Dave Meslin calls himself a Community Choreographer. He hails from Toronto, but thanks to his TED talk on civic engagement in cities, he’s known to 1.3 million people around the world. [If you have a moment, stop reading here and listen to his take on Nike Ads vs.City Planning announcements. Brilliant.]
His exhibition, The Fourth Wall: Transforming City Hall has been featured internationally and includes none other than the Los Angeles Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (that’s us!) as one of 3 examples of US cities that have embraced civic engagement enough to make it a part of city government.
Dave’s work isn’t too different from ours: he looks at his city government, embraces its strengths and exposes its weaknesses, and makes concrete recommendations on how city hall can knock down that “fourth wall” and make government the exchange between people and government it was intended to be. He’s done a lot of research on best practices and he has a lot of ideas.
Now Dave is in LA to find out still more about how EmpowerLA functions, who’s participating, and what makes our local government go ‘round. He wants to do more than visit City Hall, so he’s here for a full week and is ready to fill his schedule with Neighborhood Council meetings, events, and whatever else you would like to share with him. What he learns here will be integrated into his continuing work in Toronto and elsewhere.
He wants to hear from YOU! If you’d like to share a success story with Dave, invite him to a meeting, or show him around the neighborhood, catch him while he’s here! You can contact him at: [email protected]
You can check out his blog at meslin.wordpress.com
