Public Consultation & Community Engagement

I have been in elite University classrooms and watched tenured professors miserably fail to maintain the interest and focus of eager undergraduate students who had paid to be there. We asked Carole to bring together Newfoundland beekeepers to discuss biosecurity issues that were simultaneously contentious but also rather dry. She was able to design a process that maintained focus, anticipated trouble, undercut attempts at grandstanding, and gave a voice to everyone – and through all that also stuck to a packed day’s schedule. She (apparently effortlessly) adapted her plans on-the-fly as challenges arose, and at the end of the process we had produced clear, actionable items that had been agreed to by a room full of people that weren’t sure if they could agree to anything at the beginning of the workshop. I’ve been in a lot of meetings and work sessions, in both academic and non-academic settings, and I’ve never seen one that was planned as carefully as Carole’s and yet maintained almost complete flexibility as the schedule, mood, or focus level in the room shifted. I wish we could afford to fly her down to New York to manage acrimonious faculty meetings.