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CITIZEN-CENTERED SOLUTIONS:
Lessons in Leveraging Public Participation from the Make It Your Own Awards
™
ABOUT
THE EVALUATION TEAM
CYNTHIA M. GIBSON, PH.D.
Cynthia Gibson has more than 25 years of experience in the nonprofit sector as aconsultant, senior staff person, and advisor for hundreds of national nonprofits andphilanthropic institutions. As principal of Cynthesis Consulting™, she provides a widerange of services—including strategic planning and positioning, program development,evaluation, marketing/communications, and public policy research and analysis—fornonprofits and foundations across the country. In 2007 for the Case Foundation,Gibson authored
Citizens at the Center: A New Approach to Civic Engagement
andhelped to develop a new direction for grantmaking reflecting the concepts in thispaper—including the importance of public participation in philanthropy—that washighlighted in The New York Times and The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
PETER LEVINE, PH.D.
Peter Levine is the Director of CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research onCivic Learning and Engagement and Research Director of Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service. In addition to having worked withCommon Cause and the National Commission on Civic Renewal, Levine has alsoauthored several books, including
The Future of Democracy: Developing the NextGeneration of American Citizens
(2007). He has served on the boards or steeringcommittees of AmericaSpeaks, Streetlaw, the Newspaper Association of AmericaFoundation, the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, the Kettering Foundation,the American Bar Association Committee’s for Public Education, the Paul J. AicherFoundation, and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium.