Background

Community engagement is a fundamental step in planning and implementing shared mobility services. While it is not a new concept in the transportation field, the onset of new technologies and community-focused shared mobility demonstration projects, like bikeshare and microtransit,  demonstrate the importance of understanding and engaging people throughout the planning and implementation process. Meaningful community engagement helps projects reflect the needs and realities of the community they seek to serve with inclusive solutions that impact all users.

Indego staff at a community outreach event. Credit: Darren Burton Photography

Engaging the community in an impactful manner often requires a paradigm shift for policymakers, mobility providers, and local agencies to understand the value of community involvement. From the onset, community engagement facilitates an understanding of each community’s relevant or affected parties and residents, allowing the groups involved to identify the concerns, risks, opportunities, and potential solutions surrounding an issue. Community members may not favor or share the same opinion of a project, but feedback should be welcomed rather than deflected. Digging into these concerns and understanding residents’ perspectives can help shape the project into its most productive and valued form, increasing usership and longevity. Community engagement is a time-sensitive process that requires dedicated funding to support. The local knowledge that a community brings can save time and money in the long run by avoiding costly retrofits because a mobility solution does not meet the needs of its intended users. Data about the community helps tell part of the story, and the qualitative data gained from a meaningful community process completes it.

Credit: USDOT

Public/Community Engagement is defined by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) as effectively engaging the public, including low-income and minority communities, in the planning process. Rather than being standardized in approach, FTA explains that engagement should be scaled based on the proposed project and resources, and consider going beyond traditional methods of public outreach into more innovative strategies that reflect the fast-paced communications and technology environment we live in.

Humanizing Data

Community Engagement unravels the story told by demographic and other data describing an area and provides a human-level understanding of a community’s mobility needs. For example, data on early bikeshare use in Chicago showed us that only a small percentage of black residents held bikeshare memberships, despite comprising 30% of the city’s overall population. While this data is helpful, it does not explain why this might be. Community engagement helps us fill in the gaps that quantitative data leaves behind. Through engagement efforts, we can see the role of safety and awareness in bikeshare usage. Community engagement efforts have shown that fear of traffic collision, robbery, and poor road conditions are key concerns for black and Hispanic populations associated with bicycle use. Another study found that low-income residents and people of color were less likely to have exposure to bikeshare through their networks and experiences, contributing to lower usage levels among these populations.

Credit: USDOT

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Ensuring Project Success

Community engagement is often associated with concerns and misconceptions. Some of these concerns for the agency or pilot provider include the expenses associated with participatory methods, that it will only involve the same group of people already engaged, or that community engagement incurs complaints from the public. Sometimes these concerns come to pass and are justified (for example, community engagement will likely be an added cost, the engaged community will likely show up to events, and there will probably be feedback and criticisms from the public); however, these challenges should be seen as opportunities to identify nuanced solutions that will improve a mobility project and help to ensure its success. Understanding the project’s budget and being innovative with these dollars, using a variety of tactics to reach a wide audience, and internalizing feedback to identify ways to improve, are all part of the community engagement process. These strategies complement each other instead of one replacing the other. For example, engagement among relevant or affected parties or government agencies across jurisdictions remains an important strategy for planning, but increasing a community’s voice in these planning strategies can help to bridge the planning gap.

Credit: FORREC

Effective community engagement includes all voices in the planning process rather than just those in positions of power. Ultimately, meaningful community engagement should: 

• Create culturally relevant projects;
• Assign prices to projects based on a community’s income or ability to pay for services,
• Prioritize the voices of historically marginalized and neglected voices in the project planning process;
• Improve citizens’ knowledge and skills in problem-solving, while empowering and integrating people from different backgrounds;
• Create opportunities to discuss potential barriers; and 
• Increase trust between the community and the government.

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1. Determine the Approach

1A. Identify the Audience

Before engaging with a community, it is important to identify the relevant or affected parties and why those people are important to a project’s success. Those identified can attend meetings, serve on committees, work as community engagement ambassadors, and help to inform on missing perspectives. In addition, it is important to understand what type of engagement is being sought, what is considered successful engagement, and what is necessary for engagement to occur. Project members need to know why they want to engage this community and how the project will differ due to engagement.

Travel trainer providing group training to older adults Credit: NADTC

1B. Establish Guiding Principles & Know Your Values

Establishing guiding principles for engagement ensures that long-term goals are achieved. Guiding principles can remind us why we are engaging in the first place, which lends itself to a more fruitful and inclusive relationship with a project community. 

