These are courses that we host, and make them open to the public. Open-Courses are best suited for those who cannot hire us to do on-site training for their team.
- Look to the far-right column (of this website) for the most current schedule, or go look at list of Up-Coming (Open) Courses.
*Should you need to cancel, we charge a $100 cancellation fee unless you reschedule to attend another one of our courses.
Training Open to You
Anyone can join us for a tele-seminar (Consent-Building Clinic), our introductory course (SDIC), or intermediate hands-on workshop (CPO). You can join us as an individual, or have your whole team attend (without having to host the training yourself.)
Monthly Consent-Building Clinics
Turn Your Lunch-Break into Public Participation Power Hour!
In digestible bites, you can get the real world tools you need to deal with:
- NIMBY
- Budget cuts
- Political gridlock
- Internal opposition, etc.
just by joining us for our monthly tele-seminar.
Learn more about the Consent-Building Clinics
SDIC -Systematic Development of Informed Consent
It is fundamentally different from what most public agencies do, and so are the results. Most citizen participation efforts do not have real constructive results. Too often, in spite of good intentions and lots of work: • Public meetings turn into grand-standing sessions that leave citizens and public officials frustrated. • Advisory Committee efforts, more often than not, eventually wind up with everybody being angry with everyone else. (Who needs that?!) Based on 35+ years of research that had its origin at MIT in the late 1960s, SDIC is a practical strategy for you to communicate with your various potentially affected interests.
SDIC is not citizen participation as usual!
SDIC is based on 35+ years of research that had its origin at MIT in the late 1960s. We have trained officials with difficult and inherently controversial missions at all levels of government in disciplines as diverse as environmental regulation, public works, law enforcement, emergency management, education, transportation, resource management, hazardous waste, wildlife management. . . and more.
CPO – Citizen Participation by Objectives
CPO is a 3-day hands-on management course, that picks up where SDIC leaves off, so SDIC is a prerequisite. In this is a hands-on management workshop, you will roll up your sleeves and apply the Bleiker Methodology that you learned in SDIC to an actual project. You will learn how to assess the project’s Citizen Participation Needs, and how to address those needs so that the project is successfully and efficiently implemented.
What kind of project?
- An actual project, plan, or proposal that you, or another student are or will be working on
- One that is likely to be very controversial (such as locating a new hazardous waste site, implementing a new regulation, changing the health benefits within an organization, etc…)
Once you’ve had this training, you will never look at your work, or the public the same!
This course walks you through the steps of what it takes to be an Implementation Genius.