Issue Framing Workshops

After a successful round of neighborhood forums in January to identify the issues most on Philadelphia's mind, Citizen Voices moved into its second stage: framing the issues.

For the framing workshops, we asked our Citizen Voices participants to choose one issue to focus on from the five top issues. These top issues were chosen after reviewing what was said by the 450-plus people at the January forums.

The five main topics for the issue framing workshops were: Education, Jobs, Safety, Neighborhoods, and Government.

Each workshop dealt with only one of these issues. However, as citizens wisely noted at the January forums, the interconnections among these issues are numerous and complex. For example, to talk about jobs you have to talk about education, too. Here is how we see other often-mentioned issues clustering under these five main topics.

The Top Five Issues

• Education K-12, community colleges and higher education; lifelong learning; job training; day care; vouchers and charter schools; mentoring.
• Jobs Taxes; workforce development; transportation; "corporate welfare"; small business development; tourism and marketing of city.
• Safety Crime; drugs (enforcement and rehabilitation); police force hiring, training and deployment; gun control; prisons; the court system; mandatory sentences; media coverage.
• Neighborhoods Quality of life; housing (including vacant properties and homelessness); race and ethnic relations; volunteerism; nuisance crimes; parks and recreation; small-business development; streets and transit.
• Government Citizen organizing and involvement; political reform and accountability; City Council; City Charter; quality and efficiency of city services; relations with state and federal governments; regionalism; media reform.