Community engagement principles can be tailored to your organization or project type, however, many principles should seek relevance across the board. Elevated Chicago, a partnership of organizations committed to advancing racial equity in health, climate, and transportation by establishing programs and projects within a ½ mile radius around transit stations, published a document outlining engagement principles and insights applicable to a variety of project contexts. These principles emphasize the need to put ownership over projects in the hands of the community itself.

Elevated Chicago Community Engagement Principles

• Shift Our Mindset
• Co-Design Engagement with Community
• Enable Two-Way Communication and Learning
• Promote Cultural Competency and Equity
• Value Community Knowledge and Capital
• Seek and Embrace Multiple Viewpoints
• Establish Trust and Transparency
• Cultivate Leadership and Advocacy
• Foster Ownership and Identity in Community

Other entities like the Urban Institute have taken similar approaches, with their principles resting on the understanding that lived experience is valuable expertise

Urban Institute: 4 Principles of Community Engagement

• Reckon with institutional racism 
• Learn from others
• Redefine expertise and follow the ethos, “nothing about us without us”
• Recognize that engagement can build over time and empowerment is the goal

1C. Utilize a Participatory Framework

Participatory frameworks are tools communities can leverage to advance community-driven decision-making during the planning and implementation phases of shared mobility projects. Local government entities, community organizations, philanthropic partners, and trusted community voices can utilize participatory frameworks to assess current and future engagement efforts so the community perspective is at the forefront of solutions.

Participatory frameworks help us understand the degrees of power withheld or given to the community based on different community engagement strategies. These types of participatory frameworks can be a helpful tool for projects to set their community engagement goals. Understanding why the project requires a certain community engagement strategy is as important as the strategy and execution.

The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) offers a spectrum for participation from Inform to Empower that outlines the public participation goal, the promise to the public, and an example technique. This framework shows how residents can inform, consult, involve, collaborate, or even be empowered to make final decisions on the project.

Transit Planning 4 All outlines six stages or Pathways to Inclusion. The graphic serves as a tool for organizations to use to distinguish between types of activities and how to build meaningful inclusive engagement.  The Pathways to Inclusion begin with Level One, where programs are developed for participants, and end with Level Six, where participants play a lead role in the planning and implementation. The pathway is a continuum and is not one-way, given engagement activities are likely to vary depending on the type and timing of a program. Generally speaking, the higher the level of engagement, the greater the participant involvement, and the higher likelihood of a successful project.

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2. Identify Strategies

There are many ways to engage community members, and efforts shouldn’t be limited to just one specific choice. An inclusive community engagement plan will likely combine several strategies to ensure varied perspectives Equally important, there should be multiple touchpoints with the same people throughout the process. Each time it is important to recap what has been done and how the past engagement efforts are shaping the direction of the project. When undertaking these methods, concentrate on asking for input and engaging in conversation, rather than delivering your agenda.

Examples of Communication Engagement Strategies 

• Steering/planning committees are a great way to return power to your invested community members consistently and ensure you have community buy-in throughout the project. Steering committees can include representation from organizations in the area and residents or have a few subcommittees with different goals depending on the representation. Rather than simply asking for input during a single meeting, the steering committee serves as an ongoing checkpoint and outlet for feedback.
• Citizen panels create a space for residents and affected or relevant parties to ask pressing questions regarding project implementation. A citizen panel could parallel a council meeting, but is typically less structured and allows for more involvement in the decision-making process.
• One-on-one interviews can offer in-depth information to community members and can be a space to ask any follow-up questions not gathered through other forms of communication. They can be conducted in person, over the phone, or through video chat.

Credit: USDOT

• Community surveys can be administered via a flier, mail, or online and can elicit meaningful information from many community residents. Community members may also be more likely to speak up in an anonymous survey rather than an in-person meeting, which can be useful for obtaining quantitative data. The creation of the survey requires dedicated time to generate ethical, non-biased, and non-misleading questions that will result in insightful and actionable answers. For example, it is important to think about what type of question—multiple choice, select all, yes/no, short answer, scale—will best serve the project topic.
• Focus groups allow people to provide feedback in a relaxed and small group setting. If certain community organizations are beneficial to receive input from, organizing focus groups with them may be a goal in the engagement plan. These small group meetings typically include about 8-12 people and should offer more narrative answers than one might receive through an open-ended question on a survey. If the community prefers to speak a language other than English, a focus group is one way to engage this group, having someone who does speak their native language lead and moderate the meeting to understand their ideas and input. Focus group topics can range from more broad discussions and brainstorming sessions to a venue to discuss complex issues such as an action plan. Focus groups are an example of ‘Consult’ in the spectrum of participation.
• Town halls/community forums are opportunities to embed your project in a space already devoted to community feedback. It is an excellent opportunity to gather feedback from a large number of people, demonstrate transparency with the public, and offer a chance to explain a process in detail. Forums and town halls will see more success if supplemented by other methods of engagement, as they have a variety of drawbacks when used alone. These include the lack of certainty about attendees, the tendency of overrepresentation from existing groups, and the meeting’s potential to be bureaucratic or create conflict.
  

