Citizen Action

Focusing sharply on decisions and asking good questions are essential skills for effective citizen action. 

 

In many communities around the country, citizen action efforts promoting individual self-advocacy, leadership development and citizen participation have successfully incorporated RQI methods. 

Using the Right Question Strategy not only motivates citizens to take action, but ultimately allows them to achieve more effective action because they are able to: 

  • Recognize that there are decisions made on many levels of public institutions and government 
  • Participate in decision-making processes 
  • Hold local elected officials accountable

Citizens using RQI skills for the first time also discover the importance of expanding the skill base of their entire community. They move from being spokespeople on behalf of their community to being informal educators who see the need to teach RQI methods to their neighbors.

 

Examples

  • A group of women in a New Hampshire welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), began to see new possibilities after learning the RQ Strategy. One observer noted that: The women in the program began to take action in new ways because they now had the power to ask how the decision is made.
  • Another group of women in a housing project in southern New Hampshire used RQI skills to question some of the practices of the New Hampshire Division of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF). State officials were so impressed by the way the women were raising important questions and advocating for themselves that they invited them to join a process for producing information that parents need to know about their rights in any investigation process. Soon after, the women became resources for the state agency in efforts to improve working relationships with all parents entering the system, as well as in efforts to make agency decision-making processes more transparent. Lynn Cutler of the NH Department of Health and Human Services wrote that RQI: provided…the methodology for imparting advocacy skills to parents. 
  • At the request of The Boston Foundation, RQI developed a training on "Active Citizenship and Political Empowerment" as part of a Community Building Curriculum. Our training was successfully piloted in Dorchester and Roxbury, MA. Some participants, who had never been to a public meeting before, described how the process helped them discover the value of their ideas and the importance of participation. One individual put it simply: I discovered I had an opinion. This discovery made it easier to take the first step towards getting involved. 
  • In 2007, two years after Hurricane Katrina struck The Gulf Coast, The Neighborhoods Partnership Network in New Orleans invited RQI to work with neighborhood leaders so they could participate more effectively in decision-making on the neighborhood, municipal, state and federal levels. Residents and neighborhood leaders wanted not just to partake in large planning processes, but also to understand better how to hold elected officials accountable. Participants in the RQI training learned to break down overwhelming issues into specific decisions they could identify and try to influence. 
  • The Center for Collaborative Planning and its regional network based in Sacramento, CA has been teaching the RQ strategy as part of a coalition-building effort. This effort seeks to address needs of low-income families in many of California’s poorest counties. 
 

Voices from the Field

(RQI skills are) a gift that can help us advocate for ourselves and motivate other people in the neighborhood to join in. 

Community leader, Sylvia of the St. Roc neighborhood

They don't have to depend on me or others to speak for them, using RQI they can do that for themselves, they speak for themselves, they find their own voice. RQI allows people who don't usually speak up to find their own voice. 

Faye Kennedy, The Center for Collaborative Planning, California