Our bottom-up participation projects (Activist Solutions Internet Forum and the Dialogue Network for Action) are a way to get your members more creatively involved and more deeply committed. Participants will engage in important problem-solving activities that stimulate and challenge them, and this will strengthen their desire to stay involved. When the time comes to lobby for the resulting proposal – to make phone calls, write legislators, etc. -- they will be more likely to volunteer their time in support of an idea that they helped to craft, refine, and select. They will also tend to more enthusiastic about engaging in strategies they helped to develop.

The project will empower people. Everyone can be heard and responded to in a well-facilitated dialogue, while larger groups can have broader influence. Our goal is to achieve the best of both worlds: the opportunity for constructive meaningful dialogue in small groups and the potential impact of belonging to a larger coalition that can make real change possible.

Groups that offer this kind of bottom-up participation will attract new people. The Forum and DNA's positive solution-oriented approach will also appeal to many strong individuals who have turned off to the rampant negativity and relentless partisanship that pervades mainstream politics.

Good solutions to a host of problems may emerge. There are many urgent issues for our nation to address and too few workable proposals for how to deal with them. Up to now, only the wealthy and well connected have been able to consistently get a hearing– it’s time to find out what everyday people, thinking and acting together, can produce.

Your members will be better informed. By participating in the process, people will become much more familiar with the issues.

Leaders will surface. Program participants will be identified with innovative ideas, and they will develop better facilitation and consensus building skills in the process.

Organizations will learn more about their members. Results can be organized to show the proposals most favored by your membership.

Participants in the program will become better related to each other and the organizations they belong to. New horizontal relationships will emerge to complement and augment the vertical relationship of each individual to your organization’s leadership. Some participants in the first phase of the project, in which proposals will be developed, will meet face-to-face. Others will pursue ongoing dialogue online. They will need to stay in contact as they work on their shared undertaking. After completing their initial task together, groups of like-minded people will be urged to take on additional issues together. Ongoing communities will develop, made up of people sharing common purposes, doing stimulating work together, and communicating both in person and online.

If you would like more information about sponsoring this project, or if you have more questions, please contact us.