Partner with Us and Sponsor a Critical Conversation

 

Does your community need to come together to find common ground? Do you have a real need to have a meeting of the minds, where everyone can participate equally and all voices count?

We have the means to hold these conversations. Whether you want to:

• Conduct a Future Search Conference for regional planning,
• Prioritize capital expenditures while keeping taxes down,
• Brainstorm new ways to raise revenue for your township
• Hold an electronic town hall 
• Plan a series of focus groups to research planning options

We can facilitate all of the above and much more. We are looking for companies and organizations that want to sponsor an experience in participative democracy. Our soon to be launched Website: Citizens Summit.com will blog about our experiences.

We want to change the tone of our large conversations and put people to work discussing the things that matter to them locally. We are not interested in furthering personal agendas, and we are not willing to help those who seek to divide us. We desire to bring about more light with less heat.

We will design the experiences with you and the meeting owners to create the means for maximum diversity and inclusion, and follow-up. Our tools are state of the art, and our process has been time tested for over 20 years in large and medium size businesses. Now we want to offer our unique set of skills and tools for the greater good.

Sponsoring is easy. We have several funding options for you. It will be similar to funding a golf tournament. You will choose your level of sponsorship. You will be helping your community to come to common ground, explore options, and make better decisions with more community involvement.

If this sounds interesting to you, please contact using the form below. If you’d like to volunteer to be a table facilitator at one of our meetings please contact us. In the future will also be training facilitators how to conduct their own participative processes in the future.

Join us.

McNeil Consultants Inc.

National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD)

I want to take some time today to recognize some other folks doing great work in the area of public participation and deliberative dialogue. About a month ago, I joined the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. I have been both impressed and humbled. These folks really get it. They are living their values and they express themselves eloquently through their work. Go, take a look at their website and see for yourself. Better yet, join up. Become a member and support this important work.

Those of us who facilitate at large companies in the private sector can get lost in our client work and miss out on making a positive contribution in other areas. I remember once tying to play a simple jazz piece on my shakuhachi flute with two street musicians outside the World Bank. I was facilitating a tough meeting, lot of rancor and infighting. I needed a break. So I bypassed lunch, and took my flute outside looking for a quiet place to play and re-center myself. Well, there was no quiet place.

What I did on that marvelous May afternoon was watch two wonderful sax players having at it with the very piece I had recently learned at a shakuhachi camp I had attended. I took up the flute and found that I could play along, only on that song, but I could keep up! The alto dude told me to do a bit of improvisation, and so I did. When I was done the two quickly picked up, non verbally saying “that’s enough” Rob. Afterwards, on their break, the older one quietly said. Hey Rob, "It’s not how far you go out that matters, It’s can you find your way back home.”

For me NCDD is a great way to stay connected to home. Values matter. When I am doing my corporate work, I draw heavily from the values that NCDD espouses.