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Executive Director/Protection & Advocacy Project
I’m an outcome-oriented person. Sharing of ideas is important for creative and smart planning, but I also have a strong need to get it done. Other folks that I know believe process is the key. To them, it’s most important to leave the meeting feeling good about the discussion, even if it’s empty-handed.
There are some of us who attend meetings because we believe we “have to do so”. We observe and maybe listen but don’t say a word. And there are those of us who have lots to say on the topic and just can’t stop talking.
A good facilitator will design and implement a process that brings out the strengths of each participant, resulting in dynamic discussion and specific decisions for how to move forward. All involved will leave the meeting in agreement about what’s to be done and how. They will also know who is responsible for tasks and when they are to be done.
The Consensus Council makes this happen. Its facilitators ensure they understand the group and its needs before the participants actually meet. They design a process based on anticipated member dynamics. They are experts at bringing everyone into the discussion and in achieving consensus on the outcomes.
Through the years, I’ve been a participant in many meetings facilitated by the Consensus Council. The groups have been large and small, intra-agency and interagency, focused and not so much. Each and every time the Consensus Council has been successful in facilitating the group to reach its goals. They are the professionals. They get it done.
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Project Director/North Dakota Medicaid Infrastructure Grant
The North Dakota Medicaid Infrastructure Grant (NDMIG) is a project of the North Dakota Center for Persons with Disabilities located on the campus of Minot State University. Since the inception of NDMIG in 2002 the Consensus Council, Inc. has played a very integral part in the success of the project.
The NDMIG is funded to build state capacity, infrastructure and policies to remove barriers for people with disabilities to go to or maintain community employment. Over the past six years the NDMIG has embarked on a variety of initiatives to include a year long strategic planning process in 2006 to build a Comprehensive Employment System for people with disabilities. Without the assistance, collaboration, consensus based decision making model and the qualified staff of the Consensus Council this plan would not be as strong as it is today.
NDMIG has utilized a variety of Consensus Council services to include; facilitation, strategic planning, custom design and evaluation. I have had the pleasure of working with each staff member at the Consensus Council and in my opinion you will not find a more professional, friendly, hard working group. It is a pleasure to work with the Consensus Council and I look forward to our continued efforts!!
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President & CEO/North Dakota Association for the Disabled (NDAD)
I’ve always thought that a good strategic plan must be relevant and practical, reflecting the values of your organization and actively addressing its mission. It should be a good mix of the “blue sky thinking” that identifies new challenges and focuses on unmet needs, and the reality of workloads and resources.
When we began our strategic planning process at NDAD we all agreed that we didn’t want a plan that would look impressive, sound laudable and collect dust on a bookcase. We wanted a blueprint that would help us to continue our work and prepare the organization for the future. The only real question we had was, “How do we accomplish all this?” Fortunately, we contacted the Consensus Council for help.
Before we began the actual process of building our plan, we had a series of planning and brainstorming sessions with the Consensus Council staff. Together, we developed a process that identified and integrated the unique characteristics and objectives of NDAD and emphasized our needs for succession and resource planning. The result was a process that we believed would give us the product we were seeking.
It has been hard work, but I’m very happy to say that we got exactly what we needed. We’ve taken that product from the flip charts to the field. Our board and staff are making good progress.
The “Council” listened to us, facilitated and supported us, and continues to be available to assist us.
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Vice-Chancellor for Academic and Student Affairs/North Dakota University System
For several years, state and local education officials and public policy leaders have known that North Dakota students’ test scores and proficiency had leveled off but that other states were actively working and improving student achievement. We felt strongly that the issue needed to be addressed. . .but in a bottom-up, not a top-down effort. North Dakotans have always had a very high view of their education system, from pre-school through college, so we knew that people involved in education in some significant way (stakeholders) from throughout the state would need to address issues related to educational adequacy and, hopefully, develop agreements on what has to be done to improve student performance.
