Making Nontraditional Community Engagement the Norm
“Thank you for the ice cream. It literally made it possible for us to attend.”
“This event was wonderful. This is how the City should do outreach for everything.”
“I’m so glad they’re doing bike repair. I used to put thousands of miles on my bike, but it’s been sitting throughout the pandemic, and it needed some love.”
“Thank you so much for putting this on. This is fabulous. We appreciate you guys.”
These are just some of the heartwarming and gratifying comments we heard during a series of community engagement events for the Andrew Street Bicycle Boulevard Project in January. If you’ve been following our newsletters and social media posts, you are probably aware that we have been partnering with the City of Tucson Department of Transportation and Mobility for some time now by hosting fun and family-friendly community engagement events. Our role has been to support the City’s efforts in connecting with a greater number and diversity of Tucsonans and engaging them in conversations to help shape the Proposition 407-funded walking, biking, and neighborhood traffic calming projects.
For too long, public agencies have relied on traditional outreach and engagement models where the project at hand is the sole focus of the meeting. Here’s how it goes: An open house-style meeting is scheduled and mailers are sent out to households located near the project area. The meeting generally takes place on a weekday evening where cookies and water are served at a time when most people are either eating or preparing dinner. Since you’re reading this blog post on the website of a local advocacy organization, chances are you’ve been to one of those.
These days, more and more government entities are starting to recognize that this model of community engagement is structured to amplify privileged voices; and while it works for some people, it falls short to make our engagement processes more inclusive, capture diverse perspectives, and uplift voices that are traditionally underrepresented or excluded. Traditional engagement is generally practiced in the form of evening meetings or open houses, and more recently in an online forum, that do not accommodate children. This format tends to work best for people who have the time and the resources to attend these events. People who are raising children, putting dinner on the table for their families, working multiple jobs or unpredictable hours, experiencing transportation barriers, lack access to a computer or internet connection, or those who simply don’t feel comfortable engaging in this format, are left out. Moreover, the way projects and associated meetings are advertised determines who shows up to provide input. In reality, people care about all sorts of issues that impact their neighborhoods and might be more inclined to participate in conversations that happen organically or in casual and welcoming settings instead of those that require attending a formal meeting.
Mobile bike repair, a pop-up café, and a movie help invite neighbors out to connect with City staff on neighborhood projects.
Our partners at the City of Tucson Department of Transportation and Mobility have been paying close attention to these dynamics in recent years. As part of implementing voter-approved Proposition 407 projects, they are teaming up with Living Streets Alliance to help broaden avenues of engagement by centering community conversation around fun and family-friendly events at neighborhood parks. Sometimes it’s a Sunday afternoon ice cream social, other times it’s a Saturday evening outdoor movie screening. Free bike repair is always part of the mix, considering that many families don’t have the time and the resources to keep up with flat tires or loose chains. This model tends to draw people because stopping by at the park for a scoop of ice cream sounds like a fun thing to do or a free bike repair service that shows up in their neighborhood is a good chance to get their kid’s bikes fixed. Once they are at the event, they also get to engage with the City staff about the upcoming project in their neighborhood and share their thoughts while the kids are at the playground or enjoying ice cream at one of the café tables we bring along.
We fully acknowledge that these events don’t automatically translate into equitable engagement or address all the inequitable practices embedded in transportation planning and project decision-making processes. There is a lot more work to be done to achieve that. Shifting our community engagement paradigm towards a collaborative model will likely necessitate public entities to move away from transactional engagement and begin working with community members as true implementation partners. After all, the people living in the neighborhoods where these projects are proposed have the most valuable experiential knowledge to inform them. These events, though imperfect, allow those who would not have attended a traditional project meeting to have their voices heard. We interact with many families with kids, something we’re not used to seeing at typical open houses. More people mention finding out about the events on yard signs than through their neighborhood associations. In that regard, centering community engagement around a family-friendly gathering demonstrates that the setup can make a difference in who is able to show up and serves as a step towards more diverse and inclusive engagement.
Our wish list is long. For one thing, we’d like to see project budgets and timelines that reflect the time and the resources authentic community engagement takes. We would like community members to have more agency in the decisions that impact their lives. We would also like to see a shift away from project-based outreach that engages people around the question of “what would you like to see in this project” towards participatory budgeting processes that engage people around the question of “how can we align our municipal funding streams with the priorities you have in your community?” Systemic change takes time and dedicated advocacy efforts. For us, pursuing these ideals coexist with things we can do in the short run, like these fun, family-friendly engagement events. Ice cream brings us together and sweetens the journey, and the kinds of conversations we shared at the beginning of this post inspire us to keep doing this work.