When shelter-in-place orders were mandated in cities across the US, city employees sprang into action to facilitate the transition. Day-to-day government happenings were instantly and radically transformed, but one thing that cities still needed to do? Community engagement. In the face of orders for folks to stay home and social distance, cities faced a reality where they needed to quickly and efficiently transition to new or unfamiliar modes of digital engagement. So… how’d they do it? 

In this episode, we hear from Meghann Lucy, a sociology PhD student who studied the transition to digital engagement in Boston this past summer, and Heather Imboden, an engagement practitioner and the founding principal of Communities in Collaboration in Oakland. Both Meghann and Heather discuss what cities are learning about how to meaningfully engage residents virtually, and how this moment is shaping the future of city-led engagement processes more broadly. 

Transcript

Colleen: [00:00:07] Reem, I have a question for you.

Reem: [00:00:10] Colleen, go for it.

Colleen: [00:00:12] Okay. What do you imagine when you think of a public meeting?

Reem: [00:00:18] I imagine a windowless room probably in a modular trailer in the parking lot of the local police station or some other municipal building. I imagine a panel of angry old people sitting in the front of the room dodging questions from angry or old people who have attended every public meeting since 1970.

Speaker 1: [00:00:37] I got a sandwich in one of your parks, and I want to know, why it didn't have mayonnaise?

Speaker 2: [00:00:41] [scoffs].

Speaker 1: [00:00:41] What's so funny?

Speaker 2: [00:00:44] Oh.

Speaker 3: [00:00:44] What are you still got a moron? Why don't you have hand dryers in the park bathrooms? They're so much more sanitary than paper towels. Anyone knows that.

Speaker 4: [00:00:54] These people are members of a community that care about where they live. So what I hear when I'm being yelled at is people caring loudly at me.

Colleen: [00:01:03] Now imagine all of that, but on Zoom. Today, let's talk about public meetings and community engagement in U.S. cities and how cities have been running these meetings amidst a global pandemic. So when shelter in place orders were mandated in cities across the U.S. this past spring, city employees sprang into action to facilitate the transition. And needless to say, day to day government operations were radically reshaped. But one thing that didn't change cities still needed to conduct community engagement, even in the face of orders for constituents to stay home and social distance. Cities have a responsibility to engage residents in many decision making processes. So city employees and consultants across the U.S. scrambled to adapt to new or unfamiliar modes of virtual civic engagement.

Reem: [00:01:57] Wow, yeah, it's easy to take for granted the fact that cities often rely on in-person meetings when seeking public comment. So how are cities doing this? How are they adapting?

Colleen: [00:02:07] That is exactly what I wanted to find out. How is this transition going and what are cities learning about how to meaningfully engage city residents virtually? And what I really wanted to know, how is this moment in engagement, history shaping future policy and practice for city led civic engagement processes? So I spoke with a couple awesome women to try and find out. And first, let's hear from Meghann Lucy, a sociology Ph.D. student at Boston University who conducted research with the city of Boston this past summer to assess the city's transition to virtual engagement and how that might build a future where hybrid engagement events are the norm.

Reem: [00:02:50] This is Talk Policy To Me where today we are talking the future of city-led community engagement.

Meghann: [00:03:05] Okay. So, hi, my name is Meghann Lucy and I'm a PhD student at Boston University in Sociology.

Colleen: [00:03:12] Can you just paint a high level portrait of the research that you conducted this summer?

Meghann: [00:03:18] Yeah. So my research are like future research, I've started at a little bit that the dissertation work is going to like involve a lot of the work of cities. And originally I had done this for the city of Boston because I wanted to learn more about how the city of Boston worked. I thought that this would be a perfect sort of entree into into that environment. The city of Boston had never before engaged in so many civic participation events online. The city of Boston leaned heavily before COVID 19 on the sort of in-person city meeting when it came to civic engagement. And so initially, the goal of my research for the summer was to learn more about what that experience looked like and to maybe come up with some how to guides about how to best run sort of virtual meetings with the hope of developing those into how to run hybrid meetings in the future. What I learned was that really there seemed to be some trust issues both on the side of constituents towards the government and then also within government towards constituents. There are trust issues and neither really believed that the other had their best interests in mind or were like even really listening to them or communicating what they really want with them. The trajectory of my research actually changed quite a bit from the original idea of creating like sort of like how to guides for conducting those, those hybrid or virtual meetings, mainly because well, for, for a couple of reasons. First, because departments within the city were already formulating these how to guides. So that changed the trajectory of my work. But also I conducted all in about 20 interviews with folks. They were semi-structured interviews with constituents, with people working for the city of Boston, in departments, for people working for other cities, like, for example, the city of Boston and Seattle. That seemed like one of the biggest pressing problems for the city of Boston and constituents. There is a history of the city of Boston engaging in, I mean, honestly, like some racist practices, some practices that didn't necessarily take into account the views and hopes and desires of constituents. There are some issues with like urban renewal and gentrification that were leaving out a bunch of folks. And so constituents in some neighborhoods really didn't think that the city government was there to help them. And the city of Boston sort of it seemed several departments really kind of viewed constituencies as roadblocks into like sort of like getting what they needed or wanted to get done, done building those relationships and a focus on doing that in a way that can build trust became like part of the work that I did.