Therefore, as part of a joint discussion between the four boards responsible for state education standards, we established a “steering committee” to review alternative possibilities of developing such agreements. One of the organizations we heard from was the Consensus Council, Inc. (CC). We were all impressed not only with their proposal to bring significant stakeholders together but also with the depth of experience they had in North Dakota working on a wide variety of public policy issues in the State and, in particular, education issues. The CC was integral to developing legislation in the early 1990s to enable local and state governments to develop Joint Powers Agreements (JPAs), and the CC utilized that legislation to help local school districts develop 9 JPAs (now referred to as Regional Education Associations) working together to create efficiencies of scale and a better education for all North Dakota students.
The Steering Committee invited 38 stakeholders from throughout the state, linked to all levels of education in the state, together for 9 meetings in 9 months, plus steering committee meetings between each of the larger stakeholder group meetings in a group called the P-16 Education Task Force (ETF). Through an extremely delicate and difficult process during those nine months, the ETF was able to develop 26 significant areas of agreement to improve educational adequacy throughout ND. The agreements are just now beginning to be implemented and, I believe, will receive a boost as a result of the recommendations of the Lt. Gov. led Education Improvement Commission (EIC), which, incidentally, will need to rely heavily upon the REAs I refer to above to help implement these recommendations.
Former Secretary of the Executive Council
The (North Dakota) Consensus Council (CC) is an outstanding organization. It has a solid reputation for quality work and is developing a truly impressive legacy of policy leadership and partnership building extending well beyond North Dakota's borders.
In many ways, the CC is a reflection of the State in which it makes its home: small, hard-working, genuine, talented, resourceful, practical, dedicated, reliable, community-minded, strategic, solution-oriented, visionary, and respectful of diversity. To use an expression from north of the border, the CC "punches way above its weight."
My own experience with the CC has been extensive and entirely positive. One major example was the International Flood Mitigation Initiative (IFMI), a joint US-Canada consultative process funded by the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Province of Manitoba and designed to ensure that the many lessons of the 1997 Red River Valley flood would be remembered and applied on a cooperative, ongoing basis on both sides of the border.
The Council provided primary staffing and facilitation for the project, and it continues to provide critical support to the mechanisms, which were put in place to help facilitate the implementation of its recommendations. One such institution is a senior Legislators' Forum, which brings together elected leaders from the states of North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota and the Province of Manitoba for annual discussion of regional priorities. The Council has also played a major part in bringing together the Governors of the three states and the Province of Manitoba for their now-regular meetings on regional concerns. It has also helped initiate cross-border dialogue and cooperation among Attorneys-General, which has strengthened efforts to combat organized crime and the spread of drugs such as crystal meth.
I was able to work on these efforts with the CC and to participate in further strategic planning on the same issues through the Council's facilitation of the Tri-College Symposia honoring former Governor George Sinner. Another important project with which I am directly familiar is the Council’s coordination of western US states' and Canadian provinces' preparatory work leading up to a formal regional cooperation agreement on forest fire-fighting between the Western Governors' Association and the Western Canadian Premiers.
Through these activities and others which are still underway and in the planning stages, the Consensus Council has contributed much to building constructive policy bridges between the US and Canada, while at the same time addressing key public priorities in both countries. The Council’s work has received justifiable praise to date and will surely earn more in years to come.
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Executive Director/AARP North Dakota
What we at AARP North Dakota have so appreciated about the Consensus Council and its staff is not only the work they have done for/with us, but also the connections they have helped to make throughout North Dakota.
We have utilized the Council to assist our Executive Committee in strategic planning and, of course, the sessions have gone smoothly and the outcomes have always done more than meet our expectations. We have also been involved with other groups and state agencies in processes that have required skilled facilitation in order to bring people together and moving forward. The Council staff have helped provided outcome-oriented processes whenever we have participated in sessions they have staffed and facilitated.
The Council recently brought AARP North Dakota together with the North Dakota Association of Counties (NDACo) when, because of their work with both organizations, the Council learned that both of our organizations’ boards were particularly concerned with rural community development and the need to enhance opportunities in rural areas. Working with Council staff, AARP North Dakota and NDACo have invited stakeholders from throughout North Dakota and developed a discussion group, which is beginning to develop a vision, mission, goals and strategies to assist, especially those in rural areas, develop greater capacity and hope for the future. These kinds of “connections” are invaluable for AARP North Dakota and for the people of ND as we work together to enhance our future.
