“So you do know this is broken. But addressing broken things takes courage and it takes the strength of character to say, easy solutions are not going to give us the improvements and address the real concerns that we need to have addressed.”

~Rev. Solomon Missouri

DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA. The City of Durham’s Community Engagement Division works to improve the quality of life for people who live, work, and play in Durham neighborhoods. A cornerstone of this work is Equitable Community Engagement: the process of encouraging project/program involvement with community members to prioritize, highlight, and amplify the voices of the underrepresented and disproportionately impacted.

To catapult this effort, the Community Engagement team partnered with Cortico to surface these voices and build more transparent, trusted, and responsive feedback channels.

To begin, the City collaborated with community members to organize small group conversations where residents shared their stories and visions for their communities. This process engaged community groups to assist in reaching out to participants, designing questions, and facilitating conversations.

After the conversations were facilitated and recorded, they are uploaded onto Fora—Cortico’s unique human-listening + machine-learning system.

Data analysts, Durham city staff, and community members used Fora’s tools to actively engage with the conversations to analyze, make meaning, and thematically organize the stories that were shared. The team mapped related experiences in order to come up with a fuller picture of the experiences of Durham residents. Relevant City departments can use these findings to inform their short- and long-term work.

In addition to elevating concerns related to public safety, transportation, affordable housing, and the desire to develop stronger relationships with other residents, these conversations highlighted that residents are eager to partner with the City to bring change to their communities.By adopting the tools of Cortico’s Fora, some of the barriers to equitable community engagement were removed: by amplifying the voices of residents who tend to shy away from town halls, decline to take surveys, or prefer to share thoughts and ideas in small group settings amongst peers. The result is a sustainable system that supports community members’ ability to influence City decision-making.

Coming soon in October, 2023: Be Heard Durham—an interactive portal of Durham’s community conversations.

Cortico’s conversation portals are interactive, public-facing platforms to explore and listen to stories and experiences in a thematically organized way. Soon, Durham residents and beyond can explore experiences and stories by theme, city district, and community organization, among others.

Portals are a useful platform to memorialize conversations, amplify real voices, and provide proof of listening. This transparent sharing of stories creates trust within the community and lifts up the voices of the generous participants who took time to reflect on their personal experiences. In this way, the portal shows its power by telling the story of their stories.

Get a sneak peak of the portal experience with the Be Heard Durham voice medley below!