"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same," Ronald Reagan. The freedom and civil liberties that we have today are opportunities that thousands of supressed nations struggle with every day. We cannot take our liberty for granted. It is our civic responsibility to desire the right to have general knowledge and preserve our freedom.  

 

Citizen participation is a process which provides private individuals an opportunity to influence public decisions and has long been a component of the democratic decision-making process. The roots of citizen participation can be traced to ancient Greece and Colonial New England. Before the 1960s, governmental processes and procedures were designed to facilitate "external" participation. Citizen participation was institutionalized in the mid-1960s with President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs (Cogan & Sharpe, 1986 p. 283).

 

Public involvement is means to ensure that citizens have a direct voice in public decisions. The terms "citizen" and "public," and "involvement" and "participation" are often used interchangeably. While both are generally used to indicate a process through which citizens have a voice in public policy decisions, both have distinctively different meanings and convey little insight into the process they seek to describe. Mize reveals that the term "citizen participation" and it's relationship to public decision-making has evolved without a general consensus regarding either it's meaning nor it's consequences (Mize, 1972).