individuals open up to the possibilities of transformational shifts.
