Work groups and task forces managed touching most areas of public policy
Regulatory, legislative, and policy actions shaped
Geographic reach
Most high-stakes processes fail not because the people in them are unreasonable but because the process itself was designed wrong. Participants were asked to take positions before they understood the problem. They were asked to vote before they trusted each other. They were asked to negotiate language before the reasoning behind each position was visible to everyone else.
Confluence was built to address that failure. Not as a general facilitation vendor. As the firm called when the standard approach has already run out of runway and the problem is too consequential to leave unresolved.
The Collaborative Decision Making Process is the methodology that came out of that conviction. It has produced unanimous agreement among parties who spent two years in direct opposition. It has codified 31 transit governance recommendations into law that years of legislative effort could not move. It has given 1,100 educators a process safe enough to say the true thing. The sequence is not incidental to those outcomes. It is the reason for them.
Laws changed. Codes rewritten. Agency policies reset. Systems redesigned. The Confluence process produces outcomes that govern, not recommendations that sit on shelves.
The work is not managed from a distance. Every process is designed, led, and delivered against the same standard the firm was built around, and by people who are directly accountable for what it produces.
Confluence does not hand off engagements or manage them from a distance. Every process is designed, led, and delivered against the same standard the firm was built around, and by people who are directly accountable for what it produces.
Colorado AI Governance Framework · Senate vote · after three failed sessions
RTD governance recommendations codified in legislation after years of gridlock
Governors, Chief of Staff offices, state agency directors, and legislative leadership facing problems that standard processes have not resolved and that are too consequential to leave unresolved.
The Confluence Policy Center is an independent nonprofit that partners with government, community, and philanthropic leaders to design and manage convenings on complex policy matters. When a funder seeks to convene stakeholders on a policy question rather than contract for fee-for-service work, the Center provides the appropriate organizational structure. The same methodology. A different vehicle.
State agency leaders, Governor’s offices, county governments, and organizations navigating problems that have resisted every standard approach reach out directly. The engagement starts with a conversation.
CO · NC · FL · National