Reem: [00:06:13] So this is a really important point. When cities run engagements, virtual or not, there is a longstanding history of them not going all that well. We've all seen the public meeting memes and tropes. Just take a look at any episode of Parks and Rec where Leslie Knope holds a public forum. Sometimes it's argumentative, residents dominating the forum, or sometimes it's dismissive and entitled Public officials.

Colleen: [00:06:38] And these issues stem at least in part from the fact that engagement can mean a lot of different things, and problems can arise when engagement practitioners and the residents they engage come to the table with different expectations or motivations for being there. So, for example, in a California survey of local officials called testing the waters, nearly nine out of ten said that the public already has ample opportunity to participate in local decision making and that they consider the classic public meeting to be effective. But on the other hand, most respondents also believe the public to be too busy or to disengage, to participate, and to angry or distrustful of local officials to be reliable partners. And nearly two thirds said that the public hearings typically attract complainers and professional citizens and don't give the broad public a voice. And only half said that their typical meetings generate thoughtful discussion among ordinary residents. But the survey also revealed hope an interest on the part of local officials for better ways of engaging the residents they serve.

Reem: [00:07:46] Okay. There are a lot of complex and contradictory sentiments in there. And all of these attitudes, alongside longstanding exclusionary practices and structures and state engagement processes, undergird this moment where cities transition to different modes of engagement to cope with COVID.

Colleen: [00:08:05] So I also spoke with Heather Imboden, an engagement practitioner with communities in collaboration in Oakland. She had some thoughts on this and shared a little bit on how the moment might be offering new modes of engagement to local officials that challenge some of these attitudes and expectations.

Heather: [00:08:26] So my name is Heather Imboden. I am the founding principle of communities in collaboration. We are a small consulting firm based in Oakland, California, and we focus on three things that our primary focus is on community engagement. We also do program evaluation often from a participatory standpoint, and we also do training. I do training and teaching and coaching for folks who want to do community engagement. So often a government agency, they often do community engagement because there is some sort of legislative requirement, there's some sort of mandate that they need to have public comment. So they are often embarking on a community engagement process because the law tells them they must. That said, there are many, many people in government, particularly local government, who are truly interested in collaborating with the community and believe that community engagement will help strengthen their policies and programs. So I'm not saying they're doing it just because they have to, they're also doing it because they think it's a good idea. But the impetus, the catalyst is often some sort of legislation that says they have to do it. So for cities, it often starts as a little bit of a top down process.

Colleen: [00:09:50] I think that's a really great kind of staging ground to think then about, okay, cities are often checking a box that's been mandated by some legislation. They're also resource strapped, time strapped people strapped and in this moment. Post-COVID. We're all social distancing and sheltering in place, yet those mandates to engage have not gone away. And so cities have been forced to shift to virtual engagements. And this is this transition that we're kind of interested in unpacking.

Heather: [00:10:26] Yeah. So, you know, my virtual engagement experience prior to COVID 19 was less about, you know, virtual meetings and more about other ways of doing asynchronous engagement. So informing people about a survey, for instance, you know, offering a comment period online, that kind of thing, which we absolutely still use. Like those are still really handy dandy tools in our toolbox. What's different now is that all of our meetings have to happen in this virtual format as well. And what's interesting actually, is that I think this is opened up meeting attendance to a lot of people who might not have been involved in a different time. And we still have an issue around the digital divide and access to technology. Way more people, many, many, many more people have a smartphone, enables them to participate in virtual events, but people still have connectivity problems. Another thing that's going on with COVID 19 is a lot of school districts have worked really hard to make sure that all of their students have Wi-Fi in the home, which has that added benefit that, you know, the whole family then has Wi-Fi in the home. So there are some barriers to attending a community meeting that actually have been removed by this. This time, the idea of going downtown to city hall on a Thursday evening or whatever evening, your local government has their city council meeting. When you might have dinner, you might be tired, you might need babysitting all of those things. Now you can do it from the comfort of your own home. And there's a lot more visibility into what your community leaders are talking about, what your city leaders are talking about.

