Civic Participation and Community Action Sourcebook

Prep and Practice

Choosing an Issue to Work On

After you have drawn out the issues that concern people, the group needs to figure out which one they want to work on. Here are some activities that can help to focus the group.

1. Categorizing/clustering
Put all the issues or ideas on post-its (one idea per stickie) and stick them all on a wall or a table. As a group or in pairs, have people make clusters of items they see as related, and then label the category. (Some facilitators like to lead this activity in silence to encourage more equal participation.) To debrief, have people talk about how they made sense of the items and the relationships they saw among them. Since there are usually many ways to categorize things, this invites discussion about the different ways people see the world. By creating categories, it also helps to narrow the number of issues the group will choose from.

2. Prioritizing
One popular way to prioritize issues is by dot voting. In contrast to simple voting, where each person only votes for one choice, dot voting gives each person several votes and allows them to distribute their votes, evenly or unevenly, across the choices. This allows people to weight their support for the options. So if we all get three dots, I can give one dot to three separate issues, or I can give all my dots to one issue that I feel strongly about.

3. Focusing your topic
Before making the final selection of an issue to work on, you might want to think about the size of the issues you’re considering. Are they so big that it will be difficult to do anything about them? To figure out if the issues need more focus, try to answer these questions:

• How is this issue a concern in our daily lives?
• What change do we want to see?
• What could we possibly do?
• What would action look like?

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