Purpose
In this activity, the core planning team will determine its approach to engaging with the broader community.
Why?
Your planning efforts should reflect the values and priorities of the broader community and foster community buy-in. This should be achieved using a thorough, equitable, inclusive, and transparent engagement process that moves beyond informing to empowering. This activity may include identifying the stages where the core team will invest the time, resources, and effort to host focus groups, working sessions, community workshops, identify what tools you will use to gather important information on community concerns and potential solutions.
When?
The approach to community engagement should be defined early on but should be revisited consistently through the planning process. Drafting your approach should take approximately 12-20 hours. Community engagement should happen throughout the life of the process.
Tips
- Work with the right people. Communicating to your community about change can be difficult. Ensure that you have a team member or organizational partner as a key member of your core planning team that has the experience, expertise, and communication skills necessary to lead the community engagement effort throughout the resilience planning process.
- Integrate local knowledge. Local knowledge can be a critical component of planning, engaging with, and building community resilience and it should inform your approach to identifying concerns and gathering information.
- Commit to equitable engagement. Engaging with frontline community members requires dedicated resources and time, a commitment to trust-building, and support from community “gatekeepers” - individuals that have long-established roles and trust in these communities already. Often, frontline community members experience the worst impacts of climate change and have contributed the least to the problem. Resilience planning can provide an opportunity to address historical inequities using innovative solutions that help create a more sustainable, equitable, and just future for all. Additional information about equitable planning practices can be found in the Adaptation Planning Guide: Integrated Climate Adaptation and Climate Resiliency Program Workshop Series from California and the Planning for Equity Policy Guide from the APA.
How does my community do this?
- Community engagement requires dedicated funding, time, and the expertise to do right. The following steps will help you define, ground truth, refine, and identify the tools needed to kick off your community engagement process on the right foot.
- Don’t start from scratch. There are many readily available methods, tools, and approaches to good community engagement. Also, many of your neighbors have already taken on this challenge (see the City of Golden Community Engagement Planning Guide).
- Develop a community engagement plan and timeline. Successful community engagement means community collaboration and empowerment. You must meet the community where they are: this means seeking input from all facets of your community, listening, providing good information rooted in strong data and science, considering and developing a plan that bridges potential social divides (e.g., racial, class, political, education, etc.), among others. You should consider how to support your community in capacity building and developing a deeper understanding of how your community is changing. Therefore, laying out the specific steps, dedicated budget, and unique timeline required to sustain good community engagement throughout the process is essential to the ultimate success of the project. For example, see the Community Engagement Plan Template in the workbook.
- Develop guiding principles for your resilience planning. Guiding principles are themes or ideas that reflect the values important to a community and should be an expected outcome of all activities. Establishing guiding principles early on in the process can help define and articulate what the community hopes to achieve with strategies and projects. The nine Resiliency Prioritization Criteria from the Colorado Resiliency Framework (page 11), used in conjunction with established guiding principles (Colorado Resiliency Framework page 7), can help to identify those strategies that have the greatest opportunity for success and positive impact. Three Colorado communities, including Durango, La Plata County, and Arvada, participated in the pilot resilience framework development process and defined the following guiding principles:
- Enhance Connectivity: Community action should support connecting people to their community, jobs, services, and each other.
- Build on Existing Action: A strategy for future action should honor the work that has already been conducted to build community resilience.
- Prioritize Community Engagement and Center Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Principles in the Planning Process: Resilience planning should not only engage the whole community, but be reflective of the human, economic, and geographic diversity within the community.
- Mainstream Resilience Planning and Foster Action: The framework should drive action and empower communities to push a cultural shift in thinking about resiliency through concerted and collaborative efforts.
- Determine the tools you will use to inform the community engagement process. Community engagement tools are wide-ranging and ultimately depend on the size and diversity of your community. It is essential that the tools you use are customized for the unique needs of the community and should consider language, culture, race, background, income, age, class, and general political affiliation. We recommend using a combination of virtual and in-person tools to conduct community outreach.
- Set your community engagement process into motion! Be prepared to adapt and modify this process over time as the project takes shape.
Community Call Out: El Paso County
In El Paso County, strategic stakeholder engagement was a key to the success in the development of the El Paso County Resilience Plan. As a product of the Waldo Canyon Fire Regional Recovery Group, the local steering committee for the El Paso County Resiliency Plan supported the core planning team to conduct several community workshops that helped define the vision, goals, and strategies of the plan. For more information about developing your vision, goals, and guiding principles, see Step 2, Activity 4.