Inclusion & Civic Engagement

Building a future everyone helps shape

Reaching Everyone

• Publish a plain-language summary of every consultation before it opens
• Hold sessions at hours shift workers and parents can actually attend
• Take consultation out to community centres, libraries and workplaces
• Set a target for renter participation in every neighbourhood process
• Pay a stipend to residents who give their time to advisory panels
• Report back to everyone who took part on what their input changed

Newcomers and Language Access

• Offer interpretation at public meetings on request, at no cost
• Translate key notices into the languages most spoken in the district
• Run an orientation programme for residents new to the city
• Work with settlement agencies on outreach to arriving families
• Train volunteers to help neighbours through municipal processes
• Keep a plain-language glossary of planning and budget terms online

Accessible by Design

• Hold every public meeting in a venue that is step-free and reachable by transit
• Provide captioning, hearing loops and accessible documents as standard

Younger Residents and Older Ones

• Give a standing seat to youth representatives on advisory panels
• Fund a small grants stream for youth-led neighbourhood projects
• Run drop-in sessions at schools and colleges ahead of budget season
• Work with seniors’ groups on outreach that does not depend on the web
• Keep paper and telephone routes open for every consultation
• Support intergenerational projects in parks and community rooms
• Train staff and volunteers in accessible, jargon-free communication

Council Practices

• Publish an annual account of who took part in consultation, and who did not
• State plainly which decisions are open to public influence and which are not
• Give at least three weeks’ notice of any hearing that affects tenants
• Cover childcare and travel costs for evening public meetings
• Rotate meeting locations between neighbourhoods across the year
• Stream and archive meetings so anyone can catch up afterwards
• Answer every written submission, even if only briefly
• Review these commitments each year and publish the findings

Working Agreements

• Agree shared terms of reference with the neighbourhood associations
• Sign simple partnership statements with tenant and disability groups
• Keep a standing forum where community organisations meet council staff

In 2017 our city set out on a deliberate effort to widen who gets heard in civic decisions. The alliance has taken part in that work from the first meetings onward, through every conversation and every change of course since.

The first approach was a familiar municipal one: an invitation to sit on an “engagement task force.” Talking it through made clear that a format shaped by the participants themselves would work far better – and was the only honest way to proceed if the invitation was to mean anything. What came out of that was a standing “community circle” – residents drawn from tenants’ groups, newcomer associations, disability advocates and youth organisations, meeting alongside city staff – and a listening programme built around it.

In June 2017 council set the process in motion by approving that listening programme. Under it, ideas and actions are drawn up by the community circle, with neighbourhood associations and service organisations acting as guides and observers. Observers sit in, hear the whole discussion, and offer their reading of it so that a good way forward can be found.

The framework council endorsed that June included the following passage:

If the city is to do more than talk about inclusion, we must be willing to question our own conventions, learn from the way residents actually organise themselves, and risk working outside our usual routines and processes. A comfortable reliance on terms of reference, timelines, workplans, benchmarks, checklists and the other familiar measures of success and progress will not add value or meaning to this work, will not move it forward, and will not show that we are ready to take on what genuine inclusion demands.

Community circle meetings turn on people telling their own stories and on others hearing them – a plain but powerful way to build the understanding of each other’s experience and outlook that any real working relationship needs. Following the format the circle itself chose, it gathers over a shared meal to talk about the issues of the day, the problems that need attention, and the routes toward solving them.

Out of those conversations, that shared telling and that learning, the city and the community organisations have built a durable set of relationships running council to board, staff to staff, person to person. Relationships built on purpose have changed the face of the district and added new methods – and new values – to the work.

As trust grew inside the circle, participants spoke more openly about what honest, workable relationships between residents and their local government actually require. The city learned more about how its communities organise themselves, how to hold a gathering well, and how to support public discussion about who is being left out. After conversations about the harm done by exclusionary practice, notices have been rewritten in plain language, meeting formats changed, public art commissioned in shared spaces, occasions marked with celebration and reflection, and agreements acknowledged in public.

As the listening programme – and the community circle – has grown, so has the city’s willingness to own its share of the awareness and the action.

That is how the city’s Community Dialogues began. Four were held across 2019 and 2020 before a pandemic interrupted them, and three more ran in 2022. Those seven opened different subjects to the public and brought hundreds of residents into conversations about how the district is governed, who it serves and who it misses. Each Dialogue was run in the format its own participants proposed. The subjects were:

• Who Is Missing From the Room, which brought tenants, shift workers and carers together to describe the practical barriers that keep them out of civic consultation
• Renting, Ownership and Who Gets a Say, Barriers and Fixes, which reviewed how far our consultation processes weight the voices of owners against those of the majority who rent
• Newcomers and Civic Life, which considered what settling into a new country asks of people, and what it asks of the institutions receiving them. The session included a long conversation between a long-settled resident and a family that had arrived the previous year.
• Access as a Design Question, which, through demonstration and open discussion, and comments from an accessibility consultant who advises municipalities, looked at how buildings, documents and meetings shut people out well before anyone intends it.
• Young People and the Decisions That Outlast Us which, through words, performance and open debate, explored what residents under twenty-five want from a district they will inherit.
• Rethinking Heritage in a Changing District, which included a conversation between council members and neighbourhood associations about how to honour the district’s built past while making room for the people arriving now.
• Going Forward Together, at which members of the community circle and invited guests set out calls to action for the city and the wider community to carry this work on for decades, and asked everyone present to make a commitment of their own

Finishing this series of Community Dialogues does not mean the city’s inclusion work is over. The 32 calls to action listed above are the beginning of the next stretch, shaped by the work of the community circle and by many other local leaders.

Alongside those calls to action, the city will work out how to build a permanent community engagement function into its own systems and structure, without watering down what has gone before, or the achievements and relationships that have brought it this far with the residents and organisations inside its boundaries.

Some early suggestions for what that “function” might be:

• A standing council drawn from neighbourhood and tenant organisations
• A circle of long-serving residents and advisors chosen by those organisations
• A public statement of commitment or agreement – in effect a memorandum of understanding between the city and its community organisations
• A multi-party governance structure with defined functions and oversight duties

Each of those would complement the calls to action and the continuing staff training, the forming and tending of relationships, the individual connections and the joint programmes run between the community organisations and the city. All of them rely on everyone involved staying open, and to a degree exposed – which is itself the mechanism by which the city’s progress on inclusion happens.

There is plenty left to do: to face the plainer truths about whom the district has served well and whom it has not, to move toward a fuller kind of participation, and eventually to arrive at a relationship that is both shared and well informed. In the end the work benefits every member of our community, whether they arrived last year or have been here for generations, as we build a deeper understanding of each other and learn to live well together here. The alliance is committed to carrying this work on.