Stakeholder and Community Engagement

Sustainability and resilience efforts can benefit from engagement with stakeholders and the community. By keeping stakeholders and the community engaged in the process, groups and individuals can provide input, share diverse perspectives, and otherwise enhance these initiatives, programs, and projects. Below are a few suggested ways to engage with stakeholders and the community on sustainability and resilience work in your community. For example, you could host public meetings with your community members and stakeholders to discuss the findings from assessing baseline strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. Or, you could consider creating a system that keeps stakeholders and the community up-to-date regularly, like a dashboard or scorecard with regularly updated metrics.

Public Engagement

Public engagement is critical at all stages of sustainability and resilience work: visioning, soliciting project ideas, developing a project, project execution, sharing results, and evaluating success. There are many ways that the public may be engaged during these processes. Depending on factors such as the size of your community, different public engagement methods will be effective. The Environmental Protection Agency published a “Public Participation Guide” for government agencies that considers best practices for a meaningful and effective public participation program.

You can also report your progress to the community through informal and formal measures. Some of the suggested methods below allow you to review work to-date and begin setting new goals. Remember, community sustainability and resilience is an ongoing, iterative process.

• Informal: Host a dashboard or scorecard with regularly updated metrics like energy savings, water conservation, number of citizens using green spaces or outdoor trails and parks, and miles citizens have logged using public or alternative transportation on your website. 
  •  The city of Rockwood provides an annual dashboard update, Chattanooga provides a regularly updated dashboard for its areas of targeted performance growth, and Knoxville provides public dashboards for specific areas of focus, such as homelessness and building blight.
  • The state of New Hampshire hosts an interactive environmental dashboard.
• Formal: Host public meetings to highlight progress in sustainability and resilience, including effective partnerships with local organizations, businesses, and industry. Ask community stakeholders to identify continued prioritization and community goals so that you can move the needle in areas of greatest community concern.