Creative Placemaking Technical Assistance

Community Engagement

Building community voices in from the very beginning.

Learning how to recognize existing assets and incorporate community voices into the creative placemaking process is an essential part of an equitable, asset-based approach to project management. Use these resources to begin your community discovery process—a crucial step that is so valuable it may itself become creative placemaking. 

WATCH:

Digging Deep
Partnerships are susceptible to strenuous power dynamics related to money, experience, political clout, and more. All partners are bringing something to the table, and it is important to recognize and respect each player as a significant part of accomplishing your shared goals. During this video, Allison Orr of ForkLift Dance company and her colleagues in Austin, Texas offer insight on what can happen when a strong partnership with mutually defined goals can look like.


Things to consider:

Do you need to raise awareness, generate ideas, or reach a decision? Each of these goals is important, but each will require different strategies as the community engagement process unfolds.

Types of Community Engagement

  • One on One Interviews
  • Focus Groups
  • Arts based engagement
  • Arts based planning
  • Community Co-Design
  • Community Planning
  • Deep Listening

Steps in Community Engagement

  • Determine information needs
  • Develop tailored questions
  • Train interviewers
  • Schedule interviews
  • Ask open-ended questions
  • Be flexible
  • Listen
  • Take notes and write summary


WATCH:

Community Engagement Methods & Techniques
What methods and techniques can be utilized to engage multiple and varied community voices? How can project leaders create the conditions necessary to inspire participation and a sense of agency amongst residents and community stakeholders? Webinar participants will learn how to recognize existing assets their community and incorporate community voices into their process as part of an equitable, asset based approach to their creative placemaking projects.


What methods and techniques can be utilized to engage multiple and varied community voices? How can project leaders create the conditions necessary to inspire participation and a sense of agency amongst residents and community stakeholders? This will expand upon how to recognize existing assets in their community and incorporate community voices into their process as part of an equitable, asset based approach to their creative placemaking projects.

The community discovery process is a crucial step and is so valuable that it may itself become creative placemaking. All of these steps can be done with community and creative engagement.

Steps of discovery:

  • Surface what you know
  • Determine what you need to know
  • Gather the information
  • Organize, & analyze
  • Synthesize your findings
  • Tell the story


"Change the question from 'why aren't they showing up' to 'how might we be more welcoming?"
—Jamie Horter, Our Town Technical Assistance Resource Team Member


Network/relationship mapping

Who do members of the core team know?
Who in the community has influence, makes decisions, has power?


NETWORK MAPPING
→ Download the Worksheet


Goals of engagement

Once your group has worked to understand what assets can guide the creation of their community engagement efforts, and how different stakeholders are related to the issues at hand, the next step is to figure out what your engagement process needs to accomplish.


COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
→ Download the Worksheet


Additional Resources

Curated for you by the LISC team, the resources below provide models of best practice, insights from our Resource Team, and other extras we hope will be useful to you as you navigate your creative placemaking projects.  

READ:

CSA: Community Supported Art, Springboard for the Arts
Modeled after Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), mnartists.org and Springboard for the Arts created a similar way to support local art, artists, and collectors. Community Supported Art is a new model of art support and distribution for artists that establishes relationships with local collectors and patrons. This guide to the CSA model has helpful examples of artists' calls and even those difficult acceptance and rejection letters that come after the call.

WATCH:

Leveling Up: Community Engagement to Community Power
Community engagement is just the beginning. Scott Oshima and Tasha Golden will lead this workshop where they guide attendees in reimagining our work and projects with communities. They ask attendees to consider community engagement with intention, moving toward collaborations that center community power and transformative change. In this workshop, attendees will have an opportunity to learn from Scott and Tasha’s experiences; attendees will also workshop current challenges using peer consultation models and tools available through the Creative Placemaking Toolkit. 

Some of the Why and How of Community Engagement
You already know that residents and community stakeholders are critical to your project’s success, but can you explain it? Is it because you want residents to inform your planning? Or because residents have a role in decision-making? Thinking about the range of community engagement options is a useful tool to focus your approach to community involvement. In this session from the March 2021 Learning Lab for Our Town Grantees, Ascala Sisk will bring her considerable experience to this interactive session, where participants will explore ways to assess and focus approaches to engaging community, including the tactics and strategies that support project goals.

Engage Your Community
Are you experimenting with or interested in virtual engagement? Jamie Horter, a rural artist with significant community engagement experience, will explore tools and practices to create more engaged and accessible virtual spaces during COVID and beyond. In this session from the November 2020 Learning Lab for Our Town Grantees, we’ll talk about creative strategies for outreach and inclusion to expand the audience diversity in rural and urban spaces. Participants will have a chance to discuss community engagement in a world with differing digital access and expertise. And, you’ll be able to demo virtual practices and share project ideas with other Our Town grantees.

Collective Dreaming
How can artist-led community engagement build energy, inclusivity, and imagination? A conversation between two colleagues (one working in a rural setting, one in an urban setting) but both focused on the collective dreaming which Creative Placemaking inspires. Sharing case studies, stories, and questions, we will look at how artist-led community engagement can offer tools to bring the imaginative closer to reality.