Credit: SUMC

• Open houses are an informal way to invite the community to learn and offer input in a self-serving process. Successful open houses are located in a large location, near a central corridor or main street, where people often frequent.
  
• Web-based engagement involves webinars, virtual public meetings, online discussion forums and blogs, social media, online surveys, social networking, and ratings/voting. These venues offer people the ability to choose when and where they want to participate, are cost-effective, and can reach large numbers of people. The internet can also be a space to educate the public on new projects to create transparency and engagement. For example, to help the public understand and get involved in the large number of private land developments happening in Asheville, NC, the city embedded a new development tool in SimpliCity, the city’s search engine tool. This digital tool categorizes and defines large-scale developments and shows opportunities for public participation classified by project type. Potential challenges for web-based engagement are that it may require a moderator, extensive marketing, and exclude people without access to the internet. 
  • Web-based Community Engagement Tools
    • Social media
    • Webinar and meeting software like Google Meet, Zoom, etc.
    • Survey platforms like Alchemer or Google Forms
    • Collaborative planning tools like Miro or Google Jamboards
• Interactive workshops can help community members see the project’s idea come to life and better understand its impact on their environment. Community members can provide input on what they like or do not like about the area through the activities. The feedback is recorded and can facilitate a larger discussion around the ideas. Exercises can include community mapping or charrettes. These exercises can stimulate discussion, build a sense of community ownership, and utilize more hands-on and visual ways of learning.
• Co-production blurs the boundaries between ‘professional’ and ‘service user’ and is used to share power more equally. It is perhaps the highest level of inclusivity as the community is both making decisions and facilitating the development. An example of co-production could be a cooperative model in which community members share part ownership and subsequent planning and operations with the provider or transit agency. Co-production could be a form of ‘Empowerment’ on the spectrum of participation.
• On-the-ground outreach like visiting local businesses in addition to door-to-door canvassing, setting up a booth outside an event, and community tours attract the voices of individuals who tend not to be part of formal engagement processes. These efforts can result in an impromptu and informal conversation that can offer critical insights and help establish relationships and openness with the community. They can also serve as a method to better understand the community’s daily life.
• A deliberate polling process is a structured way for a random sample of participants to explore a topic while understanding its pros and cons. The random sample should be representative of the community in terms of gender, race, education, and socioeconomic status. Participants are given a questionnaire, gather for a few days to discuss issues, and meet in small groups with trained facilitators. After this process, participants fill out the questionnaire again. This can be a form of ‘Empower’ and is best used to discuss complex issues unfamiliar to the public.
  
• Human-centered design is an approach to problem-solving that brings the human perspective into all steps of the problem-solving process. It is both a methodology and a mindset; it is the exercise of trying to walk in someone else’s shoes and understand their lived experience as inspiration for a service or product. It is about challenging assumptions and exposing real needs. The typical three-step process for human-centered design or design thinking is ‘Inspiration’, ‘Ideation’, and ‘Implementation’.
  • Step One: Inspiration – Understanding the people affected by your project, and ensuring that each of their unique backgrounds are being considered. This is typically done through secondary research, including focus groups, surveys, or other forms of direct interaction with the community or communities. 
  • Step Two: Ideation – Making sense of what you’ve heard in Step One, generating design opportunities, generating ideas, and testing out potential solutions. This process typically involves working with project champions to generate a physical and visual framework.
  • Step Three: Implementation – Putting your project or idea out into the world. Organizations will typically run a pilot or prototype stage to ensure that it is an effective solution for the particular community they are working with.

Concerning community engagement, these three steps are collaborative processes with the community that aim to create a product or service that deeply aligns with the needs of the area.

