Building effective engagement tools is half the problem. Building a city where tools drive real change is the harder half. Lancaster, Pennsylvania, accomplished this over the past eight years, and the mayor who led that work is now on our team.
Danene Sorace, the former Mayor of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, has joined Go Vocal as Senior Strategic Advisor.
This is a deliberate move to get closer to where the work actually happens: to leaders who have been in the arena, making decisions and navigating real constraints.
Danene has lived the community engagement platform we've built. She used Go Vocal from inside the mayor's office to engage residents, weigh trade-offs, and make hard calls. Few perspectives are more valuable than those as we figure out what to build next.
How Lancaster shaped how we think
In January 2018, weeks after her inauguration as the 43rd Mayor of Lancaster (only the second woman to hold the office), Danene created the Office of Neighborhood Engagement. It was Lancaster's first new city department in roughly thirty years, and it shaped the rest of her tenure.
The starting point was a recognition that residents felt invisible in the decisions that affected their streets, their parks, and the city’s budget. By the end of her second term, the office had grown into a full department, Engage Lancaster (built on Go Vocal) had become part of how the city worked, and engagement had stopped being an event the city held for residents and had become how the city governed with them.
That is the arc most cities want, and few achieve. The reasons it usually fails are well-rehearsed: a champion leaves, a budget tightens, a participation project lands flat, and the next administration quietly retires the program.
The Lancaster story is interesting precisely because it didn't follow that arc. It survived changing city councils, a pandemic, and a Home Rule transition — recognized this April with Danene's second Governor's Award for Local Government Excellence, and last year with an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Franklin & Marshall College for the same body of work.
Most of what we have learned about how engagement becomes infrastructure rather than a side project, we learned from cities like Lancaster. The Lancaster Engagement Playbook is essentially that: eight years of practice, written down so other cities don't have to start from zero.
Now, Danene is joining the team to help us imagine what the governance infrastructure of the future should look like in other cities across the globe/US?
In her words
We asked Danene how she thought about Engage Lancaster while she was in office. She put it like this:
Go Vocal helped us build trust by showing residents we're listening — and explaining what we could or couldn't do with their input. I thought about Engage Lancaster as an additional staff person: it brings more voices to the table without the intensity of knocking on doors, and it runs 24/7. Our work has evolved and become more strategic, and they have been a tremendous partner.
Engagement is not another portal cities have to manage. Done well, it becomes institutional capacity: a way to work at the scale modern cities actually require.
What's next
Danene joins our senior advisor group alongside our chair, Beth Simone Noveck (former Deputy CTO under President Obama), and Maximilian Schnoedl (a long-time GovTech executive). Go Vocal is bringing together a small advisory committee of leaders who have governed with engagement at the center.
If you have shaped that work in your own city and want to be part of the conversation, I'd like to hear from you.
Welcome to the team, Danene!
— Wietse
Check out our podcast with former Mayor Danene Sorace on the lessons she learned about meaningful community engagement in Lancaster
