The New Orleans Citizen Participation Project

Hello and Happy Holidays!

It's that time when we all reflect on the past year, the highs and lows and bumps and plateaus.  We've had some wins and some challenges with CBNO and the Citizen Participation Project.  Here's a quick look at where we've been and where we are going.

The Big Easy Budget Game was again very successful, and we are particularly pleased that the demographics of the Budget Game players compared well with the overall demographics of our city.  Creating tools to obtain resident input are only truly meaningful when they are accessible to all residents, and our work to bring the Budget Game to the community -- at schools, senior centers, ESL classes, community events and gatherings, and more -- is vital to generating meaningful data.  We are working right now on the final People's Budget report, where we compare what the community wants with the actual city budget.  And next year, we are really going to push to get the City to formally adopt the Budget Game as an official part of its budget process, as they have promised in the past.

Another important success was the completion of our facilitation work for the Loew's Theater.  This 1930s era movie theater is a grand structure, but it is completely unviable as a theater these days, and the building has been decaying for years.  New owners want to build a hotel on the site, and are willing to incorporate the Theater into the project; but they needed substantial zoning variances in order to make the project work.  We arranged and facilitated a number of meetings, with residents, nearby businesses and other stakeholders, and helped the owners and architects navigate the relevant city processes.  Obtaining the variances was considered a real long shot when we began this work -- especially after the tragic collapse of the Hard Rock Hotel, which is virtually across the street from the Theater -- but through these community meetings, we were able to build near-unanimous support for the project, and all the needed variances were granted.  This not only saves a historic New Orleans building, but in the bigger picture, it is a powerful example of what happens when business people, residents and stakeholders have the opportunity to share information, speak their minds and find common ground.

More challenging has been our attempts to move forward on the neighborhood boundary mapping work, which is so vitally important to advancing the CPP and so many other aspects of making New Orleans an equitable city.  City government has unfortunately adopted a mindset of having very limited capacities and resources, and is focusing only on a very narrow set of objectives.  Despite CBNO's pledge to do the vast majority of this work, with only minor support from two City departments, we simply cannot get our mayor to commit to moving forward (despite the fact that she has endorsed this work on three separate occasions, in writing).  The situation is very frustrating; we are currently working to have as many of our allies -- residents, businesses and other nonprofits -- as possible contact the mayor to indicate their support for moving ahead with this.

One new opportunity we have identified and will begin working on right after the first of the year is doing community advocacy training.  We have done this on a small scale in the past; now, we plan to collaborate with State Senator JP Morrell, a very effective and progressive legislator who is stepping down due to term limits.  Sen. Morrell was the keynote speaker at our annual Diana Lewis Citizen Participation Awards luncheon last month, and out of that has come this partnership opportunity.  We feel that even as we work to create more advocacy opportunities for New Orleans residents, we can also serve them by preparing them to be more effective advocates, now and in the future.  We are really excited about this newest approach to amplifying community voice.

Like most every other year in the world of community engagement and organizing, 2019 has had some key victories and some frustrating challenges.  But no other organization in New Orleans focuses on meaningful community participation, and CBNO's commitment to community voice is unwavering.  As always, we appreciate the opportunity to tell you our story.  Our successes are very much your successes as well, because without your contributions it would be impossible to do our work.  We are deeply grateful for your support, and hope you will continue standing with us in the year ahead.  We wish you a wonderful holiday season, and healthy, prosperous new year!