For Immediate Release December 14, 2005

For More Information Contact: Marilyn Yurk, 317-261-3047

IUPUI Project Will Make Government More Responsive to Citizens

INDIANAPOLIS - The quality of life in a community is profoundly affected by many government services-schools, roads, public transportation, public health, water, sewer, police, and fire services, to name a few. Since the purpose of these services is to serve the community, they need to be responsive to the needs and opinions of citizens.

As part of its focus on strategies that enhance the quality of life in Central Indiana, the Center for Urban Policy and the Environment is initiating a Quality of Life (QL) Dialogue Web site to gather citizen input about government services.

The director of QL Dialogue is Alfred Ho, faculty scholar at the Center and associate professor at the IUPUI School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Before joining IUPUI, he served as co-leader of the Iowa Citizen-Initiated Performance Assessment (CIPA) Project at Iowa State University between 2001 and 2004, a project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In this project, nine Iowa cities created citizen teams to set performance measures for local government services. The citizen teams then worked with elected and public officials to incorporate performance measures into goals and budgeting for city services.

To help launch QL Dialogue, the Center has published an issue brief titled, Citizen Partners Make Government More Responsive. The issue brief introduces Indiana decision makers to CIPA concepts and illustrates how those concepts were used by other local governments. It has been distributed to policymakers in Central Indiana and is available to the public.

Ho commented that, "CIPA is a tool to make democracy work better, especially at the local level. The model may be useful in many Indiana communities as a way to encourage civic engagement while making government services more responsive to citizens."

Ho said that the goals of QL Dialogue will be to:

• conduct ongoing online surveys to allow citizens to evaluate government services in their home community;

• foster discussions among citizens, government officials, and policymakers;

• help policymakers develop performance measures and results-oriented management tools that make government more responsive to citizens;

• help local governments and agencies use citizen input to generate long-term strategic vision and performance goals for public programs; and

• partner with national and local experts to offer local workshops and online training to help city officials, citizens, and community organizations successfully implement results-oriented projects.

The Center for Urban Policy and the Environment is an applied policy research organization that is part of the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. For more information and a copy of the issue brief, contact the Center at 261-3000 or visit the
QL Dialogue website ( http://www.urbancenter.iupui.edu/qldialogue/).

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