Economic & Social Policy

The Challenge

When public officials, advocates, businesses and communities come together to address economic and social policy issues, perceptions about the “right” answers are often embedded in moral beliefs and backgrounds. Deep differences in experience, values, and perspective can undercut shared goals for expanding economic opportunity, improving public education, reducing crime, or creating affordable housing. Analysis and participation are important, but expert-led decision-making and traditional participation processes—voting, public meetings, advocacy—are often ineffective at building consensus on policies that address the core concerns of leaders, experts, and the public.

Our Approach

CBI has extensive experience working on complex and inter-related economic and social policy challenges with leaders and stakeholders. We build shared vision, agreements, and effective partnerships at every level from local to global. We help stakeholders shift from polarized positions to search for solutions that support common and complementary goals, using these core principles:

• Help stakeholders speak to their core values as well as policy goals
• Build mutual understanding and relationships along with analytic rigor and policy feasibility
• Ensure that public consultation and leadership dialogue inform and influence each other
• Create a joint search for new possibilities, driven by shared values and complementary interests

With these principles as the foundation for process design and facilitation, we increase the chances of finding common ground on the most challenging economic and social issues. 

Areas of Expertise

• Economic opportunity and mobility
• Public and affordable housing
• Criminal justice, re-entry and reintegration
• Public education and learning