Centering Equity in Community Engagement
Community engagement is a key tenet of planning processes. Successful engagement ensures that the project or plan has the support of the public, builds trust between local government and the community, and can decrease the risk of potential lawsuits. However, community engagement can be costly and time intensive. Ensuring equitable representation from communities of color, non-English speakers, and low-income communities at public meetings and workshops continues to be a challenge for planners. Communities of color and low-income communities are more likely to be disenfranchised in democratic processes due to barriers to accessing meetings and other opportunities for providing input.
Challenges to Equitable Engagement
Most planners want to create plans and approve projects that will benefit the community but ensuring that diverse voices are equitably represented is no small task. Getting input, particularly from communities of color and low-income communities, can be challenging. Common barriers to participation include distrust of government and the accessibility of opportunities for providing input.
Input from the community may be de-emphasized because technical expertise tends to be valued over local experiential knowledge. Furthermore, the community has little decision-making power in conventional planning processes. This lack of authority over the future of their neighborhoods is disempowering and discourages individuals from participating in government processes. Budget and politically driven timelines are other common constraints that limit the extensiveness of outreach efforts.
Community-Driven Planning
Community engagement can be seen as a continuum with increasing levels of engagement. There are five levels on the engagement spectrum:1
- Inform: This is the lowest level of engagement. Local government initiates an action and informs the community of the action. This is typically done through one-way streams of communication, such as news articles and pamphlets, and limited to the project’s timeline.
- Consult: Information is gathered from the public to inform government-led actions and programs. Outreach is conducted through focus groups, surveys, and public comment periods.
- Involve: At this stage, community members are given more decision-making power and help shape government priorities and plans. Methods of engagement could include advisory boards and workshops.
- Shared Leadership: The community and local government share in decision-making and co-create strategies that address community priorities. Engagement is typically done through co-led community meetings and advisory boards.
- Community-Driven: This is the highest level of engagement on the continuum. At this stage, the community initiates and directs the strategy or action with the technical assistance and support of the government.
Source: M-Group 2019
The key difference between community-driven planning and conventional planning is that in the former, strategies and decisions are a joint effort between the local government and the community. Neighborhood scaled plans and projects are most suited for community-driven planning. For strategic and regional planning, a shared leadership approach may be more suitable.
To achieve a higher level of engagement, local government staff need to have the skills and tools to effectively collaborate with the community. Preparation could include trainings for staff on racial equity, cultural humility approaches, communication strategies, and non-traditional methods of engagement. Understanding where power and privilege are held in existing structures can give planners a better sense of which areas in the planning process need to be improved.
Strategies for Effective Planning
Strategies that prioritize community concerns and lower the barriers to public participation, ensuring decision-making is guided by the community and reflects a diversity of voices, can help planners move towards a higher level on the community engagement spectrum. Suggested approaches to bolster inclusivity at all levels of the engagement spectrum include:
Encourage Intersectional Dialogue: Create space for the community to share their stories and knowledge rather than limiting responses to a specific question. Encouraging intersectional dialogue instead of looking for siloed answers acknowledges the lived experiences of the community, gives value to collective knowledge, and encourages collaborative problem solving.
Prioritize Community Expertise and Concerns: Attend meetings and events hosted by community-based organizations (CBOs) to see what issues are being discussed and how they’re being discussed. Include equitable representation from the community on advisory boards.
Work with CBOs and Community Leaders: Forming relationships with CBOs, such as advocacy and faith groups, that serve diverse cultural communities or specific groups that planners are looking to get input from can provide representative insight. CBOs will have a good sense of the needs and priorities of the population they serve and can also connect local government to other community leaders and CBOs. Hosting “meet and greets” can be a good way to get to know the CBOs working in the community beyond the most visible groups.
Subsidize Public Participation: Taking three hours of your day to attend a public meeting and voice your concerns within the span of two minutes while juggling work and children is not an easy ask. Public participation is a key tenet of planning so we should give it the same weight when budgeting and scoping a project. Making it easier for people to participate at public meetings, such as by providing childcare, transit passes, or meals, can alleviate some of the barriers to participation.
