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Harvard Study Praises Public’s Role in New Orleans Recovery Planning
March 28, 2007
America Speaks press release
Paper Credits ‘Extraordinary Power’ of Large-Scale Participation for Building Political Momentum
Cambridge, MA – March 28, 2007 – The process that engaged thousands of New Orleanians in developing their city’s rebuilding plan is drawing praise for increasing the plan’s credibility and momentum with local political leaders in a new study by a Harvard University researcher.
The study, titled “Citizen Participation in the Unified New Orleans Plan,” was conducted by Abigail Williamson, a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and is available at www.americaspeaks.org.
The study finds that local political leaders came to support the unified plan thanks in large part to a series of high-tech town meetings, called Community Congresses, that simultaneously engaged thousands of New Orleanians across as many as 21 cities at a time. The meetings were organized and facilitated by local UNOP planners along with AmericaSpeaks, the nonprofit organization that has orchestrated dozens of similar large-scale town meetings across the country.
“Interviews with 20 New Orleans public leaders indicated that [the second Community Congress] enhanced the credibility of UNOP in their eyes by gathering a representative mix of citizen voices and enabling conversation across differences,” Williamson’s report notes. “The experience of [the second Community Congress] in New Orleans indicates the extraordinary power that large-scale participation processes like AmericaSpeaks can have in terms of building political momentum for a process.”
Participation at the Community Congresses in December and January reflected the demographic diversity of pre-Katrina New Orleans. Twenty-five percent of the 2,500 participants in the December meeting had an annual household income of less than $20,000 and 64 percent of participants were African American. The meeting used interactive television, keypad polling and groupware computers to identify the collective priorities of citizens across 21 cities.
Public officials interviewed by Williamson cited the diversity of participation, involvement of citizens who remain displaced across the country, and the ability of Community Congress participants to deliberate amidst diversity as distinguishing factors about the forums.
“I think [it has] done more to bring credibility to the table than all of the little individual meetings that people go to,” City Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell told Williamson. “It’s brought the people who were displaced into the process. That’s probably the one thing I would give UNOP real, real credit for. … [the Community Congress] reminded me of true democracy.”
The Unified New Orleans Plan was approved in January by the New Orleans Community Support Foundation (the organization that authorized the plan) and the advisory board that oversaw the process. The City Planning Commission is currently reviewing and modifying the plan. Following approval by the Commission, the City Council and Mayor C. Ray Nagin will review the plan and make appropriate revisions before final adoption.
The UNOP process is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, The Greater New Orleans Foundation, and the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund. Additional funding for public outreach and engagement was provided by the Case Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Fund, the Louisiana Recovery Authority, Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Surdna Foundation.
Founded in 1995, AmericaSpeaks is a national non-profit dedicated to providing citizens with a greater voice in public decision-making. Using innovative deliberative tools such as the 21st Century Town Meeting®, AmericaSpeaks has engaged more than 100,000 people in governance across the country and around the world. Among other projects, AmericaSpeaks brought large-scale citizen participation to the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site; to the creation of municipal budgets in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco; and to regional planning and economic development efforts in the greater Chicago area and Northeast Ohio.
Abby Williamson is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University. She is a consultant for foundations and non-profit organizations, leading projects and conducting research on social capital and civic engagement. Abby was formerly the Associate Director of the Saguaro Seminar for Civic Engagement at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “Citizen Participation in the Unified New Orleans Plan” can be downloaded at www.americaspeaks.org.
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