V.: Flagship Initiative - Community Engagement

Launch a broad Community Engagement initiative

Other Information:

Each agency was asked to select at least one Flagship initiative – a new, specific project to promote transparency, participation or collaboration. Rather than selecting one concrete project, EPA determined we would have more impact by defining and launching a broad Community Engagement initiative, with many concrete projects across the Agency. Community Engagement refers to a broad spectrum of activities intended to promote a greater understanding of, participation in, and contribution by individuals regarding the environmental issues that affect or interest them most. EPA considered several areas of its core mission where improvements could be achieved by implementing open government principles. The selection of the Community Engagement theme presents many challenges, and the Agency believes it also offers the greatest source of growth potential by encompassing many of the elements associated with the other themes. The broad scope of this theme also allows us to select a range of projects, many with ties to suggestions posed during the public participation/input process. We selected Community Engagement by applying the following evaluation criteria developed by the Agency’s Open Government Work Group: * Supports the Agency’s strategic goals and the Administrator’s priorities * Degree to which the initiative supports openness principles * Anticipated degree of impact and benefits * Feasibility and likelihood of success * Transformative value Each Flagship candidate area (Community Engagement, Regulatory Involvement and OneEPA) met these criteria; however, the Agency selected Community Engagement because of its wide applicability—potentially influencing nearly every part of the Agency. We crafted this initiative with opportunities to apply what is learned throughout the Agency, providing a higher return on our invested effort. To implement the Flagship initiative, EPA selected a number of projects - each designed to involve the public and/or a particular segment of the population in greater depth than activities typically conducted. Individually, each project varies in how it will engage the public. The Agency expects to learn what is most effective and make use of this information as it evaluates policies and standard practices that will be of benefit to future Agency efforts. The sections that follow briefly describe the selected projects, organized around various components of the community that EPA intends to target as part of our community engagement initiative. follow briefly describe the selected projects, organized around various components of the community that EPA intends to target as part of our community engagement initiative. There are similarities among the projects which offer opportunities for knowledge transfer and lessons learned we can apply to future efforts. Additional information on the Community Engagement Flagship and individual projects will be available at our ―Evaluating Our Progress‖ section of OpenEPA (http://www.epa.gov/open/evaluate.html). The public can follow our progress and find additional details about projects and how they support EPA’s Community Engagement efforts. Information for each project includes: * How the project supports one or more of the three open government principles. * How agency operations will be improved/benefits across the Agency. * How we will identify affected and interested parties, engage them and maintain a dialogue. * Identification of any external partners. * How we will measure improvements to openness principles. * Steps we will take to sustain the initiative and build in improvements. Answers to the above questions for each project and activity within our initiative can be found at http://www.epa.gov/open/flagship/index.html

Objective(s):

V.A: Environmental Conversation

V.B: Rules and Regulations

V.C: Mobile Applications

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