Creative Uses of Community Forums

Resource
The Fieldstone Alliance Nonprofit Guide to Conducting Community Forums

Contents
How Community Forums Can Help Your Work
Case Example: Why One Organization Got Involved in Forums
Types of Forums and When to Use Each
    Community education
    Community engagement
    Community action
Other Benefits of Forums

From Becky Andrews, Marketing Manager, Fieldstone Alliance:

How Community Forums Can Help Your Work
IN A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION YEAR, community forums pop up across the country. Presidential candidates often use community forums as a way to learn what issues are important to voters and to educate communities about their political platforms. But community forums are not just for politicians.

Forums (also known as symposiums, dialogues, town meetings, public affairs discussions, community meetings, learning circles, search conferences, or roundtables--whew!) are powerful tools for any organization interested in educating the public, building consensus, focusing action, and influencing policy.

This issue of Tools describes the three common types of forums and shows you ways that they may be useful in your work. The information is excerpted from The Fieldstone Alliance Nonprofit Guide to Conducting Community Forums by Carol Lukas and Linda Hoskins.

Case Example: Why One Organization Got Involved in Forums
Here in Saint Paul, a large operating foundation had nearly a century of experience providing human services within targeted neighborhoods. However, the foundation didn’t know much about the needs of both formal and informal leaders also working in these neighborhoods.

Foundation staff interviewed local leaders to see how it might help in strengthening leadership across the city. One of the strongest messages from those interviewed was that they worked in isolation and didn’t have a way to connect with others in different neighborhoods, organizations, or cities who were working on similar issues. They wanted information and ways to better link with others for support and to improve the effectiveness of their community efforts.

The foundation, in partnership with other organizations, started a community forums program. As a result, citizens and community leaders had the opportunity to exchange ideas and opinions, learn what others think, and wrestle with choices and alternatives on a variety of issues. Here are a few examples of forums they convened:

• Stop Talking, Just Do It!, an educational forum conducted by youth to help adults understand their experience living in a multicultural world.

• Beyond Tolerance: A Call to Action, a forum to mobilize the community to take action to address racism in housing and education.

• Devolution Revolution, a series of meetings to create new relationships between nonprofits, funders, governments, and business, and to help redefine the scale and scope of publicly funded programs serving low-income people.

• Creating Marketplaces, a forum to explore creative ways for inner-city neighborhoods to build economic vitality from their cultural assets.

Types of Forums and When to Use Each
There are three main categories of forums—community education, community engagement, and community action—distinguished by what results they’re after. Of course, individual forums often include aspects of more than one category. Let’s take a look at each type.

Community education
These forums involve presenting information about a topic, generating information or opinions about an issue, sharing information among people, identifying best-practices examples, or building skills. Success is measured by whether or not people learn something new, and sometimes by whether or not people use the new information in their work or community.

Some of the more intriguing community education forums have focused on transferring knowledge between and among cities. Urban areas large and small across the country are facing similar challenges. City-to-city learning forums attempt to share promising practices and speed up the rate of knowledge transfer between communities. Learning about promising models being used in other communities instills hope and confidence that “we can do this too.”

Community engagement
These forums attempt to mobilize or connect people throughout a community who are all working on a similar challenge, such as job training or increasing parent involvement in schools.

By forging relationships around common issues, duplication of effort can be reduced and new synergies discovered. Community engagement forums might also create plans for the future or decide how to tackle new opportunities for a neighborhood or community. They can help build consensus about priorities or direction.

Success is often measured by the extent to which people feel connected with others, feel heard, learn new perspectives, and feel energized by an emerging consensus or direction. Other success indicators might be a significant number of people meeting after the forum, increased volunteer effort on a task, or a high level of engagement with a particular community issue.

Community action
Community action forums stimulate joint action on, or resolution of, an issue, or otherwise attempt to influence public policy or decisions.

These forums might involve gathering neighborhood leaders, elected officials, and technical specialists to review proposed city improvements or funding policies. They might convene experts and practitioners in a human services field to examine the effectiveness of current service delivery systems. A forum might educate parents about a new reading program in the public schools and equip them to start a home-based reading routine. Or a forum might invite people to learn about the needs of new immigrants and plan ways to support new immigrant families in the community.

While community engagement forums focus on individual action and connections between people, the distinguishing goal of community action forums is some concrete action in the community or within a system (housing development, job training, tax policy, public schools).

Other Benefits of Forums
By their nature, forums can be highly visible events. Because of this visibility, they often bring other benefits to the sponsoring group or groups, including

• Public exposure for the sponsoring organizations and their work
• Stronger connections with the sponsors’ neighborhoods or constituencies
• Increased community involvement in the sponsors’ work
• New partnerships among sponsoring organizations
• Media attention to selected issues

And, ultimately, when people have a chance to be heard, it builds hope and confidence in communities that may be short on both.

Where to Learn More

Charles F. Kettering Foundation
www.kettering.org
Publishes forum discussion guides through National Issues Forums on affirmative action, drugs, economy, education, family, foreign policy, freedom of speech, healthcare, and more.

National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation
www.thataway.org
Resources, programs, and networking opportunities for solving group and societal problems through honest talk, quality thinking and collaborative action.

International Association for Public Participation
www.iap2.org
Promotes and improves the practice of public participation in relation to individuals, governments, institutions, and other entities that affect the public interest in nations throughout the world.

National Issues Forums
www.nifi.org
Provides the “National Issues Starter Kit" which includes a sample issue book, an NIF publications catalog, "NIF: An Overview," and other materials.

Public Conversations Project
www.publicconversations.org
Promotes constructive conversations and relationships among people and groups that have differing values, worldviews, and perspectives about divisive public issues. Provides training, dialogue guides, and other useful resources.

The Institute for Democratic Renewal • Project Change
www.race-democracy.org
Assists communities in dismantling racism and achieving full and equitable participation in the democratic process through a variety of convenings, networking, learning communities, projects, publications and technologies.

Provides "A Community Builder’s Tool Kit: 15 Tools for Creating Healthy, Productive, Inter-racial/Multicultural Communities." This primer for revitalizing democracy from the ground up can be downloaded free at http://www.race-democracy.org/toolkit.pdf

Study Circles Resource Center
www.studycircles.org
Produces resource material and training for individuals and communities that want to initiate study circles. Provides forum discussion guides on building strong neighborhoods, immigration and race, jobs, education, violence, youth, and other topics.

Civic Practices Network (CPN)
www.cpn.org
This web site includes “The Electronic Forum Handbook: Study Circles in Cyber-space” at www.cpn.org/tools/manuals/Networking/studycircles.html.
This handbook documents the results of moderators trained in face-to-face dialogue who experimented with an electronic version on the Internet.

Fieldstone Alliance
Fieldstone Alliance’s consulting team has extensive experience helping foundations, nonprofits, and networks better understand their strengths and challenges through our proven assessment process. For more information, contact Sandy Jacobsen at 651.556.4510 or sjacobsen@FieldstoneAlliance.org.

Also, see these free back issues of Tools You Can Use:
How to Run Useful, Inexpensive Focus Groups
Policy and Advocacy Resources for Grantmakers and Nonprofits
Stakeholder Analysis Tool: How to Understand, Influence, and Mobilize Your Constituents

All the Best,

Becky Andrews
Fieldstone Alliance

February 6, 2008

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