Introduction

What is Equitable Engagement

People often describe community engagement as bringing people to the table but equitable engagement is much more than this. Equitable engagement means that the table - or the decision making process - is hosted by the community themselves. And, not only should the people most affected by a decision be included at the table, but they should have the most agency. NDC’s role in this process is not as the owner of the table, but as a facilitator, assisting our community partners in hosting these decision making processes.

During the decision making process, there are three major barriers we encounter:

Weak Foundations: we haven’t defined why we’re at the table and who makes up the community.

Poor Planning: we don’t make the necessary preparations for the table to be accessible and approachable for everyone in the community.

Ineffective Engagement: our time at the table isn’t meaningful for everyone.

Map of all of the barriers identified through research with staff & partners. The barriers are categorized by whether they affect context, connections, or collaboration and they are sorted by whether they occur within NDC, with our partners, or within the community.

How to Use this Toolkit

This toolkit was created as a guide to overcoming the three barriers listed above, to facilitate a more equitable engagement process. Because inequity can occur at multiple points throughout a process, it’s necessary to repeatedly reflect on what structures you might be reinforcing, who you might be excluding, and how you can redistribute more power. This is why we have created a toolkit, so that you have a variety of tools at your disposal to support these reflections throughout the process. It’s important to note that each of the components in this toolkit are not singular steps to cross off a list but resources you can return to multiple times within a project. Asking what your goals are, who makes up the community, and who is missing, are all questions to ask yourself more than once. These questions and conversations can be done internally at NDC, with partners, and with the community themselves.

How you use this toolkit will vary greatly depending on the scope and scale of your project. You should be intentional with which tools, strategies, and data you use - considering how these components fit into the goals of your project. Furthermore, this toolkit is not a standalone document but should be read within the context of the Blueprint and in conjunction with NDC training and dialogue with staff.

This toolkit is divided into three sections:

Setting Equitable Foundations

Setting equitable foundations means defining why we’re at the table and identifying where and with whom we are working. This section should help you set goals, values, and expectations for both the project as a whole and specifically the role of engagement. It includes strategies to learn about the community, tools to identify stakeholders, and prompts for reflecting on who may be missing from the process.

Planning for Equity

Planning the logistics of engagement is essential to making the process accessible and approachable. In order to make sure you’re doing engagement for the right reasons, asking the right questions, and inviting the right people, you need to prepare and reflect ahead of time. This section provides tools for planning engagement and outreach strategies.

Equitable Engagement in Action

Equity in action is about making our time at the table meaningful for everyone. We don’t want to reinforce unjust power structures through an ineffective or extractive process. This section lists best practices for hosting an equitable engagement session. It also includes analysis methods you can use to make meaning from engagement results.

How this Toolkit was Created

This toolkit was developed as part of a multi-year AmeriCorps VISTA project. Through interviews with staff and partners and surveys of community participants, we identified a variety of barriers to equitable engagement. In collaboration with NDC staff and other co-design professionals, we compiled a series of engagement methods to address these barriers.

This toolkit is a living document. It was created based on the tools we knew and used at the time but as our expertise and knowledge grows, so should this toolkit. If you have something to add or a question about the toolkit, let us know.

This toolkit was written by Evy DiSalvo but it wouldn’t have been possible without the generous help of many designers, planners, and community organizers. Thank you to the community design practitioners, Maria Bergh, Kristen Chin, Ebony Dumas, Taylor Holloway, Liz Kramer, and Chris LeDantec, who allowed me to soak up their knowledge through interviews. Thank you to NDC’s dedicated community partners, Laurence Campbell, Augusta Gribetz, Ro Johnson, Crystal Philips, Jennifer Robinsn, and Kristina William, who shared their experiences with our engagement process. And of course thank you to the staff at NDC for informing every part of this toolkit!