Setting the Foundation for Community Engagement
Community engagement should reflect the racial and socioeconomic diversity of the community from which input is sought. For example, if Raleigh wants input while developing a small area plan or some other decision impacting a specific part of the City, the target population might be those living or working in that immediate area. Alternatively, if the policy or decision under consideration impacts the entire City, then the target population should include people living or working anywhere in Raleigh.
While most cities, including Raleigh, recognize the value of community engagement, many continue struggling to build greater diversity into engagement systems. As COVID forced public meetings into virtual formats, there was hope that people from more diverse backgrounds would find it easier to participate in public meetings. Unfortunately, recent research suggests that was not the case. Since the virtual meeting environment failed to substantially improve the over-representation of older, white, wealthy homeowners in community engagement, it’s a good time to explore the variables affecting community engagement. Particularly as Raleigh seeks to rebuild its community engagement process.
Variables Impacting Community Engagement
Resources: No engagement process will succeed without adequate resources.
Money: Although obvious, fiscal constraints are a reality and must be factored into any engagement effort.
Staffing: Like fiscal constraints, engagement efforts can only succeed if staffed properly, both in terms of quantity and quality.
Expertise: Even if a city has sufficient staff, do those staff members have adequate training to effectively implement an engagement plan?
Political/Management Support: Elected officials establish goals and priorities while management’s responsibility is to hold employees accountable for implementation. If political or professional commitment to community engagement is lacking, frontline staff will not make it a priority either.
Purpose of Engagement: Resource allocation can vary widely depending on the purpose of engagement. Therefore, it’s important to clearly define the purpose and goals of any engagement effort.
Informational: Informing residents about what’s happening in their city is the easiest and least expensive form of engagement. This is particularly true in the age of electronic communication. Most cities use social media, opt-in mailing lists, livestreaming/virtual city meetings, newsletters, websites and many other forms of communication that can be distributed electronically. The approach is generally one-way because the goal is to inform without providing residents a direct means of interactive participation.
Reactionary: This form of engagement generally occurs when cities seek input using online surveys, comment cards or other tools that ask for reactions or responses to specific questions, plans or other pending decisions. This technique is limited because it doesn’t provide residents with the opportunity to exchange ideas and information.
Mandated: This involves situations where a law or regulation requires that one or more meetings be held with residents that could be impacted by or fall within the geographic area of a plan or project. In Raleigh, this often happens when a developer is rezoning property. In these situations, there is often significant interaction between residents and the party required to hold the meeting. But since the mandate simply requires the meeting to occur, the quality and outcomes vary widely.
Consultation: This form of engagement asks residents to react to and discuss various options, designs or approaches to an issue or problem. They can be presented to residents in various settings and usually involve inviting residents to attend meetings at various times and locations, including virtual meetings. This form of engagement can result in substantive changes to proposals, depending on how the process is defined and structured.
Collaboration: Collaborative engagement is the most intensive form of engagement because it involves meeting with residents on a regular basis for an extended period of time. This is an evolutionary form of engagement and occurs when residents are invited to work with city staff to develop policies or guide decisions from the outset. This is the most intensive and expensive form of engagement.
Community Centered: This engagement is initiated and controlled by residents. Though cities can choose to participate and/or support this form of engagement, residents retain full control over the process, timing, frequency and agenda for all meetings.
Community Support: No form of engagement can truly succeed without some form of community support. In order to generate community support, cities must build relationships and trust with residents so they feel ownership and commitment to the process. Cities also need to allocate resources to re-build civic capacity, particularly within historically marginalized communities. While many communities once had robust civic leadership, much of it has been lost over time.
Time Constraints: Whether it’s an approaching election, grant application deadline, application filing deadline, statutory or other regulatory deadline, there are often time constraints that must be considered when structuring community engagement processes.
With so many variables, developing a comprehensive community engagement system is no simple task. It requires political leadership, organizational commitment, civic capacity, community trust, adequate resources, persistence and patience. In the next post, we will explore these variables as Raleigh seeks to re-build its community engagement system.