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3. Identify Affected Parties

Identifying key relevant or affected parties is a critical step in all community engagement efforts to ensure efforts are representative and equitable. These individuals are valuable members of the community and play a large role in facilitating meaningful dialogue with community members. According to The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership, these key players have roles that should be leveraged:

• Community-based organizations are key players in cultivating community capacity to participate in and lead decision-making processes. 
• Staff and elected officials within local government should help facilitate system changes to increase community voice and decrease disproportionate harm to those who traditionally lack a political voice.
• Philanthropic partners should partner with communities to transform power dynamics and ensure adequate resourcing of essential community capacities. 
• Third-party facilitators and evaluators should create an environment of collaboration and participation across sectors.

Credit: SUMC

Specific types of key affected parties might include:

• Local, regional, state, and federal agencies, 
• Elected officials, 
• Local businesses, 
• Civic associations, 
• Labor organizations, 
• Educational institutions, 
• Advocacy groups, 
• Religious institutions
• Faith-based organizations, 
• Tribal organizations,
• Community organizations,
• Cultural groups, 
• PTO/PTA groups or, 
• Neighborhood groups

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4. Evaluation

An ongoing evaluation process is an important component of community engagement to ensure that the work is maintained throughout the program lifecycle and help projects align their current efforts with community engagement goals. Community engagement performance cards are a useful tool to use throughout the project to serve as a baseline and checkpoint. Other more informal approaches, such as human-centered design’s journey mapping, are exercises used frequently to maintain a high level of community engagement work. A more detailed discussion on evaluation tactics for community engagement is explained within the learning module on Goal Setting, Performance Metrics, and Evaluation.

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Engagement Considerations

Meet people where they are physically, culturally, and emotionally. 

We usually talk about meeting people where they are in the context of physical location. For instance, instead of relying on residents to put in extra effort to convene, come to them or meet them in a place where they are already planning to convene. While this is important, meeting them on a cultural and emotional level can help create a safe space where members’ stories, opinions, and ideas are better understood. This awareness can bring forth better solutions and tactics the engagement process hopes to step away with.

Community Engagement pop-up in Historic Northwest Palm Beach. Credit: 8 80 Cities

Understand historical context 

Understanding the history of the community being engaged helps reveal how and why some communities may or may not hesitate to engage with projects. Matters such as past trauma can lead to apathy or unwillingness to participate and provide information useful for project implementation.

Content creation

When designing engagement materials such as surveys, it is important to ensure they are accessible, enjoyable, and reflective of community members’ primary languages.

Community engagement fatigue 

Community engagement fatigue can occur when a community is constantly solicited for input. Fatigue is often derived from engagement having a transactional or perfunctory quality. Underserved communities are particularly vulnerable to this due to the present inequities that exacerbate transportation, health, and climate issues. To avoid this, those heading pilot projects should look for ways to foster more ongoing, consistent, back-and-forth communication with a community. Engagement needs to be intentional and meaningful, qualities get lost when interactions are viewed as one-and-done. Building trust and relationships, providing incentives, and establishing two-way communication lines are key.

Balance priorities

When it comes to shared mobility solutions, it is very important to balance priorities and understand how these services will look on the ground. While the idea to bring these services in may be well-intended, consulting community members to understand their needs will reveal whether there is interest and if these services will address certain access needs when put into place. Too often, micromobility options like bikeshare and scootershare are dropped into cities with little regard for how the community will use them concerning the larger transportation network or where they would be best placed to meet mobility needs. Even if a city’s intent is for these services to bridge first- and last-mile connections to transit, it takes planning, collaboration with community members, and integration with transit networks to see successful outcomes.

Debunk the idea of community consensus

A common misconception surrounding public engagement is that it will result in a clear course of action. Because communities are made up of a variety of people with varying needs and perceptions, the idea of all community members having one unified vision is unrealistic and weakens the engagement process. When one focuses on pursuing consensus in community engagement, it becomes easier for those heading a mobility project to revert to their original ideas and fall back into a top-down planning approach, a dynamic that hinders communities. Jeremy Levine, Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, recommends straying away from this preferred outcome of consensus and transitioning focus on uplifting community voice. He suggests investing in “low cost, ongoing exercises that produce a high volume of information, persists even after particular projects are completed, makes priorities transparent, and neither seek nor assume a singular position from ‘the community’”

Credit: Divvy

Re-examine the engagement approach

Conversations surrounding communities’ visions for more safe and equitable travel need to be ongoing. Even in instances where entities sincerely want input that is representative and inclusive, the issue tends to lie in the way entities approach soliciting public input. Oftentimes community engagement methods include asking questions that community members are not prepared to answer due to their technical language. While the average citizen may not be familiar with technical terms or have expertise in transportation service and design, they obtain local knowledge that comes from using and experiencing public space. This useful knowledge tends to be lost in current public engagement processes which foster a dynamic where the public participation process feels more like a formality than a platform that gives weight and consideration to community needs and challenges.

