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CPO: Citizen Participation-by-Objectives A 3 Day Management Course by Hans and Annemarie Bleiker. This course picks up where the SDIC course leaves off. It, therefore, is important that only people who have had the SDIC training attend. The CPO course cannot be conducted at the same pace if some of the participants have not had the SDIC training.
What is CPO all about? Once you have the solid understanding of:
CP Techniques: You will spend about half of your time in this course rummaging through the tool-box of CP Techniques. You'll become intimately familiar with the 15 - 25 CP Techniques that are most relevant to you and the other course participants. Course participants help pick the CP Techniques that will be covered.
Meetings, Advisory Committees, and the Media Although agencies tend to over-use Meetings, Meetings are a group of techniques we can't afford to ignore. You'll learn the "DOs" and "don't" of several of the most relevant types of Meetings that you'll likely be using your job. You'll learn about brilliant things people have come up with for making Meetings work better, . . . and dumb things we are likely to do -- but don't need to do, if we use our heads -- in meetings. You'll discover that, although it's true that most public officials find Meetings frustratingly ineffective, it does not have to be that way. Once you change your citizen participation approach to one where Meetings - as well all the other CP Techniques - are simply tools, . . . tools for accomplishing specific objectives, . . . tools that have specific strengths and weaknesses, . . . you'll find that Meetings can be very effective and constructive.
The same goes for Advisory Committees, and the Media. You'll discover that these are not inherently frustrating mechanisms. They only frustrate you because you try to use them for things they were never intended for in the first place, or because you use them poorly.
Most agencies who create and use Advisory Committees find a few years into it that - in spite of nothing but the best of intentions all around - often everyone winds up angry with each other . . . You'll discover that it doesn't have to be that way at all . . . Advisory Committees have the potential - provided you use them strictly as objectives-driven tools - to be among the richest, most productive, constructive CP Techniques . . .
In spite of all the bad experiences you may have had with the Media . . . you'll learn that you can use the Media as a powerful communications tool; . . . you'll discover that the Media can be a fantastic . . . virtually indispensable . . . communications tool . . . provided you're will to stop bad-mouthing them long enough to take a new look at them and what they can do for you as a Consent-Building tool.
You'll learn to look at Meetings and Advisory Committees in ways you had never before. And, you'll discover the Media, and your relationship to them need not be at all what you have been experiencing.
A Sampling of Other CP Techniques We also expose you in the CPO course to a variety of other CP Techniques that you may never have thought of as tools in your Consent-Building efforts. This includes such technqiues as:
You'll get exposed to enough of a variety of fundamentally different, innovative CP Techniques, where you'll start to get your sea-legs. You'll realize that:
"Hands-On" CP-Program Design The other half of the time of the CPO course, you'll spend designing - via hands-on exercises - a Citizen Participation program for an actual project that you and/or your course participants are currently working on. You will learn a systematic, step-by-stop process for assessing your project's CP Needs - and then - designing a CP Program that's tailored to meet those specific needs. For this hands-on part, you should have a candidate - project in mind when you sign up for the course. The best candidate projects - for the purposes of the hands-on exercise - are projects that are both:
The systematic, step-by-step process for creating your own tailor-made CP Program has you do the following
At the conclusion of this step, you will have identified virtualy all of the pitfalls, hurdles, land mines, political ambushes, etc ... that are strewn along your project's path . . i.e. all the "CP Needs" . . . But, you'll also have done more than this . . . you will also have learned how to go about identifying all these potential CP pitfalls. . . for any project or program . . . You will have learned a process, . . . a methodology for doing so.
2. Next, you learn how to prioritize those CP Needs . . . so that you'll not waste scarce CP resources on trying to fix relatively unimportant CP needs. . .
3. Finally, you learn to design a CP program that's tailored to your project's particular high-priority CP Needs. This final design step, itself, consists of several steps . . . They're all aimed at turning the potentially overwhelming task of "Developing the Informed Consent" of all your Potentially Affected Interests (PAIs) into a straight-forward, common sense, step-by-step process that takes no more than a few hours, . . .
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