Like me, many of you have devoted a great deal of your energy and time to engaging citizens in our democracy. Like me, many of you are proud of our accomplishments, but frustrated by the limitations of our work so far. We have done our best to involve people in political systems that don’t really have a place for citizens. We’ve created effective processes and meaningful roles for people to play – that are usually outside the official boundaries of public decision-making. We’ve produced temporary opportunities for public participation that generally aren’t sustained or embedded in the way communities work. We’ve fostered democracy, largely outside of Democracy.

Planning for Stronger Local Democracy, a new guide from DDC and the National League of Cities, is intended to help change that. It is intended for local leaders of all kinds – traditional or nontraditional, established or emerging. It is designed to help them use the lessons we’ve learned about engagement, take stock of the strengths and weaknesses of democratic governance in their communities, and formulate a comprehensive, sustainable, long-term strategy for vitalizing public life. The guide can be downloaded free of charge on this page and more is available here.

The guide is built around two lists: the questions to ask about your community in order to take stock of local democracy; and the building blocks you might consider as part of a comprehensive, sustainable strategy for vitalizing civic engagement in your town.

These building blocks include:

• Neighborhood associations, school councils, and other citizen spaces that have been made more participatory and inclusive

• Proven processes for recruitment, issue framing, and facilitation of small-group discussions and large-group forums

• Online tools for network-building, idea generation, dissemination of public data, and serious games

• Youth leadership

• Buildings that can be physical hubs for engagement

• Participatory budgeting and other approaches to making public meetings more efficient, inclusive, and collaborative

• Action research and other methods that involve citizens in data-gathering, evaluation, and accountability

• Food, music, the arts, and other social and cultural elements that make engagement more enjoyable and fun

Planning for Stronger Local Democracy is not just a tool for local governments or school systems; in fact, one of the assumptions of the guide is that long-term engagement planning is best done by a cross-sector team of organizations and leaders. An appendix of the guide provides organizing suggestions and sample meeting agendas for these kinds of planning groups.