The New Orleans Citizen Participation Project

Greetings to all supporters of civic engagement and participation!

My favorite band of all time is The Doors, and one of my favorite Doors songs is "Strange Days".  If I was better at technology, I would figure out how to make that my ring tone, because these are indeed strange days.

Looking at the big (national) picture, the civic discourse is apalling.  It's easy to blame it on our leadership, but one key tenet of CBNO's community participation work is that accountability is a two-way street.  Governments, businesses, institutions, foundations, nonprofits, and everyday people all have to do better.  We have to engage actively with people who do not think just like us, share our views, align with us politically; and we have to do so with a commitment to seeking common ground rather than focusing on our disagreements.

This is of course much, much more difficult to do in a vacuum.  Which points to the need for much more work to create formal, functional structures where people can come together and have a framework for respectful, productive conversation.

That is the objective of the Citizen Participation Project here in New Orleans.  And we seem to be struggling to make progress as much as everywhere else in our nation.

Obviously, community participation in the pandemic is a major challenge.  No in-person meetings are being conducted in New Orleans, from the City Council on down to the Neighborhood Participation Plan.  We understand and support the need to put health and safety first, but this is deeply problematic in terms of informing residents and getting meaningful, timely input into city decisions.  The reasons are myriad, but underlying all of it is the still-substantial lack of technology and internet access that is widespread in our community.  This is interfering with public education and economic opportunity as well as civic engagement.  As always, those who are most vulnerable suffer the most consequences in times of crisis.

Frankly, issues of this scope are beyond CBNO's capacity to address them.  Here's what we are doing:

- We continue working with individual neighborhoods as situations arise, and projects/proposals with potentially significant impacts on them are brought forth.  We have reached the point where private sector proposals are beginning to decline, as projects that were in early stages at the beginning of the lockdown, but continued because financing was already in place, have moved into implementation.  Conversations with colleagues in the architecture and construction fields indicate that the pipeline for new projects is starting to slow considerably.  On the government side, revenue shortfalls and increased expenses are causing delays and outright cancellation of public works projects.  No one likes to see progress stalled, but at least this reduces the chances of neighborhoods and residents getting steamrolled because they could not engage.  We continue to monitor the situation, and do our best to keep neighborhoods informed when projects are on the horizon.

- We have opened up a conversation with our Independent Police Monitor and the local Police and Justice Foundation around better communication between the New Orleans Police Department and New Orleans residents.  There is a structure for that here called the Police Community Advisory Boards (PCABs), but they were not well-designed to begin with and have reached the point of being mostly non-fuctional.  A positive note in this is that some of the push for better communication is coming from District Commanders within NOPD.  We are working with the IPM and the Foundation to get a good picture of what is (or is not) going on right now, and what we can do to increase communication in the short term.  CBNO is more excited, though, about the potential for meaningful reform of the PCABs, providing a long-term solution to the problem.  This of course is even more timely in the context of the "defund" movement, which put more thoughtfully should be a citywide (and nationwide) conversation about identifying what police departments do best, tasking and resourcing them to do that, and shifting other responsibilities and funding to other agencies that are better suited to shoulder these responsibilities.  As we have been putting it, it would be far better to have trained mental health care professionals responding to mental health situations -- but we also don't want social workers responding to in-progress bank robberies.

- We are about 90% of the way through a major technology upgrade to our Big Easy Budget Game.  While we deeply regret not being able to offer the Budget Game to our community this year, the technology simply had to be updated and made more sustainable going forward.  Further, the way we achieve a legitimate demographic representation of New Orleanians in our resulting "Peoples Budget" is by bringing the Budget Game to senior centers, schools, community events, etc.  That obviously would not have been possible, and we would have been very reluctant to release results that did not include the input of a representative sampling of our residents.

- We have also been unable to put on our annual Bryan Bell Metropolitan Leadership Forum this year due to the restrictions on community gatherings, but we have been conducting virtual versions of some of the Forum sessions, specifically Health Care, Public Safety, Education and Housing.  All of these obviously are highly timely in the pandemic context, and we have had great panelists and great conversations.  We have opened these up to all community members, as another way to keep residents informed about the key issues that impact them.

The best way we know to deal with the frustrations, the divisiveness, the unprecedented challenges of this time is to keep working, and most of all, to keep informing and discussing.  Any problem or circumstance is improved when people communicate with each other.  We have to be honest in saying that large-scale progress is incredibly difficult right now.  But by doing what we can in the moment, and keeping our attention focused on the larger picture and opportunities, we continue to contribute to our community in a unique way, and to move forward at least a little on the longer-term objectives.

We thank all of you for your continued support, and wish you the best in taking on the challenges in your lives.  We will get through this.