How do we apply technology in a way that is sensitive to personal and cultural means? While technology is often presented as the solution to transportation problems because of its ability to automate systems and streamline efficiencies, transportation’s ultimate goal is to serve people. Stakeholders should think about the implications technological solutions may have on an individual’s ability to access essential services or participate in project-related engagement efforts. Technology can be advantageous, but stakeholders should consider what technology solutions mean on the ground. For instance, while vehicle electrification stands to benefit low-income and minority communities due to its associated emission reductions, the lack of reliable off-street charging options is a major barrier to EV adoption.

Be mindful of technological solutions

How do we apply technology while also being sensitive to personal and cultural means? While technology is often presented as the solution to transportation problems because of its ability to automate systems and streamline efficiencies, transportation’s ultimate goal is to serve people. Key relevant or affected parties should think about the implications technological solutions may have on an individual’s ability to access essential services or participate in project-related engagement efforts. Technology can be advantageous, but the key relevant or affected parties should consider what technology solutions mean on the ground. For instance, while vehicle electrification stands to benefit low-income and minority communities due to its associated emission reductions, the lack of reliable off-street charging options is a major barrier to Electric Vehicle (EV) adoption.

Compensate

Make sure you compensate communities for participating and make sure that the form of compensation is culturally sensitive. For instance, if gift cards are provided to individuals who participate in an engagement activity, the gift card should be eligible at a store that is not only in the neighborhood but regularly frequented by community members.

Seek local knowledge

Seek out and engage those who are and will be affected by the project.

Credit: Streetsblog

Recruit from within

Instead of consulting outside entities to help collect data, recruit from within the community, allowing residents to share their local knowledge. Even once a pilot program is established, prioritize community residents to fill needed roles.

Avoid groupthink

To avoid groupthink, consider multiple engagement methods to capture unique viewpoints of the community. When a team is in groupthink mode, they will dismiss other concerns and alternative viewpoints to conform and find consensus. Groupthink is harmful to inclusive engagement because groups tend to accept a viewpoint or conclusion that falsely represents a perceived group.

Commit to an action-oriented process

Even if the planning and design process may be long, find ways to generate tangible outcomes in the short term to demonstrate progress and action towards the larger objective.

Transparency

Be clear about your intentions with engagement and how you plan to use the information provided in the decision-making process.

Open and reliable channels of communication

Open and reliable communication channels will expand the reach of engagement for a project and make sure contact with the community continues after engagement efforts are completed. For instance, having a website, phone number, or email address that is associated with the project gives community members a way to provide feedback or ask questions before, during, and after the project.

Best Practices

Develop a community engagement budget

Community engagement efforts are the most valuable pathway to the success of a project if they are planned for and executed properly. If efforts are poorly designed and lack investment, they can waste time and resources and even increase public cynicism. A community engagement budget should be developed in the early phases of the project planning process to avoid the effects of poorly designed and unprioritized community engagement. Overall, the amount of money allocated to community engagement and the chosen engagement methods will send a clear message about the intent of these efforts.

• Tip: The community engagement budget development should be a collaborative process because it involves identifying what type of outreach efforts will take place.

A small group discussion at one of the Public Budget Forums. Credit: Joe Linton/Streetsblog L.A.

Develop user personas and stories

Entities are increasingly looking toward human-centered design to understand how to target services to residents because it brings the human perspective into all steps of the problem-solving process. A community engagement tool that has arisen from this approach is the development of user personas, a tactic that involves personifying trends and patterns in data. Personas, also known as community member personas, are fictional representations of a person within a group or audience that a project or service is looking to target. Personas are meant to be representative of the communities in which the project serves and thus should be based on relationships and knowledge of real people.

Developing personas helps organizations understand their audiences to better tailor a project’s goals and arrangement. They inform decision-making and how one communicates with an audience. Often, personas work out what type of people the project will engage, what those people are interested in, and what their needs are. This helps humanize the people the project aims to help. Rather than typical demographic data showcasing “what” their target audience is, personas uncover “who” their target audience is. For instance, quantitative data can tell us that paratransit is highly frequented by individuals with disabilities during weekdays but personas attribute a trip purpose or need to them that helps us understand who they are.

