Supported by Community Foundation for Northern Ireland as part of the Civic Innovation Programme
Community Dialogue, in partnership with Aisling Bishop and AvilaMedia developed a pilot series of political education and participative democracy workshops. The workshops formed part of our wider Civic Innovation Pilot Programme.
The intentions of the series are to build the capacity of disenfranchised citizens to engage political institutions with confidence, and to understand new and emerging participatory methods of decision making.
The series includes educational presentations combined with consensus building dialogues, responding to participant’s interests and concerns through a reactive learning process. Participants were given support to identify issues and action plan to help drive positive change in their communities.
Feedback from this pilot series demonstrated that citizens not only feel voiceless and alienated from decision making processes, but that access to information and education on political structures is significantly lacking.
Participants were invited to express their thoughts on politics and democracy during workshop exercises at the start and end of the 5-week series. The results can be seen below.
Community Dialogue is now working hard, with the support of our partners and participant groups, to expand and deepen the workshop process. To find out more please visit our current programmes page.
Read the “Making Politics Work for People” article on AvilaMedia here: https://www.avilamedia.org/2020/08/14/making-politics-work-for-people/
