To employ innovative, empowering engagement strategies to build meaningful community partnerships that reverse oppression to provide input into a cutting-edge sustainability plan.

The team developed a presentation that highlights best practices in the appendix of the Stakeholder Engagement Summary. Key takeaways include:

• Spend at least 20% of project funding on stakeholder engagement.
• Partner with organizations trusted by communities of interest.
• Utilize a co-hosting model, where trusted community organizations lead engagement.
• Pursue more flexible funding sources, like Partners for Places, to fund crucial activities like childcare, food, door prizes, and other such activities that are useful to residents, but infeasible to fund with public dollars in most cases.
• Include a land acknowledgement in all your work if appropriate, but especially in your long-range planning documents.

Push the boundaries. Place-based foundations are interested in partners who are trying something new and different to better the community. The team showed that they could deliver on this new approach to stakeholder engagement, which led to additional partnership on the most innovative approaches.

Meet the moment. Year two of the grant overlapped with the nation’s racial justice reckoning.  The team was willing and eager to make space, modifications, and rethink approaches when it came to work during that time. That flexibility built trust with partners affirming that the sustainability office was the best place invest to make real change.