New Orleans Citizen Participation Project

This weekend, on 28 February 2009, the NOLA-CPP hosted its first Town Hall Breakfast to discuss the 1st draft of the New Orleans Citizen Participation Program model. The event, held at the Ashe’ Cultural Arts Center was co-hosted by the Central City Renaissance Alliance and the Central City Partnership.

People from across the city came out to have a good breakfast and discuss the proposal for a new Citizen Participation System. Notes from the discussion are attached to this email as well as e-copies of the new Citizen Participation Project Toolkit and the actual Draft Guidelines and Standards reviewed at the breakfast.

There was great enthusiasm about the draft as people began to understand how truly unique and innovative a model it was. The residents who have been coming together since July to discuss the creation of the Citizen Participation Program have crafted a model that brings together the diversity of the New Orleans’ community by recognizing that civic engagement and needs to reach as many voices as possible to be effective.

To do this the Organizational Structure Team has settled on a model for the CPP system that includes a geographic basis for organizing Neighborhood Associations as well as a social or thematic basis for organizing Communities of Interests. At the town hall meeting on Saturday we had an audience of people representing both [geographic] Neighborhood groups and [social] Community groups. Both types of civil
society organization have a great deal to offer the other and as the system is developed we hope to see more partnerships emerge through dialogue and problem solving.

We were also pleased to have staff members from the offices of Council-Persons Mrs. Jackie Clarkson and Mr. Arnie Fielkow. Follow-up meetings with other Council Persons as well as members of the City Planning Commission and ORDA are being planned to keep them all informed of our work and get important feedback.

While we presented the 1st draft of the new CPP model to the public on Saturday, our discussions do not stop there. We plan to have the final draft completed by late May 2009. Now we need to refocus our Action Team discussions around the proposed structure we created. We will continue meetings with the Organizational Structure team that will continue working on the structure and policy of the CPP.

In addition, in the next few days we will be sending out meeting dates to restart the discussion began in 2008 with other Action Teams such as;

1. Financing a CPP
2. Public Access to Information and Data
3. Race, Gender and Class perspectives of Citizen Participation
4. Scope of Activities
5. Civic Education and Capacity Building
6.Outreach and Inclusion

In addition to these familiar topics, we are creating a new Team to help us specifically address the inclusion and creation of Community of Interest Councils in the CPP system. Questions on the proper structure, rules of engagement, accountability and others will be of major concern as that group’s discussion moves forward.

We hope that you will work with us and build on the great energy we experienced on Saturday to complete the CPP model by May 2009.