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Community engagement is a pillar of any planning process and at its core represents the most essential aspect of planning, the people. Our engagement work highlights the intersection of technical work and the human element in planning. We go where people already are, create experiences that make it easy (and even fun!) to share ideas, and build the kind of trust that opens the door to meaningful dialogue. In the sections ahead, we’ll walk through how we approach engagement, why it matters, and how it helps us elevate community voices into long‑lasting planning outcomes.

Building Trust

Developing a strategy for effective engagement starts with understanding the “why”. Our main goal is to make sure that people feel heard. Conventional engagement techniques often feel ingenuine and leave participants feeling like their input is not truly valued. Our approach is grounded in building trust and creating an environment that allows people to be comfortable sharing what is truly important to them.

Asking questions that we already know the answer to or framing our questions to illicit the answer we want, doesn’t provide any quality to our planning process and leaves us at the place we started. We see engagement as a way to move past surface level conversations and get to the heart of the matter.

Going to Them

Everyone is busy and it’s difficult to ask people to take time out of their schedules to attend a public meeting, so instead, we go to where they already are. Some of our best conversations have come from a quick one-minute conversation at a farmers’ market, fall festival, trout fishing derby, or other events where the community is already gathering. Not only does attending these events give us access to people who wouldn’t typically come to a public meeting, but they are at their most comfortable, allowing us to have candid conversations. Existing community events also help us better understand community values and support small businesses or vendors. A win-win!

Informing Decisions

The results of our outreach are meant to provide real human data to the decision makers in the communities we work in. One of our strategies is to engage our steering committees and the public with the same activities. This allows us to stack up the results side by side and demonstrate if the decision makers and the public have the same priorities. If priorities aren’t aligning, we know that is an area to dig a little bit deeper into. Often, decision makers are pleasantly surprised by new ideas that community members bring to the table.

Having Fun

While community engagement and public meetings aren’t traditionally recognized as ‘fun’, we try to keep things interesting throughout the engagement process to keep community members coming back to meetings or events. The C&S team has led projects that include bike tours, sunset canal boat tours, kayak tours on sunny Saturday afternoons, and downtown pub crawls on Friday nights to gain insights from community members. Having experiences with the community allows our team to better understand the community through their eyes. Engagement events outdoors or at small businesses break down barriers and allow for the flow of candid conversations and exciting ideas.

Creating Community Champions

Community engagement does more than check a box. Long after a planning project is done and C&S has completed their scope, it is the people within a community who bring initiatives to the finish line. We strive to work with community members who are passionate about projects in their own backyards ranging from wetland protection to park improvements. We call them ‘Community Champions’ as they often champion a project or initiative once the planning is complete and implementation steps are needed.

Planners are the conduit that bridges the gap between the lived experience of community members and the decision makers who shape their built environment. Community engagement provides a podium for people to express their ideas from a place of acceptance and trust, and all we have to do is listen.