Better Public Meetings
Your Community, Your Meetings
Begun in 2025, Anchorage was one of two cities nationwide selected to participate in the Democracy Innovations for Better Public Meetings project. This partnership with the Federation of Community Councils, YWCA Alaska, National Civic League’s Center for Democracy Innovation, and the arts-based initiative Perfect City aims to improve how public meetings are experienced by community members, elected officials, and municipal staff.
Thanks to funding from the AAA-ICDR Foundation, Better Public Meetings builds on national efforts to make public meetings more civil, effective, and connected to community values.
Step 1 - Civic Infrastructure Scan
The Civic Infrastructure Scan explores the factors influencing public meetings and the relationship between residents and local institutions. The scan is a qualitative research methodology that encompasses the recent history of engagement, assets and capacities present in the community, demographic shifts, and the state of democracy in civic associations and digital networks. There was also semi-structured qualitative interviews with key local leaders from different sectors, media and social media analysis, and review of reports, plans, and other documents related to engagement.
Additionally Civic Engagement Scorecard was implemented at Spenard and Northeast Community Councils as an ongoing source of data on resident attitudes toward meetings and the community generally. The Scorecard is a quantitative, “user-centered” ratings tool hosted on the Alchemer platform. It gave people an easy-to-use tag-based system to rate the quality of democracy and civic health in their public meetings and offers various ways to visualize collated data.
Read the full report below.
Step 2 - Collaborate
On January 29, 2026, 31 residents participated in a civic arts exercise of ‘walking a mile in each other’s words’, with people acting out and reading different interactions from a real transcript of a public meeting. This exercise was hosted by Perfect City, with the goal of making the session fun while also opening a dialogue about how we interact in formal meetings and what we might want to change about the structure and relationships meetings currently embody.
The group then pivoted to roundtable discussions on what meaningful civic participation looks like, covering what works in community councils, where the current system falls short, and what could realistically change in the next 6–18 months.
Check out the full presentation.
Step 3 - Discuss Ideas
Next steps for this project including a two-part implementation of recommendations from the scan. The FCC will be hosting a facilitator training open to the community, in alignment with the recommendation to “replace testimony-heavy formats with facilitated dialogue.” On Saturday, August 29th at 10:00am, the FCC invites community members to join the training online or in person.
