Conducting Community Forums

Your step-by-step guide to successful community forums Community forums are powerful tools for educating the public, building consensus, focusing action, and influencing public policy. The Fieldstone Alliance Nonprofit Guide to Conducting Community Forums provides step-by-step instructions to plan and carry out effective community forums with lasting results. It's based on the authors' experience with more than 70 community forums on a wide variety of topics. The proven models and best practices provided in this book will help readers: Clarify goals and decide whether a forum is the best way to achieve them; Select the best type of forum to meet your goals; Develop a timeline, create a budget, and recruit sponsors; Engage an audience early; Manage the logistics of event planning and execution; Prepare for pitfalls, unexpected requests, and challenging situations; and Sustain the results and bring about lasting, desired changes.

You don't need a lot of time or money. This book includes practical tools for planning and trouble-shooting and "Forums on a Shoestring" sidebars to help you save time and money; a comprehensive forums checklist to ensure that no key planning steps are missed; a troubleshooting section to help planners anticipate and avoid typical problems; sample agendas, concept paper, evaluation forums, and marketing brochures; reproducible worksheets to help the planning process move along; and resources pointing you toward helpful books, organizations, and web sites.

This book is recommended for all kinds of community groups, meant to be used in many situations. It's particularly helpful to any community group, citizens, nonprofits, foundations, government, or businesses; facilitators and event planners.