Pensacola Partners With Change.org to Let Residents Set City Priorities

Civic Dialogues opens today for a six-week run, and Mayor D.C. Reeves says he wants residents to move past complaints and toward proposals City Hall can actually act on.

This week, the City of Pensacola launched Civic Dialogues, a new partnership with Change.org—the company describes itself as the world’s leading platform for social change—built to surface and rank the ideas residents care about most. From Sept. 3 through Oct. 12, any Pensacola resident can post an idea or respond to a neighbor’s suggestion at civicdialogues.org/pensacola. The site is live now.

• Open now through Oct. 12—a six-week window
• Residents submit ideas and respond to each other’s suggestions online
• Change.org will narrow submissions down to the topics that draw the most support
• A resident panel is expected to turn the top ideas into actionable proposals at a virtual session Reeves says is tentatively planned for mid-November
• Mayor Reeves has committed to reviewing what comes out of the process to see how the city might support it

“I rely on the voices of residents every day to help inform the decisions made in their interest,” Reeves said.

Why it’s different from the annual survey. Pensacola already runs the annual Resident Satisfaction Survey through the University of West Florida’s Haas Center, plus town halls and community meetings. Reeves said Civic Dialogues is meant to work alongside those tools, not replace them—but with a sharper focus. Where the annual survey asks broad questions about whether the city is headed in the right direction, Reeves said this process is built to drill down to the one or two issues residents care about most and push toward solutions. “It’s not necessarily complaint-based, it’s solution-based,” he said.

Where the idea came from. Reeves said he first heard about Civic Dialogues from fellow mayors through the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Change.org is running the same pilot with mayors in Tulsa, Okla.; Erie, Pa.; Kansas City, Mo.; Chattanooga; Jackson, Tenn.; Folsom, Calif.; and Albuquerque, N.M.

“Our process engages a wide net of community members and builds consensus around practical policy solutions,” said Duncan Lockard, general manager of Civic Dialogues at Change.org.

Residents can weigh in now at civicdialogues.org/pensacola.