• Tip: Supplement the creation of user personas with interviews.

Credit: 99 Designs

Maintain engagement throughout the program lifecycle

Community engagement from the needs assessment through evaluation is important for projects to achieve meaningful engagement. Involving participants throughout the program lifecycle can pose challenges on the planning and budgeting side as well as the participant side to ensure they do not experience fatigue or burnout. This is particularly true for shared mobility projects that may be exploratory, such as a small pilot for microtransit, or a highly multifaceted and extensive project such as a mobility hub.

• Tip: Legitimize the strategies and processes of the community engagement work. This includes offering incentives or compensation and providing daycare and refreshments during events to show community members how valued their time, knowledge, and skills are to improve a local project. Participants should feel empowered and energized, knowing their involvement is essential.

Securing funding for community engagement

Funding and budgeting for shared mobility projects is a topic of careful consideration as these projects tend to work with constrained budgets from the beginning. Additional funding opportunities over time can also become a challenge. As shared mobility projects often involve several partners, deciding how and what to budget to achieve the projects’ community engagement goals may be negotiated.

• Tip: Outline a public engagement plan during the beginning stages of the project. Identifying what partner will be in charge of community engagement operations can help determine how budgeting should be allocated. Lastly, setting aside resources in the planning stages while also finding funding opportunities that value community engagement will help ensure there are enough resources for meaningful work.

Understand effective timing for community engagement

Shared mobility projects can take time to become a fully solidified plan, which makes the timing of when to begin engaging the public about a project a sensitive task. Opening up the floor to the public without a clear project plan could be perceived as unprofessional or confusing if the community latches on to ideas that may not be completely viable. However, bringing in the public too late can also indicate to the community that their opinion and feedback are not considered, as the project has already been decided upon.

• Tip: Engage the community as early as possible, ideally before a project and plan have been established, for meaningful engagement. This can be done effectively with thoughtful messaging and goals for the project to help steer the conversation while keeping the result open-ended for the community to offer their input and guidance. This will ultimately result in a more effective and applicable program for the specific community it serves.

• Tip: For example, if a particular mode has already been decided on internally, engaging the community to find out how that mode can best meet their needs early on in the planning process encourages community approval. It can also limit costly program retrofits if something is planned contrary to the community’s needs. For instance, suppose microtransit seems to be the best solution for a community. In that case, it is critical to educate the community about microtransit early on and create multiple environments for the community to still play a role in helping to define how the service operates. Equally important is being open to suggestions beyond the proposed mobility solution. If bikeshare is also a popular consideration among the community residents, then can it also be deployed, if not at this moment, then in the future.

Engagement for Indego, Philadelphia’s bike share system Credit: Better Bikeshare Partnership

Ensure inclusive planning

Central to meaningful community engagement is the concept of inclusion. Inclusion does not just mean increased turnout or high response rates but rather paying attention to who is involved in the community engagement process and specifically what voices are not represented. This may include older adults, individuals with disabilities, immigrants, racial, ethnic, or religious minorities, indigenous groups, families with young children, new residents, renters, or youth. Being thoughtful about who is hosting an event, when it is happening, and where it will occur will help dictate who will participate. If events are consistently taking place at the same location on a weeknight, those who care for their family in the evening, work at night, or live far from the outreach event cannot participate.

Pictures from MUSE’s Design A Street exercise with community members. Credit: MUSE

• Tip: Engage community groups with first-hand knowledge of the neighborhood to glean important insights on how to reach residents and build trust. For example, Seattle DOT partnered with Rooted in Rights, a non-profit organization that protects the rights of people with disabilities, to create informational videos on bikeshare parking requirements and to work directly with the disability community.
• Tip: Make use of existing tools. Many publications share important information to help make presentations, surveys, flyers, or web pages accessible for persons with disabilities. Detailed information on inclusive community engagement processes can be found in King County and Hopelink’s Inclusive Planning Toolkit, and Alta & the City of Raleigh’s Public Participation Playbook. We have included a few of the most important considerations below:
  • Meeting space:
    Check to make sure the surrounding building sidewalks are in good condition, the outdoor light is sufficient, and the building itself (inside and outside) is ADA accessible, including curbs, steps, railings, elevators, pathways, and chairs
  • Marketing materials:
    Presentations should include microphones and applicable interpretation services. Written materials should use a large and high-contrast font, incorporate alternative text options, and follow header standards for screen readers.

