Moving public outreach towards a profession

TriMet’s new light rail alignment through downtown would not have happened as smoothly without a highly effective public outreach program. Yet how do practitioners become equipped for this kind of work?

Recently I had the pleasure of joining the local chapter of the International Association for Public Participation (also known as IAP2) for a social event in Portland. For those not familiar with this organization, IAP2 is one of the leading professional organizations for those who work in public outreach and community affairs fields.

Many topics flowed over the beer and chips at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne, but one struck me as particularly apt: there is little professional education in public outreach.

This isn’t to say there is no training available. IAP2 itself has a certificate program that it offers on a regular basis. Along the same lines, many educational institutions offer coursework in communications, conflict management, mediation, and other similarly applicable areas of study. There is, however, a distinct lack of cohesively centered coursework on public outreach.

Why does this matter? Why not simply study these other related fields and skill sets? As one veteran public outreach person stated that night, many of these fields simply don’t directly translate to public outreach scenarios. Mediators, for example, generally work between a pair of individuals, whereas public outreach practitioners must deal with groups of stakeholders that may number in the dozens or even hundreds. Simply from a logistical standpoint, it will not be possible in the given time to satisfy all parties equally.

In a similar vein, facilitation, with its emphasis on consensus, often falls short. While consensus is certainly a noble ideal, in the tangible world it is not always possible. In some cases it can slow down a process so far that it becomes untenable, and in the worst case it can hand over all the power over a decision to the one person who refuses to say yes. Fairness is one thing, but gridlock is entirely another.

This is the heart of the tension within public outreach. On one hand, a public outreach practitioner must attempt to secure, as much as possible, consensus from the public regarding a path forward. On the other hand, the practitioner also serves the overall project itself, facilitating its successful completion.

While education in conflict resolution, negotiation, facilitation, and mediation are valuable to a public outreach practitioner, there are gaping holes in each of these fields that fail to address the specific circumstances of facilitating large stakeholder groups and/or the public at large in a public realm setting. Even more distressing, in many agencies the public outreach component is handled by planners or engineers with little or no training in communication whatsoever. The public outreach veteran I was sharing a beer with last week had had to learn much of what he knew on the job, the hard way. Further, it was he, not I, who wanted to drive home the point: there is a very real need to synthesize an educational program that not only provides future public outreach practitioners with skill sets and tools, but also the unique settings and tensions of the public realm. It is time to move the field beyond continuing education credit trainings and professional association certificate programs and into a unique academic sub-discipline that mirrors its professional counterpart.