Who are the Engagement Deciders?

Community engagement is not community building.

And, as we discussed last time, the most common engagement practices do not line-up with the best practices for community building.

Well, why not? Why don’t so many of our community engagement processes do more community building? Do we not want to? Do we not know how to? Are we not able to? Or are we simply not aware of its potential?

I’m on a mission to find some answers. So let’s dive back into our recent survey on the Practice of Community Engagement to see what we can uncover. If you need a refresher on the survey and its scope, check out this earlier post with an overview.

A few questions from the survey sought to diagnose some roots causes at the heart of these “why not” questions.

First up: Who decides what a community engagement process looks like?

I figured that if we could identify where people make decisions about community processes, maybe we could more accurately implement some changes.

This line of inquiry arises from my experience as a practicing landscape architect. Often projects would come into the office through a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) process. This is when a government agency or community group would outline a scope of work and ask professional consultants to make a case for why they are they qualified for the job.

In my experience, RFQ’s — especially those originating from government agencies — would often have the community engagement strategy already baked in. For example, they might require three community meetings, or pre-determine the composition and role of a stakeholder group.

Do government agencies always call all the shots? There are some limits to my exposure as a consultant, so I wanted to know if other shared this experience.

So I asked in the survey: “Who typically determines what tools or techniques are used in your community engagement process?”

Respondents had the option to move a slider between “o=never” and “5=all the time” for each of three different groups: the sponsoring agency or organization; the consultant (landscape architect, planner, engagement specialist, etc.); or the community or community representatives.

Below, you can see the results grouped by the same categories: private practice/consultants, government officials, and non-profits/community groups.

What do you see?

First, I see that private practice and governments are both reporting that the community is least likely to determine the engagement process.

Alternatively, community groups responded that they have an equal or greater say. This most likely represents some selective bias among the respondents. The community representatives who responded to the survey were largely from organizations actively working to cultivate community in their local communities. Such respondents are distinct from the less organized “communities” that governments and consultants are likely referencing.

Governments report that they are most often the deciders, which perhaps confirms my experience as a consultant.

There was also an option in the survey to provide additional comments to this question. Some respondents mentioned they were constrained by local codes and ordinances. Several government manages noted they confer with consultants or community groups, but they make the final decision. This may explain why private practice consultants seem to think they contribute more.

I’m not sure if there are any obvious conclusions to draw here besides that community members aren’t involved much in deciding the community engagement process.

This is not insignificant. As we saw in our last post about the survey, the engagement techniques used by community groups differed from those used by agencies and consultants.

Which reminds me of the critical role of a representative Convening Group to steward the engagement process. The most successful engagement processes are co-designed with the community that they are involving. If you need a refresher on how this works, check out this previous post “How to Craft a Public Process for Community Building.”

I’d be curious to run an experiment that tests this distinction: with the same project, have the community group, the consultant, and the governing agency each draft up a community engagement process. What differences arise, and why?

Anyone want to take me up on this experiment? Or have an experience that approximates it already?

What conclusions do you draw from these survey results? I’d love to hear your feedback! I recently moved this blog over to Substack, and the Substack app and website is well-formatted for comments. Go ahead and click that “comment” button and let me know what you think!

Next time, we’ll continue to dig into our “why not?” questioning by looking at organizational missions. Stay tuned!

LOOKING FOR STORIES TO SHARE.

Do you have a great example of how a community engagement process helped a community restitch is fraying social fabric, or go from “Us vs Them” to “We.” I’d love to talk to you. Please reach out.

WHAT ELSE I’M READING

If you haven’t read Jonathan’s Haidt’s The Anxious Generation or subscribe to the After Babel Substack, you are missing out on one of the most important conversations today. In this wonderful piece, “The Great Deterioration of Local Community Was A Major Driver of The Loss of The Play-Based Childhood,” Jonathan Rausch draws a bright line between the decline of community life and the crisis of mental health currently consuming our youth. This is a critical intersection of cultural trends.

This pieces references Seth Kaplan and his book Fragile Neighborhoods. This is another one I highly recommend!

Ian Marcus Corbin gets right to the heart of contemporary American life in America Unraveled: Precarity, solidarity and our long season of crisis. Touching on issues of community, economics and anxiety, this is an insightful and compelling piece. Don’t miss it!