Community Solutions (CS) continues to improve its ability to provide facilitation services to community groups. This past year we've taken on seven community cases requiring different degrees of facilitation skill. These included two State, two County, and three City related cases. We also take on facilitation work for organizational issues dealing with personnel, special projects, and strategic development. Our facilitators work in teams; one lead, one assistant, and one recording facilitator. We leverage our mediation skills to serve as neutral, third-parties who meet with conveners, plan a specific facilitation approach, hold initial stakeholder meetings, and facilitate discussions on difficult issues. We also utilize a wide range of polling, decision-making, brain-barn storming, issues-solutions collaborative practices, and more. Our latest innovation is the use of Crowdsourcing (Cs) in which we use the reach of the internet to pose open-ended, challenging questions to the public or 'crowd' asking for their perspectives, ideas, and solutions to community issues. Our latest Cs challenge is facilitating group discussions on noise and complaints between Bend's River West neighbors and Century Center businesses, the most current 'Issues-Solutions' matrix for which is included below.
