A Robust Community Engagement Policy: why it matters

From a headline in today's Minneapolis Star Tribune: "Scuffle, harsh words upend Minneapolis City Council public safety forum." So what happened here? In part, this is what happens when you don't have a robust community engagement policy.

In an earlier post on "The 'Neighborhood Based Engagement Structure," I noted that there currently is no community engagement policy at the City of Minneapolis. The City at one time had a working policy called the Community Engagement Process-Model Guidebook, which has since been effectively expunged from the City's website.

One of the original criticisms of the Guidebook was that the first ten steps were "research, research, research," to determine what level of community engagement was needed. Part of this research would include "what community engagement has been done previously on this issue?" What happened here is a failure to do any research whatsoever.

What would the forum planners have found if they had done research? They would have found that the City has been down this road before. Many times before.

Lesson 1 on community engagement: history matters

In my previous role at the City, I was a notorious collector of historical documents. One such document I had inherited was a report on "Undoing Racism" that the City had prepared in the 1990s during the Sharon Sayles Belton adminstration. The document addressed many of the same issues facing people of color in the City today. The City held meetings and developed training initiatives and major goals around diversity and inclusion. A whole section was added to the City's website providing background information on many of the new immigrant communities that were then coming into Minneapolis.

That beginning initiative was dropped when the RT Rybak administration came in with a mostly new City Council, and the process started all over again. And the cycle was started over yet again under Mayor Hodges, and we are seeing yet another reboot with these events. These fits and starts occur as well whenever the City hires a new City Coordinator. The problem isn't that these issues haven't been recognized or discussed before. It is that the City has a short attention span.

To be fair to elected officials, when they come into leadership positions at the City, they want to start their own initiatives, and put their stamp on programs. And they may be entirely sincere and unaware of previous initiatives. But, from the community perspective, the process appears to be broken--the City begins yet another cycle of community conversations that do not lead to real implementation. This constant start again-stop again cycle erodes trust in the community.

Worse, there is little incentive at the City for long-term solutions. Elected officials don't feel they get credit for continuing programs of their predecessors, especially if their predecessors were their opponents in a recent election campaign. And City staff who do have a memory of past commitments made to the community are typically punished for providing those reminders. Most staff learn that the fast route to a short career is to tell new leadership that their initiative is nothing new (I have personal experience with this, in fact). So there is an institutional bias built into the core of the City.

But back to our main point: history matters. The City has been holding dialogues and forums on these issues for more than twenty years, with very little lasting change. If the City is going to abandon current initiatives with little review or consideration of past commitments, then it should do so with the awareness that it violates trust in the community.

Any community engagement process should really begin by reviewing past community engagement and build on standing commitments rather than sweeping them away. What does this look like?

What it could look like is to have an individual at the City with real authority, dedicated resources, and accountability, to provide guidance on community engagement policy and practice at the City. That individual should have a deep commitment to and strong experience as a practitioner in community engagement. They should also have a strong sense of history and background of the issues and past City commitments.

Lesson 2 on community engagement: thoughtful planning matters.

Those with real experience with public participation know that planning matters. As an example, the International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) offers workshops on "Strategies for Dealing with Public Opposition & Outrage in P2."

Poor planning results in conflict at public meetings, and, worse, pits residents against residents, stakeholders against stakeholders. And, as noted above, further erodes confidence in the public process. Experienced community engagement practitioners know how to prepare for conflict and can set up effective techniques for managing potential conflict.

It also appears that there was little real consideration of the purpose of the events, other than "to bring City Hall to the community." While the article also indicates that the purpose of the events was to hear "residents’ ideas on how to make the city safer and more just," the description of the format of the meeting again indicates poor planning. Filling the room with elected and appointed officials, having them make presentations to start the forum with their own proposed solutions is almost a sure fire way to turn the meeting into an "accountability session" rather than a forum to hear resident's ideas. The real purpose, if unintended was to provide a forum for City leadership to present and get buy-in for their ideas.

So what might have looked different in this forum if there had been effective planning? One of the core values of public participation according to IAP2 is that "public participation seeks input from participants in designing how they participate." The City Council adopted these as core principles of community engagement in 2007, but there is little evidence that there was any consultation with community members on this process.

Lesson 3 on community engagement: good communication matters.

Another important value promoted by IAP2 is that public participation provides participants with the information they need to participate in a meaningful way. Unfortunately, while the event was apparently promoted widely through email and on Facebook (and likely other sources), the flyer and Facebook page say little more than "Join Mayor Frey, Council President Bender and the Council Members of the Public Safety and Emergency Management (PSEM) Committee for a community forum on improving public safety in Minneapolis."

What kind of information might be important for residents to have? First would be to know where participants have room to influence actual decisions, policies or practices. Second might be to know what the next steps in the process might be. It is not clear that any of this meaningful information was communicated at the meeting, or if there was even an intent to develop policy.

Lesson 4 on community engagement: the right questions matter.

Many community engagement practitioners will spend as much time designing the questions to be asked as they do on the rest of the planning process. It doesn't appear that there was any attention paid to what the key questions were to be asked during this forum, except in the most vague form. As noted above, it is not like the issue hasn't been on the City's radar for the last twenty years or more years. The issues and concerns raised at the forum are well known, there should be no surprises. And no reason the City should not be able to put forward more thoughtful questions.

Lesson 5 on community engagement: participants should be treated with respect and with opportunities for real solutions.

Sherry Arnstein, an early theorist on community engagement practices, wrote in 1969 that "there is a critical difference between going through the empty ritual of participation and having the real power needed to affect the outcome of the process." While much has changed in the practice of community engagement in that time, without a community engagement policy with real teeth, the City is likely to continue down a path of community engagement that Arnstein labeled as manipulation or, worse, "therapy."

I could not help but notice in a description of a similar community forum a week earlier, that "at tables stocked with stress balls and colored markers, groups of seven or eight were encouraged to come up with recommendations for how to re-imagine public safety in the city, and then report to the larger group." Arnstein notes that, in this approach to citizen participation "under a masquerade of involving citizens in planning, the experts subject the citizens to clinical group therapy. What makes this form of 'participation' so invidious is that citizens are engaged in extensive activity, but the focus of it is on curing them of their 'pathology' rather than changing the racism and victimization that create their 'pathologies.'"

At the opposite end of the community engagement spectrum described by Arnstein are "delegated authority" and "citizen control." If the City were serious about addressing the significant disparities facing people of color in Minneapolis, it would take the same approach that made NRP successful: clearly state the intended goals, and establish a long-term commitment with a structure free from the political winds of City Hall, with independence, resources, and real authority to implement community-driven solutions.

What set the Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP) apart from other initiatives was the commitment of leaders in the late 1980s and early 1990s to a true long term solution. When they identified a significant problem (rapidly falling population, crumbling housing stock, decaying infrastructure) they put in place a 20-year program deliberately designed to be immune to short term politics. NRP was structured as a joint powers program separate from the City with a dedicated twenty-year funding stream.

The final lesson to be learned from all this is that, absent a clear and robust community engagement policy, there is little guarantee for meaningful community engagement or resident empowerment. A good community engagement policy would help address many of these issues beginning with good research on the issues and past community engagement. It would provide for good communication, and ensure that residents are treated with respect. Without a well thought out community engagement policy, the City will continue its practice of confusing community engagement events with no clear purposes or outcomes.