In a recent post, I shared how we working with residents to develop a strategic approach to supporting participation. We explored how residents want to get involved, what issues we need to improve and how they’d like to work with us to do that. In this post, I focus on ideas they developed on how to tackle the challenges.
1. Knowing how to get involved
- Pro-active communications and outreach is essential
- Make the information and the location of activities more accessible
- Improve the Newham Co-create online platform
- Address and mitigate the digital divide
- Value the importance of libraries for awareness-raising
2. Knowing how your contribution was used and decisions made
- Transparency throughout the process is crucial
- Create multiple ways to find out outcomes of participation and decisions made
- Enable different levels of input/commitment
- Tackle the assumption that passive ‘open access’ approach means that seldom heard groups will be involved
- Follow-up information throughout participation process and at the end to ‘close the participation loop’
3. Developing mutual expectations between the council and residents
- Show everyone mutual respect
- Treat everyone involved with dignity
- Listen to and engage with issues being discussed
- Be transparent throughout the process
- Create efficient design and messaging
- Be ambitious with participation
- Be clear on the process, requirements, aims, context, and limitations
- Enable resident-led discussion
- Ensure high-quality facilitation
- Accommodate and address people’s wider concerns or interests beyond the issue being discussed
