Why Community Engagement Efforts Fall Flat

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: [00:00:00] I feel like this is something we do all of the time. We bring really smart people together to address a big important community issue. We have great conversations. We design something really thoughtful, and then we ask for community input after every decision is already made.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: It’s like, “Here’s what we’re thinking. Any feedback?”

And really I want to be clear that I think we mean it sincerely. And most of the time, all the groups I’ve worked with, they mean it sincerely. But by that point, even if the group doesn’t think this is the case, a lot of the big choices have actually already been made.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yes, I agree that it usually comes from a really good place. It’s usually, “Oh, we don’t have time,” or, “This is so important, we have to be moving on it. We have to get something done.”

But then they put all this energy and effort into it, and they’re surprised when people push back or when they get no engagement at all.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Right. Or, people show up and it feels like they’re reacting to what you’re saying instead of helping to shape the project. When maybe your intent was, you were hoping people would come and [00:01:00] help shape the project, but they seem to be reacting. Yeah. It’s an issue.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Mm-hmm.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: So let’s explore a small shift that can make a really big difference in how all of this plays out, especially in collaborative work.

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JESSICA BECKENDORF: Today we’re talking about a practice that connects really closely to the kinds of collaboration we often focus on in this podcast, it’s this idea of engaging with people before decisions are made and then closing the loop on it, showing your work and sharing it back with the people you engaged with.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yes. I love that you’re saying both of those things, because you really need both. You need to ask for input and then close the loop or else it isn’t effective.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: We talk a lot about cross-sector collaboration, like bringing together different organizations, different perspectives, different kinds of expertise, but one thing we haven’t really focused on as much is [00:02:00] what it looks like to fully include community voice in that work, not as a separate step so much as part of the collaborative work itself.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah, that makes sense. Because it’s really possible to have a strong collaboration across organizations and still not be meaningfully engaged with the people most impacted or affected by an issue.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah, and pretty often when engagement does happen, it happens later than we think it does, like later in the process.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Hmm. Or later than it should happen.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Which brings us to the first part of this practice: Engage before you decide.

The first part of this practice is really about timing. It’s about bringing people in when things are still open, when there’s still real opportunity to shape what happens next.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: So I think one thing that’s helpful to say here is that we’re bringing them in at the beginning, because part of the community voice that you need is having the community shape how the problem is defined, not [00:03:00] just responding to a proposed solution.

And I think that’s so important because sometimes your solution doesn’t hit what the community needs because you aren’t aware of what they need.

Right? You don’t know their side of the problem.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Or you’re not aware of all the perspectives, because once a group has spent time developing a plan, even if it’s informally, right, you’ve just kind of gotten together and you’re like, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we were addressing this issue?”

It becomes much harder to change direction, there’s already momentum and some of those on the planning team might even become defensive of the plan, even if they truly do want to hear feedback.

Like we said, we think people genuinely do want to hear feedback most of the time. And when it’s gotten to the point where you’re like, you crafted something and you’re like, “okay, what does everyone think?” It’s already a little bit too late because there’s a plan in place, right?

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yes, and people can tell, people know when you’re railroading them. If you’ve already put down the tracks and there’s already a car on the tracks and you’re like, “See, we’re [00:04:00] going to the zoo,” or whatever, and you’re like, what is happening? The zoo is maybe a bad example, but you know, people can feel when you actually are willing to change things or when you’re just performing.

“Oh yeah, we care about your opinion,” and it can really be demoralizing and just kind of like stop things before they get started.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah, and I mean, in all the reading I’ve done on this topic, one thing that really stands out to me is that engagement isn’t just a set of tactics. I think a lot of times it’s how are you going to do your engagement? How are you going to do that? Is it going to be through surveys?

Are you going to have community forums? Are you going to have a booth at the local fair where you, you know, have a clipboard and you’re asking people at the fair their opinion on things.

It’s more than that. This is something that needs to be embedded in how you work, and timing is a really big part of building that embeddedness.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: So in practice, this could be a pretty simple shift. Like before you move forward with a plan or a [00:05:00] decision, you pause and ask who or who else has direct actual experience with this issue? And have we talked with them yet?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. And, have we talked to them in a real way, right? Like that old 80/20 rule. You should be doing only 20% of the talking and the rest is all listening.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah, I think those percentages are probably imaginary, but I think the point behind them is so true because when you’re engaging the community, you need to listen to what’s being said and also to what’s not being said.

And small plug for our own podcast: we have a great episode called How to Read the Room. If you feel like you need more help figuring out what the community’s not saying, you can check that out. We’ll put it in the show notes.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: All right. So the second part of this practice is called Closing the Loop, this is also though where a lot of engagement efforts can break down.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah, that makes sense. Imagine if people are asked for their input, and then never hear what [00:06:00] happens or what decisions were made, or they listened to the input session and absolutely none of it makes it into the final progress or project.