Learn how to scale

This challenge goes in both directions – scaling down traditional community engagement processes used for large development plans to fit a small experimental pilot project and scaling up that pilot project into a more extensive comprehensive program. Public agencies may have limited control in decision-making and a comprehensive process may not scale down for a temporary experimentation pilot phase. For example, a microtransit program planned at the regional level might not be designed to reach the specific needs lower-income communities face. Conversely, a microtransit program planned for a specific community may not have all the mechanisms in place to scale to a city or region.

• Tip: Determine the level of communication necessary for your pilot project. Communities need to be familiar with even the smallest projects or they risk not being used at all. Similarly, if there are later plans to scale a project to a larger size, then community engagement will lay the framework for future expansion early in the process. A well-thought-out permitting strategy or public-private partnership agreement can help to address these issues.

Competing with other priorities

Community members have a myriad of other competing priorities both in their personal and professional lives. It can be challenging to show how one project is significant if there are more pressing issues taking up space in their lives. Specifically, making a shared mobility program relevant and important for immigrant communities, low-income communities, and communities of color can be difficult when these communities may be more concerned with immediate issues in their lives such as healthcare access, or unemployment.

• Tip: Explain and message the project to make a human connection to the communities’ day-to-day lives. Though transit issues in the eyes of the project administrator may feel relevant and connected to other community concerns, this connection may not be felt or understood daily by community members. Showing the project’s impact through storytelling, narratives, or interactive activities can help people see themselves in the project.

Acknowledge that equitable and meaningful engagement takes time

Truly engaging with the ideas and input of the community for new shared mobility projects requires quality interactions over a long period of time. Similarly, the concept of equity, whereby those who have not had a seat at the planning table are deliberately included to create a more just world, requires time. Furthermore, a partnership between the project administrator and community members must be built on trust. Balancing the slower pace of relationship building and the fast pace of typical project periods is an ongoing obstacle.

• Tip: Discuss community engagement goals from the beginning with all partners. Be realistic with time frames and acknowledge that equity-based partnerships move at the speed of trust. All partners should communicate and agree on this concept so that timeline expectations are set.

• Tip: Work with community partners that have networks and systems in place that can be tapped into to reach community residents and offer familiar places to convene. This can help save time and resources instead of starting from square one.

Consider the lack of familiarity and/or negative perception of shared mobility

In some neighborhoods in the country, residents in lower-income minority communities view shared mobility projects as harbingers of gentrification or do not feel they address the more immediate challenges when confronting their neighborhoods. There are a number of sources that dig into these racial inequalities in more depth, such as Racism Has Shaped Public Transit and It’s Riddled with Inequities or The Wrong Complexion For ‘Protection’: How Race Shaped America’s Roadways and Cities. On the other hand, many individuals are not aware or familiar with the emerging shared mobility technologies. Both situations can lead to disengaged community members.

• Tip: Leverage human-centered design techniques that are rooted in empathy to understand the community’s perspective.

Bikes for Belmont Cragin

Since 2019, Northwest Center, a community-based nonprofit organization based in Chicago’s Belmont Cragin neighborhood, has been working to foster a more bicycle-friendly community to improve transportation in the area. 

Belmont Cragin is a neighborhood on Chicago’s northwest side of about 78,000 people, the majority of whom are Hispanic. The neighborhood is also a transit desert, with few reliable transportation options available to residents. Northwest Center aims to improve the economic well-being and quality of life of Belmont Cragin residents through community development, organizing, planning, and education. One of the organization’s major focuses is youth empowerment, and it hosts a Youth Leadership Council for young Belmont Cragin residents to support them as organizers, activists, and community leaders.

In 2019, The Youth Leadership Council recognized that a lack of reliable transportation was one of the most pressing issues facing the community, and focused their efforts on improving the neighborhood’s bike network. The Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) and Divvy, Chicago’s bikeshare system, were in the midst of planning a city-wide bikeshare expansion plan, with Belmont Cragin and other west-side Chicago neighborhoods included as expansion areas. Northwest Center’s Youth Leadership Council worked directly with CDOT, Divvy, elected officials, and Belmont Cragin residents to form a task force to drive this expansion effort, developing recommendations for where Divvy stations should be placed and new bike lanes should be installed. Northwest Center held several of these task force meetings where residents could connect directly with CDOT and other city officials to discuss the progress of the expansion, give feedback on new bike infrastructure, drive the design and installation of future infrastructure improvements, and address the community impacts of the project. 

