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While this may say a lot about NGOs, it says little for parliamentary democracy. The political process could learn a good deal about genuine citizen engagement from the third sector.
In my public life, including my current position as Chair of the Ontario Trillium Foundation, I have come to appreciate the growing importance of citizen engagement. Last summer, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, one of Canada's largest granting foundations, launched a series of Community Conversations throughout Ontario.
We distribute $100 million in funding to more than 1,500 not-for-profit and volunteer organizations across the province every year. Our Community Conversations were designed to spark discussion and were premised on the notion that genuine dialogue and deliberation are crucial to building better organizations, communities and democracies. We learned a lot about effective public engagement.
You get better public policy when you include the public. The prevailing wisdom in the '80s and '90s was that governments could outsource anything except policy-making. How thinking and practice have changed. The public has taken its rightful place as a contributor to and participant in the policy-making process.
Move from consultation to conversation. When you engage people in a conversation, you better be ready to listen, to hear things you may not agree with, and to respond. Governments and agencies such as ours must move beyond old-style consultations - often no more than a series of presentations to the powers-that-be - and enter into two-way conversations.
Create an environment of trust. The best conversations, whether between two people or among a hundred, happen in an atmosphere of trust and respect. Participants will be more forthcoming in a forum where they feel the dialogue is genuine and where views can be freely exchanged.
Throw the doors wide open. If you hand-pick your participants or set too many limits around who can participate, you will undermine the range and quality of discussion. The more exclusive the session, the less you will learn.
I recall a town hall meeting not long ago where one young woman, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, objected to the session being a "citizen dialogue." She noted that, though not a Canadian citizen, she was nevertheless a community member who had a legitimate voice in this discussion. She raised a good point. Only citizens can vote, but all community members can participate in town halls or public forums.
Public participation should offer the opportunity to do more than register people's views. It must also give people the satisfaction of being heard and feeling that their views matter. One of the oft-cited limitations of our first-past-the-post electoral system is that it leaves many voters feeling that any ballot cast for an unsuccessful candidate is a vote wasted. This is one explanation, but certainly no excuse, for poor voter turnout rates in Canada and the record low of 60.9 per cent in the 2004 federal general election - the lowest since 1896. Certainly changing how we vote would help, but so would building the credibility of the democratic process.
Offer alternative opportunities for engagement. We knew that not everyone could attend our meetings so we extended our conversations by connecting with people online. When you engage in a dialogue with the public, you have an opportunity but also an obligation to talk to people when and where it is convenient for them. Online engagement, though still in its early days, offers great promise, once we get beyond the stage of web-based surveys and move into more truly interactive forms of web-based dialogue. This will be an important supplement to, but never a replacement for, engaging stakeholders face-to-face and in real time.
Keep the conversation going and make it matter. It's not enough to have a good conversation if it leads to nothing. Share what people tell you and show them how it will make a difference.
The Ontario Trillium Foundation is using what we heard in our Community Conversations to improve our grant-making practices so that we are even more responsive to the different and always changing needs of the communities our grants are designed to support.
The political process could also benefit from creating more effective forums for engaging the electorate. We cannot restore faith in our political system without convincing people that we value their views as much as their votes.
So let's really talk. People are willing and able to engage in real conversations on issues that matter to them most. Let's give them that opportunity.
Helen Burstyn is the Chair of the Board of Directors at the Ontario Trillium Foundation.
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