Citizen Participation Program Will Help Organize Neighborhoods

New Orleans may be a city of neighborhoods, but those neighborhoods have historically been disorganized at best when it comes to citizen participation.

Hurricane Katrina may have changed all that.

Before the storm, New Orleans had more than 250 neighborhood organizations representing the city’s 70-plus neighborhoods. In many cases, different organizations that claimed to represent a specific area couldn’t even agree on the boundaries of that neighborhood. It was confusing for City Council members when more than one organization claimed to represent a particular neighborhood.

The Unified New Orleans Plan called for an organized citizen participation arrangement that would serve as a permanent mechanism for ongoing citizen input into city government policy setting and decision making.

So the Committee for a Better New Orleans/Metropolitan Area Committee (CBNO/MAC) and the Neighborhood Partnership Network (NPN) got together to get the ball rolling. A $50,000 grant from the Greater New Orleans Foundation helped them get grants from four national foundations to start organizing a Citizens Participation Program.

Keith Twitchell, president of CBNO/MAC, said his committee is trying to provide a forum for citizen participation. They’re not telling people how the Citizen Participation Program should be organized. That’s up to the citizens. They just want to make sure it’s organized so it can have a voice in city government.

“We want to convene a series of public meetings in which the people of the city of New Orleans will design the Citizen Participation Program,” Twitchell said, noting that the first round of meetings was held in February.

The citizens will determine how many rounds of meetings will be held. Twitchell said it will probably
be three or four and they should be completed in about 18 months.

“If the people build it, own it and design it, we’ll get a lot of participation,” he said. “If people are engaged and feel their voices are being heard, then they will trust government. It just makes for a healthier relationship between people and government, and that has so many ramifications.”

As convener of these meetings, CBNO/MAC and NPN have a three-pronged mission:

• To reach people to let them know about the meetings
• To emphasize that the level of participation in UNOP needs to be sustained into the future and
• To make sure people know that this will provide them with an opportunity to create a clear and unified voice for themselves and make that permanent

“The entire city was in crisis after Hurricane Katrina, so citizen participation went up,” Twitchell said. “The further we get away from the crisis, the more that participation will go down unless we do something like this to see it through.”

Twitchell said GNOF’s willingness to support the project “was instrumental in us being able to get support from the national foundations.”