In embarking on your participatory and deliberative democracy journey, you are stepping into a leadership role, not necessarily defined through your rank. Getting the right people on board, at an early stage, is going to be key to your success.
Who the right people are depends on your organisation or institution, but it could include senior managers, strategic leads, officers working on the ground or elected representatives. There is value in building up champions for public engagement in decision making, which is as much of an advocacy exercise as capacity building or demonstrating good practice.
By engaging with the right people internally early, you can mitigate against barriers that might stand in your way later on. If you need to do work to bring others along with you, you may need to think about how you can establish the groundwork for cultural change in the organisation before doing any engagement processes. You may want to engage external organisations and institutions who have an interest in what you’re doing, like third sector organisations.