Community Engagement

An essential aspect of community placemaking involves including community voices from the very beginning. It is an opportunity to foster greater community connections, build coalitions, and strengthen community ownership over the project. By engaging with the community, you can ensure that your team designs a project that is a positive fit with the neighborhood's social, cultural, and historical context, and supports shared decision-making and consensus-building within the community.

Incorporating community voices into the creative placemaking process is an essential part of an equitable, asset-based approach to project management.

To begin the process ask yourself:

• Who are we engaging? Who is missing? 

• How are you making the process transparent and equitable?

• Have you considered possible unintended consequences of your community engagement?

• Is there public engagement for all key milestones? Why, or why not?

An important aspect of the community engagement process is to address issues of power and influence.

Every individual involved in the placemaking process comes to the table with a unique power to impact local issues, but these systems of influence aren’t always obvious. Understanding and unpacking them early and in conversation with community members will be essential to putting your project on the path to success.

In creative placemaking projects, the goal is often to realign power differences and make sure that all stakeholders impacted by a local issue feel welcomed to the table and capable of contributing to a meaningful solution. Often, arts and culture strategies can be an ideal way to level hierarchies and bring people into new types of relationships with each other.