Transforming Communities with the Power of Every Voice Engaged.
Who We Are:
Our vision is a world where everyone participates in their democracy, every day.
The Every Voice Engaged Foundation is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that helps citizens, governments and other nonprofit organizations solve problems that benefit from effective civic engagement. We harness the power of innovative civic-deliberative technology in Every Voice Engaged to connect ordinary citizens together and with governments, nonprofits and industry to address wicked, challenging issues.
What We Do:
Our mission is to create informed and engaged communities capable of driving audacious solutions to joint problems.
We design-build civic engagement apps and platforms like Every Voice Engaged that help avoid the kind of politically polarized talk that prevents community action on serious issues. By using innovating with citizen deliberation and the power of serious games, our platforms help citizens work through tough policy choices and find common ground that government, institutions, or even citizens themselves can act on. Our most successful product, the online deliberative platform Every Voice Engaged/Common Ground for Action (CGA), has been used by local libraries and nonprofits, colleges, universities and K-12 schools, and even in the halls of state legislatures and the US Congress to connect elected officials to their constituents.
How We Do It:
The games work particularly well for resource-prioritization and allocation decisions involving diverse groups of stakeholders such as participatory budgeting. We make it fun, drawing on the same elements of game mechanics and gamification that attract and keep people coming back to games of all types. Each game results in defined deliverables that include action plans that pave the way for future collaboration.
Our Solutions Have Helped 100s of Organizations to:
Plan and produce Participatory Budgeting events that enable residents to collaboratively prioritize spending initiatives.
Activate resources through engagement and making sure that all voices are heard.
Enable difficult conversations, both internally and with constituents.
Produce actionable insights not available from surveys or focus groups.
Resolve competing priorities and get “unstuck” using proven tools and processes.
Create virtuous cycles of success so that even tougher challenges can be tackled confidently.
Typical Groups Include:
Cities & towns
Neighborhood and homeowners associations
Schools/school districts
Arts groups boards of directors