And then they don’t explain why. Like there’s nothing at all about why the decisions were made the way they were made. Oof.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. And that’s a good way to put it. When there’s no clear connection between what they shared and the decisions that were ultimately made over time, that makes it a lot harder to sustain engagement. So if you need to go back and get more engagement in the future, they’re not sure that their input’s actually gonna be making a difference.

So the trust breaks down, and engagement is ultimately about building trust.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah. I think that that’s such an important thing to keep in mind as you’re deciding how you do engagement, is that trust aspect because it’s easy to think, “Oh, they’re gonna be disappointed that we’re not doing what they asked us to do.”

And the answer is like, yeah, they [00:07:00] probably might be disappointed. And that doesn’t inherently mean that you’re going to break trust. If you can explain, “Here’s our reasoning, here’s why we made the choice that we made. We understand you might be disappointed and we feel like this is the best path forward to meet x, y, z things.”

And just even communicating an acknowledgement of, “We know this isn’t what you expected,” can leave space for trust to not be broken and completely destroyed.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah, I love that. You know, really taking what they said and sharing out ‘here’s what we heard.’

And not only that, but having a little bit of sharing or sharing your work about how the input was not used, right? Because both of those things matter. So sharing back about “Here’s how your input was used, and oh, we also have this input and we weren’t able to use it,” because, you know, fill in the blank.

Closing the loop tells people what you heard, [00:08:00] what changed because of what you heard from them and what you couldn’t change and why you couldn’t change it? I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen decisions that were made, like new policies created, things like that, and they don’t share why they made the final decisions or what all went into those final decisions.

They don’t show their work, but they expect everyone to get on board. It’s just so frustrating. And you know, they don’t understand why people either reacted, like we said earlier, reacted to it, or why they’re just not engaging with it.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah, sorry, I’m having flashbacks here. Sounds like that hit on some reality with you. There are many times where I wished that people just hadn’t even asked for my opinion because they didn’t even address it. And I was like, “Well, why did I waste my time with this? Right.” Oh, ooh.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Not that you need more examples, [00:09:00] I’m sure people have had a similar experience at some point, so I am so on board with the showing your work.

Even if you can just tell me why you made a different choice, that is so helpful to me.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah, even if I don’t agree with that, like there have been times when someone did share with me why they didn’t go a certain direction, it was a direction that they were just kind of showing their work about it in this way that we’re talking about. And I was able to disagree with the direction they went in, yet I could go along with and support what was being done in the end because I understood, I at least understood.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah. Okay. So we just had a great long conversation. Can we just, like, in the shortest way possible, can we just re-talk about the two components together?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. Absolutely.

So I mean, really what we talked about today was concepts that can be turned into practices, right? So the first one is, engaging with people before you [00:10:00] make any decisions. This is front loaded listening or front loaded co-creation, whatever you want to call it.

This is about just taking that moment to pause when you’re in a collaborative effort, especially one that calls for some community engagement and you say, “What kind of engagement do we need? Who needs to be here? And, “How can we engage with them?

And then once you’ve done that, do not forget to go back after the final decisions have been made. You’ve chosen a direction, your project is going to go one direction or another. You need to go back then and say, “Hey, thank you so much. Here’s how your input is making a difference, and here’s what we weren’t able to address and here’s why we weren’t able to address it.”

Those are the two things that we’re asking you to do.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Beautiful. Thank you so much for that summary.

So I imagine that not every collaboration you work on will require community [00:11:00] engagement, but those that do would benefit a lot from both of these strategies being used, and specifically these two pieces being used together, because they really do reinforce each other.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah, you could think of them as bookends in a way.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: I like that.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. They really do reinforce each other, and when you engage with people before you make any decisions about the direction you’re going to go in, you get better input and better alignment right from the start.

And then when you close the loop, you build the trust that makes future engagement stronger.

If we’re thinking about collaboration as a system, working toward addressing important issues, community voice has to be part of that system, not something that sits outside of it.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yes. While community engagement can feel like one more thing and you don’t have time for it, folding it into your process can help you build trust for the implementation [00:12:00] phases for future projects.

And it’s so worth giving it a shot, because if you think you don’t have time to do community engagement, you don’t have time to do this project three or four times.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. Love that.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: I mean, three or four is maybe not every project, but if you think you don’t have time for engagement, you definitely don’t have time to have to start all over two years from now. So just a little plug, try it out.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: That’s it for today’s episode. We’d love to hear what you thought about this episode. Send us your thoughts and questions at Practicing Connection@oneop.org.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: You can click the like or share button in your podcast app to share this with a friend or a coworker.

We’ll be back next week with a new episode. Until then, keep practicing.

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CREDITS: The Practicing Connection Podcast is a production of One-Op and is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture and the Office of Military Family Readiness Policy, US Department of Defense under award number 2 0 2 3 4 8 7 74 3 3.