Goal #1 Engagement Enhance relationships with diverse audiences and communities and incorporate their perspectives into each project or plan. 1.1 Create guidelines for engaging and reporting back to neighborhood residents regularly to ensure local needs are understood and met. Engagement Framework Community engagement is much more than public meetings and pop-up events. It is a process of building community relationships, sharing information, and – ultimately – feeding community input into decision-making processes. The core vision of Mecklenburg Park & Rec is around ensuring that residents have great park, trail, recreation, and naturebased experiences. However, this cannot be achieved without conversations that inform decision making and ensures that Mecklenburg Park & Rec’s services meet community needs. Community members and the Park and Recreation Advisory Councils have expressed a desire for engagement to go beyond meetings that are only about specific sites.
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MeckPlaybook 2021 Master Plan
Instead, the aim of this strategy is to transform decision making to be more transparent and communicate decisions on a regular basis. The goal is to provide the public with greater context for Mecklenburg Park & Rec’s rationale and process of decisions. As planning for open space and recreation resources becomes more sophisticated and communities increase in diversity, engagement also needs to respond in kind. This means borrowing from technology for transparent communication and ensuring staff have the tools to effectively communicate, listen, and build rapport. Rather than creating a unique engagement strategy for each capital project that arises, cities like Raleigh, North Carolina, and Portland, Oregon, have created comprehensive public engagement policies that clearly state the organization’s engagement mission and approach to fairly and equitably maximize resident input and support. In July 2020, the City
of Raleigh published a Community Engagement Process Development Public Participation Playbook10 to study best practices for outreach and create a standard process for City of Raleigh projects.
Measuring and Tracking Progress Mecklenburg Park & Rec also needs mechanisms to track community conversations to make sure a diverse pool of residents are being heard and to communicate the outcomes. Expanding the ways for the community and Department to interact is the first step for building trust and strong relationships. The next step is to coordinate this with increased research, evaluations / surveys, and other data gathering to better understand, track, and reflect on diverse community needs. For example, Oregon Metro, Portland’s regional planning organization, publishes a public engagement survey and annual report each year, acknowledging that the ongoing success of
