Does Your Community Need a Change?

Reforming your local town council, school board or planning board would be a major undertaking that many politicians and community residents would resist, at least at first. So, before you consider proposing the kind of change advocated on this website, we recommend that you ask yourself the following questions:

Does yourcommunity face problems that will have major negative effects on community life?
Can your community’s problems be solved by sensible government decision-making?
Do many people in your community perceive your town council, school board or planning board to be dysfunctional?
Have other reforms been tried and failed?
Are other civic leaders or civic groups sufficiently agitated about your community’s political process that they might back a major reform if they believed it would enable the community to resolve its major problems?

If your answers to these questions are yes, and you are prepared to start a campaign for reform, click here to see a checklist of the steps that are likely to be required.

Alternatively, if your community faces one major problem that local government has been unable to resolve, you may want to consider electing an ad hoc group of citizens by Personally Accountable Representation (PAR) and giving them a mandate to propose a solution that the appropriate government body would then be asked to ratify. To see step-by-step how to organize that kind of body, click here.