Meaningful and Effective Engagement Training (MEET)

The Approach

The Community Resilience Center’s Meaningful and Effective Engagement Training (MEET) is an adaptable, interactive training that is built on research and best practices for engaging different types of stakeholders across a range of planning, research, and implementation contexts. To date, this capacity-building training has been delivered in person and virtually to municipal, state, and federal and non-profit staff in Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi in different formats. The most common is a 2.5-hour lunch and learn that has time for productive dialogue to explore the information. It is designed to be adaptable and easily scaffolded for different audiences based on specific needs and levels of background knowledge.

Through this training, participants are provided with the information and tools needed to:

• Consider different types of stakeholders in engagement plans,
• Identify gaps and specific community stressors that may need to be considered in engagement, and
• Utilize specific skills in executing engagement to be more inclusive and comprehensive.

The training is divided into 3 sections:

1. Defining Effective and Meaningful Engagement: Details the importance of inclusive engagement and provides case studies that demonstrate how inclusive engagement leads to more productive outcomes for projects.

1. Engaging with Marginalized Communities: Provides information about specific tools and datasets that can help municipal leaders and other project managers identify marginalized and underserved communities, discuss real challenges related to inclusive engagement that participants have experienced, and start thinking through ways to address those specific challenges through targeted discussions.

1. Effective and Meaningful Engagement Opportunities: Outlines how inclusive engagement can be integrated into traditional project processes such as project goal setting and project management instead of treating it as its own isolated endeavor. This part of the training is also interactive, with examples of different levels of engagement that can be determined based on the context of a single project, discussions about cultural competency, and clear strategies to support effective communication, messaging, and relationship building.

EVALUATIONS

In training evaluations, participants said they could see themselves using the information in a variety of ways. This included to plan for and conduct community meetings for comprehensive plan development, for planning commission meetings, for personal communication, to communicate with councilmembers, to improve stakeholder engagement in municipal infrastructure projects, in conducting community listening sessions, in planning for elderly populations, and in planning youth events. In recent trainings, 100% of participants agreed that the training was a good use of their time and that they learned the basics of meaningful and effective engagement, and 95% agreed that they learned about actions that can be taken to effectively engage people in municipal projects. 100% of participants noted that they would recommend the training to other municipal staff across the Gulf Coast.

Direct Quotes from Participants:

“This was a lot of information to digest, but very informative. Thanks so much for the presentation.”

“Awesome presenters. Good pace.”

“Speakers were very knowledgeable! Great!”

“Great use of time. New knowledge and outlook on engaging people.”