Community Engagement

The Center collaborated with Lincoln’s largest public, private, and philanthropic organizations to vision and compile widely-used reports in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2019 that present Lincoln over time and in comparison to other communities and the U.S. as a whole. The reports have been used by a wide variety of organizations in strategic planning, grant writing, advocacy and education, and investment decisions. The report spurred interest in community leaders to take action to nurture Lincoln’s assets and address challenges. This led to a city-wide visioning project eliciting ideas from over 2,000 residents to create a community agenda now known as Prosper Lincoln.

Learn more by visiting the Lincoln Vital Signs website.

The Center occupies a central and strategic role in visioning and implementing the Prosper Lincoln initiative, which brings together leaders from across the community to create system change in the following five areas: early childhood, innovative workforce, strong neighborhoods, affordable housing, and civic investments. Learn more by visiting the Prosper Lincoln website.

Significant aspects of Prosper Lincoln include: 

• Engaging neighbors, community leaders, business leaders, policy makers, and nonprofit leaders in implementing a community-wide agenda. 
• Participation by dozens of University faculty, staff, and departments.
• Spurring philanthropic funds supporting scholarships for early childhood education students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
• Establishing first-time kindergarten readiness assessment by Lincoln Public Schools.
• Establishing community-wide Read Aloud 15 Minutes initiative working with Lincoln’s public libraries and public and private museums as the core, funded by local dollars and federal support from the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
• Organizing agencies into one-stop coalition to raise awareness about career pathways; hosting career fairs for veterans, job seekers and case managers; and hosting tours with local businesses.
• Consulting with local businesses to create career pathways for under-employed persons.
• Creating Reverse Pitch and State of the Practice events connecting tech driven businesses to UNL students in computer science and engineering.
• Establishing the Future Builders program surveying 4,150 local high school students, identifying those with entrepreneurial profiles to participate in events, and offering the top students a month-long immersion at the Clifton Strengths Institute at UNL.

The “Community Engagement in the State Courts Initiative” is a joint collaboration of the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) and the University of Nebraska Public Policy Center. With funding from the State Justice Institute (SJI), the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) initiated six pilot projects to learn more about how courts can best engage the public to overcome social inequities and bias in the court system and build trust between various publics and the courts.

Following the completion of a national Listening Tour sponsored by the Initiative’s Advisory Board, the NCSC invited individual or aggregations of trial courts or court systems to submit letters of interest in participating in the pilots. Listening sessions were held in three cities and broadcast under the title “Courting Justice.” Eleven main issues surfaced from the listening sessions and through an online survey of court and civic leaders active in efforts to reduce racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and other forms of bias in the courts. In their letters of interest in participation in the pilot community engagements, courts needed to express their willingness to design and implement a community engagement project designed to (a) improve trust between courts and minority or low-income communities, and (b) make progress on eliminating a disparity and its impact in a specific problem area.

The project is funded by the State Justice Institute and the National Center for State Courts as a strategic initiative carried out in collaboration with the National Consortium on Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts and the Conference of Chief Justices.  Visit the National Center for State Courts website to learn more or read about the project.

The PPC has worked with the City of Lincoln since 2008. As part of the City of Lincoln’s continuing initiative to assess community satisfaction, the Public Policy Center partners with the City of Lincoln mayor’s office to gather public opinions on particular issues of importance to Lincoln residents. In one such set of efforts, a random sample of Lincolnites is regularly surveyed by mail and an online survey is offered to residents who were not selected to take the random-sample survey. In the past, Lincolnites also engaged in community conversations about key issues, using processes implemented by the PPC. The resident satisfaction survey and community conversations address issues relating to future city priorities and inform city budget decisions.

As part of the PPC’s research on public engagement and trust, we have worked with the City of Lincoln to create unique interactive surveys which have allowed residents to choose city programs important to them, and see the impacts of funding on the city budget and property taxes. The PPC has investigated the impacts of asking residents to fund versus cut different programs, and the use of different decision rules in small group deliberations about city budgeting issues. The long-term goal of this research is to enable public managers and policymakers/elected officials to be intentional and evidence-based in selecting the components of their citizen involvement techniques for use in areas such as budgeting, performance measurement, and management processes.