Colleen: [00:12:12] So this makes a lot of sense, right? Virtual engagements lower the barriers that can prevent participation. And it feels like this is something that people may have hoped for as a result of this shift, that we could reach more folks more meaningfully and hopefully people who had a harder time participating before cities were forced to make this shift.

Colleen: [00:12:29] What I think is not totally clear or obvious, though, is where things fall on the quantity versus quality spectrum. So maybe we're seeing higher attendance, but are the meetings going well? Do participants feel heard? Do engagement practitioners feel equipped?

Reem: [00:12:44] Right. And this new meeting format might be challenging some of those attitudes held by local officials that we mentioned earlier. So these longstanding tensions that stem from mismatched expectations or attitudes or from a history of being excluded from city led community engagement, how are those bubbling up in the virtual realm?

Colleen: [00:13:02] Meghann's research suggests that the virtual setting may offer some mechanisms by which local officials and residents can gain traction on some of those issues.

Meghann: [00:13:13] One thing that was surprising to City of Boston employees was that in civic engagement events where they expected this sort of adversarial relationship with constituents, the people that showed up and and to virtual events compared to the in-person events, they were having like three times as many people come, four times as many people come as before. And like sort of people that they didn't recognize, which, you know, is a good sign. They found that people were incredibly gracious with them as they again, having expected this very adversarial interaction. They found that people were really gracious and patient and appreciated the city of Boston, like continuing to do civic engagement events and, you know, attempting to solicit their feedback. Yeah, there was a kind of a surprised sense, certainly amongst the city of Boston employees in that regard.

Colleen: [00:14:04] So I think that's really interesting. And I wonder, do you have any thoughts as to whether the virtual setting helped? This is me maybe extrapolating a little bit here, but whether it might have been a forum where that lack of trust might begin to be repaired so.

Meghann: [00:14:21] Hard maybe, I would say there was certainly a sense amongst the city of Boston employees that there was something about the digital format where maybe you like seeing people in the same size rectangles and also like that seeing people in in the same size is sort of taking up the same amount of space that that might contribute to, like a sense of of equity and equality amongst the people participating. Also, you know, like in like spatial arranged arrangements in city meetings, there's a clear hierarchy of like sort of like the city employees are in the front, you know, commanding the space. Sometimes they have tables and then there's, you know, the people in the meeting, you know, sitting in chairs, clearly like a hierarchical difference that can be mediated in a digital space. There are different social norms that exist in online spaces that people may be sort of getting used to and like learning to, like, raise their hands and taking turns in a way that may not be achievable in physical space in the same way or haven't been achieved in the same way in the past. There's also the chat function. So some people feel really uncomfortable, you know, raising their voices in public spaces like by actually like, you know, audibly speaking. And so they feel uncomfortable or perhaps they can't, you know, because of different abilities. And the chat function provides a way for them to still, like at their point across and have conversations with each other, you know, without having to, like, speak to this person standing in front of you. So there is certainly potential, I think, in an online space for more equality and, you know, plurality in hearing different voices.

Colleen: [00:16:06] So there's at least some exciting potential for these virtual engagements to not just improve quantity in terms of numbers and attendance, but also maybe even the quality of engagement. And this was echoed by Heather, who talked about how practitioners are really just figuring things out on the fly right now and how maybe that's a good thing, even if it's hard.

