You can read this episode here: https://montecarlorei.com/4-steps-for-community-engagement-for-your-development/

I have a four step process that I like to lay out when I’m starting a project. The first is, get curious, show up and listen. And before the showing up and listening, it’s important to observe, ask questions and listen. People are the experts of their own experience, and that’s your job as a community engagement practitioner to deeply and empathetically understand what their experience is. So in order to show up, you have to ask who is already here, who has been here before, who’s showing up at your meetings at city hall, who’s responding to requests to meet and who’s not. And so a big part of that is showing up everywhere. Get to know local businesses, shop there, spend time there. You’ll start to meet regulars and hear stories, go to neighborhood meetings, go to town halls, go to gatherings. Before you start knocking on doors, it’s important to build those relationships by showing up in public and meeting people. And through that, you can evaluate if you need to be invited and go with a local leader who can introduce you to their neighbors or who can introduce you at a community meeting. Having buy in from the local leadership is really important.

Having an established relationship before you do that. And so by showing that you want to be part of the community, by going to local events to block parties, to coffee shops, to bars, to whatever it is, it shows people that you are there and that you’re committed. And a key part of that is to not offer solutions yet. You’re still in this curiosity phase and getting a sense of who is here. What’s the history of the area? What has already happened? What already exists here that builds or holds community, whether those are events or meetings or parks. I feel like this may seem like an obvious thing to say, but you’d be surprised at how many post-mortems I’ve heard where developers say, oh, the biggest lesson learned was that we needed to talk to people and include them in the process.

Part of it comes down to being honest and transparent about what you are and what you’re not, and what you can do and what you won’t do. When you do community engagement, one of the challenging components of it is that you aren’t necessarily going to get input that will be conducive to what you’re trying to do or you won’t necessarily get input that’s helpful or you’ll get input that is challenging your core beliefs or your vision or your mission. Part of it is not necessarily incorporating all of those pieces of the input that you’re getting, but it’s understanding how to best respond to them and how to best respond to the community. Transparency and communication is one of the most important things in addressing that. Having your community engagement process in place allows you to build relationships with your neighbors, with the community, with community leaders, so that when they do ask the hard questions or if somebody does come in with an objection, you’re able to respond to them in a way in which you are showing them respect, that you’ve listened to them and they’re showing you respect that they’ll understand and accept your answer.

Ilana Lipsett

www.iftf.org

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