Resources
113 Resources found
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Public Participation in the Throes of Coronavirus
CBI Latin America Director David Plumb reflects on the unique challenges posed by convening while social distancing in the wake of Coronavirus.
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Using Online Tools to Empower Collaboration
In this post, CBI offers more specific tips about the kinds of online tools you can use to generate participant input, both when participants are online together, and over time.
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Breaking Through to the Table: New Thoughts on a Perennial Problem
CBI is employing four critical elements of its breakthrough collaboration framework – trust building, creativity, negotiation, and joint action – to support stakeholders who are facing what seem like intractable disagreements on a public issue. These ingredients are powerful catalysts for collaboration, but they beg the question: how do we get stakeholders to the table in the first place? Using a challenging case in a New Jersey community as an example, CBI Managing Directors David Fairman and Stacie Smith discuss enabling conditions and catalysts needed to bring parties together to consider the possibility of collaboration.
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Breakthrough Collaboration: What is It and How Do We Help Make It Happen?
CBI’s vision is a world in which the most complex problems are solved through collaboration. In this era of high polarization on pressing public issues, creating strong partnerships to meet public challenges is more urgent, and more difficult. At CBI, we have been discussing the need for what we are calling "breakthrough collaboration" to help groups and organizations work together in situations where trust is low and there is no shared vision, yet the stakeholders know they need to work together over the long haul to tackle the challenge at hand. In this article, Managing Director David Fairman and Associate Managing Director Stacie Smith present CBI’s preliminary thinking on what it takes to advance breakthrough collaboration, and how the key ingredients can be blended to create sustainable solutions to seemingly intractable problems. We welcome your input as we continue to explore what it takes to achieve breakthrough collaboration!
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Past as Present: Facilitating collaborative processes with those who have been historically wronged
How do fundamental issues of identity, justice, and power affect the facilitation of dialogue with groups that include individuals who have experienced injustice? How does one’s own identity as a facilitator affect the ability to remain neutral and help these groups address challenges? Managing Director Pat Field reflects on lessons learned from engagements over his 25 years as a facilitator and mediator.
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CBI launched diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative
Core to CBI’s mission is our belief that all who may be affected by a decision should have a voice in the conversation. Including the perspectives of marginalized or underrepresented populations is important morally, and practically, to ensure wise and durable agreements. CBI is engaging in a process to explore how well we are living the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in our organization and in our work. We offer some initial insights about how to thoughtfully undertake a DEI initiative.
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Volunteer Committees: Set Them Up for Success!
Some of CBI's most rewarding projects have been with local committees that engage members of the community to make important decisions that affect that community or region. As CBI Senior Mediator Carri Hulet reflected on some of these facilitations, a number of insights and learnings surfaced about how to set up, support, and reward these volunteer bodies. Here are four suggestions for choosing the right people, setting the right expectations, and providing the right support right off the bat.
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Building a National Stakeholder Consensus on "Working Up"
Central to the American Dream is the belief that through education and hard work, each generation can raise its standard of living, and create greater opportunities for the next. But over the past forty years, incomes for lower-wage workers have stagnated, and economic inequality has increased. Education and hard work are no longer a guarantee of upward mobility for lower-wage workers.
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Addressing Land and Property Claims Amidst Rubble in Marawi
Facing growing pressure and concern to generate a strategy to address land and property issues in Marawi, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) turned to the Consensus Building Institute. CBI mediators have helped develop systems to manage post-conflict land and property issues in peace processes in Guatemala, Timor Leste, and Sri Lanka.
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CBI Helps West Virginia Schools Rebuild After Historic Flooding
It’s hard to find an arena closer to people’s hearts than their schools. In Nicholas County, West Virginia, despite shrinking enrollment and tight budgets, the rival high schools in Richwood and Summersville have served as the centers of civic community life. So it wasn’t surprising that a proposal to consolidate the schools erupted in controversy and intense conflict.
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Community Engagement in Federal Site Remediation
Community advisory groups (CAGs) can play an important role in engaging the community to manage long-term cleanup sites. However, it's vital to set them up for success.
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Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The Pitfalls of Cognitive Bias
Cognitive biases can provide shortcuts to decision-making, but in complex and contentious processes, they often get in the way of making the best agreements.