Belmont Cragin Community Event Credit: Better Bike Share Partnership

Additionally, Northwest Center hosted various community outreach events, including group bike rides, workshops, and an eight-part facilitated forum where Belmont Cragin residents connected to discuss transportation issues in an effort to build harmony between cyclists, motorists, and pedestrians. 

As a result of Northwest Center’s efforts, particularly those of its Youth Leadership Council, Belmont Cragin now has over 17 miles of designated bike lanes, and 13 Divvy bikeshare stations. Additionally, the campaign helped build a strong community around biking in the neighborhood. This case study exemplifies how thoughtful community engagement and capacity building can address specific community transportation needs.

For more information on the Bikes for Belmont Cragin campaign and best practices for meaningful youth-led community engagement, read SUMC’s evaluation report. 

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Clean Mobility Equity Alliance

The Clean Mobility Equity Alliance (CMEA) works to provide resources that help plan, implement, and grow shared mobility projects that advance local and regional mobility equity and justice policy solutions.
Since its founding in April 2021, CMEA has worked to activate local organizations and community members to better understand the target region’s mobility needs to design, implement, and sustain shared mobility options for all involved users. Although this program is funded through California’s Clean Mobility Options (CMO) program, it works to enhance mobility equity nationally by following three main goals:

1. Support mobility equity project implementation
2. Create a clean mobility equity community of practice
3. Advance mobility equity and justice policy solutions to meet the state’s climate, air quality, and equity goals

To ensure that implemented projects are localized and meet the community’s needs, CMEA uses community engagement as a tool and works to activate all community members through various efforts. The first effort CMEA uses is education and outreach through workshops, town halls, and informational sessions. Depending on who the audience of these sessions is, information will range from what shared mobility options are currently available to what sources of funding a community or region is eligible for. Secondly, CMEA works heavily to obtain and utilize community feedback to create effective shared mobility programs. 

Fresno County community participants fill out a survey. Credit: Clean Mobility Options

For instance, one project in rural Fresno County California utilized a variety of forms of community engagement to better integrate microtransit into their current transportation infrastructure. By working with the community members in Biola, CA, the project team learned about mobility options and obstacles faced by community members who do not have access to a vehicle. The results of community engagement efforts provided Biola with more environmentally friendly transportation options that lower residents’ travel costs and provide more diverse transportation options while working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and dependency on vehicle ownership.

Based on community feedback, CMEA worked with various community organizations to implement a rideshare program in 2023. This program offers short-term electric car rentals that work to transport residents both inside and outside of Biola borders.

For more information on Fresno’s Rural Vehicle Carshare program, read the Clean Mobility Voucher Pilot Program (CMO) report or visit Biola’s carshare service website.

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General Engagement Resources

• Mobility Project Toolkit – Clean Mobility Options (CMO) is a statewide public program that empowers under-resourced communities to better understand and overcome mobility obstacles. CMO offers a suite of five guides that have been designed to help communities plan and implement community-based mobility projects. CMO also offers an example needs assessment survey, English and Spanish.
• The Inclusive Planning Toolkit from Transit Planning 4 All includes an example glossary of jargon/acronyms, a satisfaction survey template, a stipend or honorarium, an engagement flyer, an agenda, a sound system checklist, an example feedback log, meeting coordination applications, and an Aging and Disabilities Services (ADS) print and digital communication guide.
• Public Participation Playbook, prepared by the City of Raleigh, NC, and local partners includes Implementation Tactics, Survey Questions to Use/Avoid, Social Media Tips, and a Meeting Preparation Checklist.
  
• Community Engagement Guide, prepared by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) in Eastern Massachusetts, offers tips and detailed case studies, including example surveys.
  
• The National Center on Disability and Journalism’s Disability Language Style Guide covers dozens of words and terms commonly used when referring to disabilities.
• Survey Monkey’s 10 Tips to Writing Good Survey Questions has information on how to effectively structure surveys to improve engagement.
• Mobility on Demand (MOD) Sandbox Evaluation Reports provide example user surveys (in appendices).
• The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design is a comprehensive guide for practitioners to plan and conduct Human Centered Design engagement.

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Virtual Resources

• The International Association for Public Participation’s white paper Digital Engagement, Social Media and Public Participation provides information on how to successfully engage communities through virtual process.
• Local Government Commission’s Best Practices Guide for Virtual Engagement outlines some of the best practices for reaching all communities and engaging them virtually.
• Smart Growth America’s Virtual Engagement: A springboard for inclusive community engagement includes three pre-recorded webinar trainings to better inform teams about virtual engagement.

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