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Executive Director/Catholic Charities North Dakota
When Catholic Charities North Dakota (CCND) decided to move ahead with a five year strategic planning effort, it wanted to accomplish three tasks at the same time: develop a strategic plan, engage and obtain strong buy-in from all its 45 employees and 16 Board members and develop a process for succession planning in the agency, knowing that I would be stepping down by the end of 2009.
Because we had a member of our Board who has also been on the Board of the Consensus Council, Inc (CC) for many years and has had an extremely high regard for their work, we met with CC staff to hear suggestions about how we might complete such an effort. Working with the CC, we set up a series of 3 meetings during 2007: the first with the Board and senior management; the second with the staff and senior management and the third with all staff, senior management and Board members. CC staff prepared for, facilitated and documented each meeting and also developed a document that combined the agreements developed during the first two meetings in such a way that the third meeting, bringing all participants into agreement with the whole plan, was a relatively easy thing to do.
Having developed new Vision, Mission and Values Statements, as well as goals and strategies to implement them, we applied those agreements to developing a process for selecting and the characteristics we needed to seek in not only a new executive director but also in new board and staff, particularly management staff. All participants in the process indicated how grateful they were to have been part of it.
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ND House of Representatives - Blanchard, ND
After serving 20 years in the North Dakota House of Representatives, I can honestly say that one of the accomplishments of which I am most proud is my participation in the international Legislators Forum (LF). It was the result of a two-year effort facilitated by the Consensus Council, Inc. (CC) to help mitigation of flooding on the Red River and its tributaries. One of the agreements of that group of stakeholders was that legislators from North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Manitoba should meet at least annually to discuss flood, drought and other public policy issues of mutual interest in all our jurisdictions.
The result was the LF. I have had the pleasure of participating not only as a delegate to each of 8 annual LF meetings but also as a member of the Steering Committee (SC) of the LF since its inception. That committee has met virtually every month by phone or in person to carry out the agreements developed by the 32 delegates (8 from each jurisdiction) on the issues considered during each LF meeting. Those issues, in addition to water, have included, sponsoring a 2 Nations Tour, bringing animal health and food safety people together from all of the jurisdictions to make sure they were coordinating their efforts, helping to further the development of renewable and clean coal technologies and additional energy transmission capacity in the 4 jurisdictions, weighing in on cross-border identification issues and, perhaps as important as any of these and other issues, learning from each other and developing life-long friendships among legislators in these jurisdictions.
What I have found truly remarkable about the annual LFs is that, after 8 years, at least half of the delegates who participated in the first meeting in Winnipeg are participating in this year’s eighth annual meeting in Bismarck. The work of CC staff in keeping the SC and all of the delegates to the LF interested in and making progress each year and developing cross-border agreements has been commendable. I have been proud to say that the CC is based in ND.
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Executive Director/ND Association of Counties
For well over ten years, the North Dakota Association of Counties (NDACo) has relied without hesitation on the services of the Consensus Council, Inc. (CC) to provide all phases of the work it does—consensus building, conflict resolution and strategic planning.
NDACo employees, management, Board members and affiliated organizations have been involved in multiple strategic planning sessions, each one strengthening NDACo and its internal and external ties. During the time we have been engaged in continuous strategic planning with CC staff, NDACo has grown significantly while employing strong association management principles from a small staff in rented office space to a current staff of 36 in a significant building of its own, from which it also derives income by renting space.
During that same period of time, we have worked with CC staff and emergency management and law enforcement throughout North Dakota to begin a statewide movement to Next Generation 911. Because of that work, we believe we have the potential to be one of the first states in the country or part of the first region in the country to successfully implement statewide or region wide NG 911.
With the CC, we have brought together legislators, county leaders and state and county agencies to help enhance what was a messy and inequitable child support enforcement process throughout the state. One meeting facilitated by CC staff resulted in legislation already in effect that has had a dramatic impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of child support enforcement throughout the state.
We know that when we need assistance to help build consensus within our organization and with other organizations we can turn to the CC for help, and it is always there.