Heather: [00:16:30] We're spending a lot more time actually doing true analysis on who we've been able to reach and who we haven't, which is something that we always talk about but don't always take the time to do. And I think because the techniques we're trying right now are so new to us, not necessarily new, but new to us. We're really paying attention to evaluating who we're reaching, which is actually its best practice. We should be doing it all the time, but we're really taking the time to do it. So that's great. And the other one I think that's really key is creativity and flexibility. We're throwing lots of things at the wall and some of them are working and that's okay. You know, we're just really in invention mode. And so we're trying to we're trying a whole lot of things. And truly there are things that we should have been trying a while ago. But because of the nature of the work where we're resource strapped and time strapped, we haven't been as creative as we could be and now we have to be. You know, 2020 is the year of radical authenticity and grace, and it's really okay to try something and have it not work and be like, Dang, that didn't work. Let's move on. It's truly okay to do that right now. I mean, it should be okay to do that always, but it is truly okay to do that right now. And I kind of love that for us. So that's that's really working. The thing that's really a challenge is that people are tired. This isn't just a, I'm not going to swear on your podcast, but this is not a good year. And the fatigue that practitioners are feeling, communities are feeling. Everybody is so anxious and stressed that, you know, the idea of showing up for a meeting or filling out a survey or, you know, all of our phones are ringing right now with texts and calls from campaigns, all of that. We're just exhausted. And I think that's really tough. I mean, there's yeah, there's no no two ways around it that people are just really fatigued and disheartened. And so that's that makes everything just really hard. Yeah.

Colleen: [00:19:04] So amidst all these challenges, innovation surprises that this moment is bringing. What are some of the takeaways and lessons we can learn from these cities? Meghann shared some of the driving themes that arose during the course of her research and how those themes and patterns informed a set of recommendations that she made for future engagement, policy, and practice in Boston.

Meghann: [00:19:30] The people who are most likely to go to an in-person public meeting tends to be like an older, wealthier, home owning white male. This demographic of folks might also be like, more knowledgeable of navigating the city. Right. And so you find a particular type of individual who may be comfortable expressing their opinion. There are some ways that we can mitigate this effect. One of which it seems like the online environment, at least in the meetings that I saw there, like I saw 14 during the course of my research. But in those meetings, it did seem like there were multiple ways for people to communicate again through like chat, through, you know, raising their hand and being called on through verbal communication. It seemed like the different ways of allowing people to communicate was useful. Those different modalities are different ways of letting people speak and voice their opinion could let other people's voices be heard who may not feel as comfortable speaking up in an in-person event. Part of my recommendation for the city of Boston was actually to not just lean on the in-person event or like in the future, a hybrid event, right? That's like a city meeting, like as we know it. But it's just, you know, you can participate virtually or in person to not just lean on this one type of engagement, but I called it a multi modality approach to use different modalities of reaching out to people and different types of people to be really thoughtful about who you are more likely to hear from, you know, using like traditional methods and to think through different ways depending on, you know, the goal of engagement. Also, the neighborhood that you're trying to engage with, the people in neighborhoods that you're trying to engage to really think through who lives there and how you might be able to reach them, to allow for different ways for people to reach you and to give comment. I came up with three recommendations, so. The first one was a centralized meeting and event site. So it turns out again, like sort of supporting this idea that particular people who knew how to navigate the city were more likely to attend events. Each department would list a lot of the events that they were going to have on their individual websites. There was no like centralized city of Boston. You know, these are the civic engagement events or meetings or whatever it may be that were running. There was no centralized site. And so my first recommendation to improve equity and accessibility was to put all of their events on one site. The site should have how to guides for how to access live in recorded meetings. Also a link to the department with more info about the event and project. And finally, a repository of past meetings and with access to video recordings of the meetings. If they were video recorded, audio only recordings of the meetings and also transcripts. My second recommendation was called the Community Engagement Worksheet. This was a worksheet that I developed with help from others within the City of Boston with the goal of supporting employee creativity and strategic thinking. And this was to help ground civic engagement in important questions about power dynamics, the goals of engagement strategies, the history of the cities, the engagement, involvement in the community, ways that community feedback can be integrated and which departments expertise might be useful with this project. When departments were planning civic engagement events, they weren't necessarily using that expertise. And so they were again, sort of like limiting, but in effect, if not in purpose, limiting the reach of their events because they weren't taking these things into consideration. So the third recommendation that I made was we call it the decision tree. It's basically just a and engagement process. The community engagement worksheet is the first step of this process, and the results of the worksheet should influence the planning and subsequent events that the city uses. So a mix of modalities digitally in-person hybrid should be employed to reach different voices in the community. There are built in opportunities within the process for reflection and evaluation so the employees can restrategize and move forward with different modalities as they see fit. And there was a goal of really thinking about civic engagement as a process rather than thinking about it as an event, which seemed to be something that was happening within the city, not across all departments, but certainly within many.

Colleen: [00:24:00] Based on what you learned studying this transition into, you know, a world where engagements occurred virtually, but then thinking about and taking those learnings and projecting them into the future, what picture do you paint for an ideal future of of city led civic engagement?