Accessibility of Public Meetings: Evaluate how easy it is for a lay person to participate in a public meeting. How are meeting times and agendas being communicated to the public? How easy is it to attend a meeting in-person or virtually? Ensure that people affected by a plan are aware of opportunities to provide input and that the avenues for providing input are easily understood and accessible.
Reach Non-English Speakers: Work with leaders in the non-English speaking community to understand the best way to reach non-English speakers. Communication material for projects and plans that will impact this population, particularly neighborhood-scale projects, should be translated. Hosting meetings and conversations in a non-English speaking community’s native language and having leaders of immigrant communities facilitate and lead these discussions can create a more comfortable setting for participants.
Expanding Decision-Making Opportunities: Include people of color and organizations that represent people of color in decision-making bodies (e.g. steering committees, working groups) as well as official advisory committees (e.g. technical advisory committees). There should be more than one or two representatives to avoid putting the onus of representation on a singular person.
Work with Youth Groups: Young people will be the ones impacted by plans – particularly long-term plans – but don’t have the opportunity to vote. Engaging youths can build a culture of civic engagement and trust from an early age. Young people that are involved in planning processes and feel a sense of ownership over their neighborhoods are also likely to be future community leaders.
Different Methods of Engagement: Combine traditional community engagement methods, such as workshops and visioning sessions, with strategies that are more proactive and targeted at specific groups, such as coffee chats, which are more informal and personal, and focus groups. In addition to in-person engagement, provide a variety of outlets for people to contribute to the planning process, such as online comment forms, surveys, and social media posts.
Benchmarks for Success: Develop measurable benchmarks for defining the success of community engagement efforts. Throughout a process, schedule regular check-ins with CBOs and residents to gauge their perceptions on the effectiveness of the process.
Source: M-Group 2015
Source: M-Group 2015
Engagement during a Pandemic
California has been sheltering in place for the past five months, posing new challenges to public meetings and community engagement methods. Cities for the most part have transitioned to using online video conferencing for public meetings and workshops. Using online platforms has both pros and cons to expanding access to opportunities for public comment. On one hand, people who may not have previously been able to attend meetings can now do so from the convenience of their homes due to the flexibility of virtual meetings. On the other hand, technology can be challenging to use, intimidating for people unfamiliar with the program, and inaccessible for those with unreliable internet or phone service.
Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, can be another avenue for getting input from a wider audience and has the benefit of providing multimedia content on a familiar platform. In a post-COVID world, local governments should consider continuing to use online forms of public engagement in tandem with in-person methods to expand opportunities for participation.
When using technology as a substitute for in-person community engagement, several things to consider include:
Are the tools easy to use?
Are the inputs and outputs for how to interact with the tool clear?
Can it be accessed by non-English speakers, non-verbal communicators, and people with low literacy?
Equality to Equity
To achieve equitable development, we need a systematic approach that prioritizes inclusivity and equitable representation in planning processes. Being able to effectively engage with historically marginalized communities requires planners to have the tools and knowledge to connect with these groups. This starts with acknowledging past injustices and existing barriers that inhibit people from participating in democratic processes. Community engagement is a long process that requires continuous relationship building, but by reaching out and working in partnership with CBOs, increasing the accessibility of public participation, and sharing decision-making power with the community, community engagement can become a pathway for working towards a more equitable future.
1Community engagement spectrum adapted from Urban Sustainability Directors Network’s (USDN) "Guide to Equitable, Community-Driven Climate Preparedness Planning".
References
Bergstorm, Danielle, Kalima Rose, Jillian Olinger, and Kip Holley. 2012. The Sustainable Communities Initiative. PolicyLink.
Curren, Ryan, Nora Liu, Dwayne Marsh, and Kalima Rose. 2015. Equitable Development as a Tool to Advance Racial Equity. Government Alliance on Race and Equity.
Logan, Warren, interview by YIMBY. 2020. Making Urbanism Antiracist (June 23).
Urban Sustainability Directors Network. 2017. "Guide to Equitable, Community-Driven Climate Preparedness Planning."