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Good morning. I’m Helen Burstyn, and I’ll be chairing this morning’s forum on Citizen Engagement – An International Perspective. Let me begin by offering some observations on the subject of citizen engagement, based on my recent experience here in Ontario.
I use the term citizen carefully when it comes to engagement. I remember being at one town hall session a year or so ago, where a woman stood up and objected to the use of the word “citizen” because she said it excluded her and many others who, technically, were not citizens. She and many others who participate in engagement processes may be landed immigrants, recent or even longtime residents of this country. They are part of the fabric of our communities and have a legitimate voice in public discussions -- even though they may not have a right to vote here. Whatever their official status, they are stakeholders, community members, individuals who speak for themselves, or representatives who speak for their organizations. They are people who, today, want and expect a role in helping to set the public agenda. This is an important extension of the democratic process we are witnessing.
I came to appreciate the importance of public engagement well before I joined the Ontario Trillium Foundation last year. Prior to that, I was Senior Advisor for Stakeholder Relations to the Premier of Ontario. One of my main responsibilities was to design and enable public forums where we discussed issues too important to leave the public out of the public policy process. In my current position as Chair of the Ontario Trillium Foundation, I continue to encourage a process of engagement with our many stakeholders – whether they are grantees, community organizations, volunteers, government or members of the public in general.
A word about the Foundation: It is the largest in Canada, and gives more than 1,500 grants a year totaling $100 million to building healthy and vibrant communities in a province that is more than twice the size of Texas. Our grants support human and social services, arts and culture, sports and recreation, and the environment. We cover lot of territory – sectoral, social, economic and geographical. That means we have a lot of contact with the public, with feet on the ground and an ear to the ground in pretty well every part of this province. As a government agency assisted by more than 300 volunteers from across the province who make up our Grant Review Teams, and interacting with thousands of community groups, we have a real stake in engaging and connecting with the public.
What we’ve seen at the Foundation, and in government over the years, is that the nature of engagement has changed dramatically. Public policy is no longer the exclusive preserve of the public sector. The public has taken its place as a contributor to and participant in the process – aided and abetted by governments, I must add.
Governments have gone from consulting with stakeholders – largely a one-way process – to conversing with them in a more genuine form of two-way dialogue. In the traditional pre-budget consultation process, for instance, the Finance people would hear presentations and receive wish lists from various interest groups, who would make their case for more support, less regulation or whatever the particular ‘ask’. The officials and politicians would listen respectfully and thank the groups for submitting their briefs. Then everyone would go away while the budget makers crunched their numbers, calculated political risks, and crafted their budget. The feedback from the pre-budget consultations –the Government’s response to what it had heard – was the budget itself. Not much dialogue there.
Then things began to change. Governments – at least some governments -- started moving from consultation to conversation. Governments have begun to understand that the more engaged their stakeholders are, the more buy-in there will be at the outset, and the better the results will be for everyone.
When this government took office in 2003, they soon discovered there was a budget crisis – a large and growing deficit, plus many and growing demands from groups clamouring for attention and support. The government decided that there was a need to truly engage 12.5 million Ontarians in appreciating and working together to get through this financial crunch.
The government did not just sit back and invite the public to pitch their private interests. We gave them information, provided a common agenda for discussion and got them working alongside us in setting priorities and making choices. The pre-Budget Town Halls were a first for Ontario – and a first anywhere, I believe. These were genuine conversations with the people of Ontario on what the focus of spending, saving, priorities and policies should be. The government received good, thoughtful advice and, though they obviously couldn’t take all of it, they used a lot of it.
The engagement process happened on many levels. It included not only town hall meetings, but intensive one-day dialogues with representative participants in different communities. The government also created a Town Hall Ontario website to replicate the engagement process online. Virtual engagement is still an emerging phenomenon, but I believe, more and more, this is where the future of engagement lies.
At the Ontario Trillium Foundation, we’ve been applying the rules of engagement in our work with grantees and other organizations around the province.
We know it’s no longer good enough to go out and listen to your communities and stakeholders; we have to be prepared to respond to them. That, by definition, is a genuine dialogue.
Earlier this year, the Foundation launched a number of Community Conversations -- a series of town hall meetings in eight centres across the province, as well as online. We wanted to learn how the foundation could better align its grantmaking with the changing needs of Ontario’s volunteer and not-for-profit sector.
We met, not just with grantees, but with civic leaders and all kinds of community organizations. We weren’t there to tell them how to fill out their grant applications or lecture them on how to meet our objectives. Rather, we wanted to find out how we could better align our mission and our objectives with theirs -- those of the organizations and communities we serve.
One of the commitments we made was to keep the conversation going. We thought it was important – necessary, in fact – to share what people told us, give them feedback on what we had learned, and tell them what was going to happen as a result. We weren’t the circus coming to town one day, putting on a show and leaving the next.
Our report on those community conversations hasn’t been released yet. But I can tell you that when it does come out before the end of this year, it will contain very specific ideas for how the Foundation will do its part to respond to the new demographic, social and economic realities that communities face. I can also tell you that every group who spoke with us will hear their voices and see their views reflected in that report.
I mentioned earlier the importance of connecting online to individuals and communities. Not everyone can get to those town hall meetings, especially those who live in remote communities. I believe it’s not just our opportunity, but our obligation to talk to people where and when it’s convenient to them. And not just to survey them – that can be likened to a high-tech form of the one-way conversation – but to use technology as a tool of true engagement.
The potential for online engagement is huge, and I believe we are in the very early days of using the web to expand our reach and make consultation a much richer experience. One day, the richness and reach inherent in online engagement will make our efforts today look pretty simplistic. The concept of “mass customization” is no longer an oxymoron for companies in tailoring their products and services to the precise needs of their customers. The time is coming, I believe, when governments and foundations and public agencies of all descriptions will be able to personalize their engagement with stakeholders through virtual, as well as face-to-face, channels.
So governments and public agencies, here in Canada and elsewhere, have evolved from one-way consultation, to two-way conversation and are now in the midst of exploring new frontiers for enhancing the richness and reach of the engagement process through new media. The next chapter of public engagement is being written, and it promises to be an exciting one. |