Meghann: [00:24:19] Building trust, demonstrating care, being accountable and being transparent are incredibly important to civic engagement. That ideal of civic engagement includes all of those characteristics and lets people have ownership and feel ownership in their city. And I think that sparking like this sort of environment can also really empower people to bring their best to a city, right, and can help it grow in the long run.

Heather: [00:24:47] I think one of the big takeaways for me and hopefully for cities from this time is that we're trying a whole bunch of new tools and I hope we keep using them, the ones that are working for us. I hope we keep them in our toolkit. So making attending a meeting virtually really easy. I want to see that. Forever. I don't. I don't want us to go back to, you have to show up at City Hall at 7:00 on a Thursday if you want your voice to be heard. That's not working for most people. So there's I want us to hold on to this bigger toolbox and pay attention to what has been working for us and keep using those tools. I also want us to hold onto this idea that we can try stuff and it's not that hard to try stuff. I think that, you know, trying a new technique is scary. It feels like high risk. What if we fail? What if it costs a lot of money? It might be hard to do. And truly, most of the things that we've tried have not been that hard to implement. So, you know, let's keep trying things in the spirit of, you know, throwing things at the wall.

Colleen: [00:26:00] In thinking about, you know, you really hope we see a future where these tools that we're starting to use don't just go away. We don't just drop back to the status quo. And we're adopting this stance of bravery toward trying new things and being innovative. How do we get there? Is that I mean, I think part of that is cultural. You know, how do we make a cultural shift where that's what we're embracing? And I'm also curious, do you have any sense of if any of that is policy work or systems work?

Heather: [00:26:35] There is a good question. I don't know. I mean, one thing is that we're not going to be out of this moment anytime soon. Right. I think when we started our lockdowns, we were all like a month, maybe two. It's pretty clear to me that this is the way it's going to be for a while. And so we're building a new culture right now and new habits. The trick will be not getting into a different rut and maintaining that spirit of experimentation. And that one's tough. I don't know how we're going to do that. Every new wave of planners that's younger and more familiar with using a variety of tools helps. But I foresee that cities are going to come out of this crisis even more resource strapped than before. And so I don't I really I really don't know. I do also think that we're in a moment where our populations are more and more comfortable with uprising and making their voices heard outside of formal channels. And that also is actually a good thing. But I think one of the things we're also learning about community engagement right now is that the people don't have to wait for you to open up a channel. Right. Community engagement, as it's as it's shaped right now, is at the will of the agency. And people are not having it in this moment and are saying, no, we will engage with you. And if you're not going to listen to us in the meeting, maybe you'll listen to us in the streets. And it's an incredibly effective form of communicating with government. You know, the only other thing that I'll say is that I hope this moment has reminded folks of how smart and engaged young people are. And I think that, you know, I feel like young people are really leading a lot of the protests in the street and about climate, about policing, about immigration, about so many things. And I think that young people get dismissed by government a lot. And we don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to open up conversation with young people. And that is a mistake. And I hope that one of the lessons will hold on to from this time is that young people are so smart and creative and passionate, and we need to tap into that. And that will really I think only good things can happen from that.

Colleen: [00:29:50] So what I learned through chatting with folks for this episode is that not only is this moment teaching cities, engagement practitioners and residents new things about community engagement, it's surfacing many of the old and deep issues in the process and forcing cities to reckon with them. What I think the challenge is now is what I touched on with Heather. How will cities approach that reckoning? Will they ensure the things that they're doing now, the strides being made, the challenges pushed through, that all these things inform future policy and practice? And Heather's point, how are city employees and officials learning from what communities are telling them right now, even when they're not being asked? And challenging ourselves as possible future government employees, but also as constituents to ask, why aren't we asking people, can we expand our reach and our notions of expertise to bring more voices, more opinions, more values into the fold? And if we can. What's stopping us?

Colleen: [00:30:55] Talk Policy To Me is a co-production of the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans and UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy.

Reem: [00:31:12] Our executive producers are Bora Lee Reed and Sarah Swanbeck. [00:31:15][3.5]

Colleen: [00:31:15] Editing for this episode by Elena Neale-Sacks, Michelle Pitcher, and Colleen Pulawski.

Reem: [00:31:21] I'm Reem Rayef.

Colleen: [00:31:25] And I'm Colleen Pulawski. Catch you next time.