The New Orleans Citizen Participation Project

Happy New Year to all!  Each new year brings new promise and opportunity, and the New Orleans Citizen Participation Project is extremely excited about the opportunities we see in 2018.

New Orleans elected a new mayor and City Council at the end of 2017.  We began working five years ago to make sure that the CPP was an issue during the campaigns, building collaborations and coalitions to ensure maximum exposure as election season unfolded.  The result was that the incoming mayor and all the incoming Council members have made strong commitments to finalizing and implementing the CPP.  Due to a change in our election calendar, the new government will not be inaugurated until early May, but we are working now to make sure that progress will be expedited as soon as inauguration day is here.

One key initial step is redrawing the city's official neighborhood boundary maps, which date from the early 1970s and are now simply obsolete.  As we previously reported, we succeeded in getting an amendment to our Master Plan adopted last year that mandates updating the maps, and have begun conversations with the City Planning Commission and the Neighborhood Engagement Office about this project.  As updating the maps is critical for many vital reasons beyond the CPP, we see this project being launched before May and moving forward expeditiously under the new administration.

It is also vitally important to re-engage and re-energize New Orleans residents around the CPP.  Committee for a Better New Orleans submitted the NOLA-CPP model to the city back in September 2011; and while we feel that the model remains a powerful structure for inclusiveness and equity, it also seems fair to recognize that it is now almost seven years later.  The community deserves an opportunity to review the model, be reminded of its many benefits, and consider if there are updates or improvements that can be made.  To this end -- and to work with us through the full process of adoption and implementation of the CPP -- CBNO is beginning to assemble a very diverse coalition of neighborhood, community, faith, business and other organizations to make sure all segments of the community can participate in this process.  This work has been under way for a few months now, and despite the distractions of the elections, the holidays and so on, we have largely completed the first step of bringing together a core team for the coalition.  This team will set the guidelines and standards for the coalition; identify and bring to the table additional organizations; set the strategies and tactics; oversee development of the communications materials; and ensure that the outreach is as wide and inclusive as possible.

In the current national political and financial climate, this is extremely challenging work, but vitally important to the future of New Orleans and potentially something that can be modeled in other cities going forward.  Inclusiveness and engagement are more important than perhaps any time in the history of our nation, and as we begin the celebration of the New Orleans tricentennial, we are extremely excited about this opportunity.

Also in 2018, CBNO will continue its work on the Big Easy Budget Game, seeking to continue increasing the number of participants here in New Orleans and also to bring it to cities around the country and the world.  If any of our wonderful supporters reading this is interested in learning about how to bring the Budget Game to your city, please email us at info@cbno.org.  We are also going to create a version of the Budget Game directed at personal finances this year; low levels of financial literacy are a major factor in the intractable poverty that has plagued New Orleans for so long, and we believe that a new, game-based, hands-on approach to financial literacy training is a way to break through this barrier and put people on a path to a better life.

So the horizon of opportunities in 2018 seems both very large and very reachable.  We hope that your new year is similarly blessed with opportunity and hope.  We thank you so very much for your past support, and hope that you will continue to help us empower the people of New Orleans in the year ahead.  Happy New Year from the NOLA-CPP team!