If you are a local public agency, nonprofit or business leader, how do you think about the people who live in your area? Are they voters? Donors? Customers of your product? Of a service? Volunteers? Leaders and staff at agencies routinely use language and practices that regard residents in terms of the function they play in [...]
It was a pleasure to reconnect with the City of Burlingame this year, our first partner in San Mateo County’s Home for All Community Engagement Learning Network. Together in 2018 we piloted a redesign of how to convene local communities for broader and deeper mutual learning about options for addressing the region’s most pressing issue: affordable [...]
How do we make sense of the difficulty employers are having when looking for workers when there are so many people unemployed or underemployed hoping to get a job? One major factor is that the online resume screening that most companies use is deleting all kinds of people who could be strong candidates if the criteria [...]
More and more jobs are advertised online and computers are screening the resumes. Creating a resume that gets read and noticed is hard for anyone and can be especially challenging for adult literacy students. Research by the U.S. Department of Education indicates that nearly 25 percent of adults in California struggle with basic literacy skills. For [...]
Susan Stuart Clark was recently interviewed by Mary Leong for the PlaceSpeak blog. The conversation focused largely on Common Knowledge’s approach to community-driven design. Below are excerpts of the full interview; click here to visit the original. What’s the difference between user-centered design and community-driven design? User-centered design is really popular these days, and Common Knowledge [...]
A student from Berkeley Reads looks over the 2016 Easy Voter Guide. "This one is a lot better than the other one," he said. "It is simpler to understand." Busting the apathy myth: an origin story The seminal project that launched Common Knowledge over 20 years ago was the "Key to Community Voter Involvement Project." [...]
Common Knowledge facilitated a December 2016 offsite day for Code for America. The end of 2016 was full of workshops for the next generation of civic leaders. On November 3rd we presented a pre-summit workshop at the Code for America Summit in Oakland: The Next Generation of Community Engagement. There are an increasing number of new tools for [...]
Common Knowledge was originally founded to put a more inclusive “public” in public participation. Over the years, we’ve grown to see it’s equally important to put more “unity” in community. At Common Knowledge, we’ve designed hundreds of programs and trainings that bring people together to listen together and learn together. This cumulative experience leads us to [...]
Shhh…can you hear that? It’s the sound of an invisible movement. Over 33,000 people across the U.S. and Canada are engaging thousands – and, at times, millions — of people in doing something that most people have no idea is happening. What are they doing? They’re leading conversations – a different kind of conversation that challenges [...]
The proliferation of digital engagement tools and the broader civic innovation movement present an enormous opportunity for those of us interested in increasing civic and community engagement, especially at the local level. A comprehensive study about the state of public participation in local decision making in California confirms that many local governments are stuck in the [...]
