We connect planners, community members and other audiences to co-design sustainable solutions and build community capacity.
Cascadia specializes in designing, implementing and managing equitable and inclusive community engagement and public involvement processes to amplify voices that have historically been underrepresented in planning, program development and policymaking. For us it is not just bringing different voices to the table but committing to sharing power, building capacity and bringing down barriers to participation. Our approach elevates partner consulting firms, community-based organizations, community leaders and in-language media sources that are already active—and trusted—within each community. Our approach also considers things like building trusted relationships, compensated community partnerships, understanding impact, active learning and listening, feedback loops, fair community compensation and language access. For example, we design inclusive events that remove participation barriers by proactively addressing participants’ barriers like compensation, childcare and language access services. These considerations intend to meet our communities where they are, raise their voices, build community capacity and co-design efforts that are for and with community.
Examples of our support include:
- Designing and implementing inclusive community engagement plans and strategies
- Designing and implementing inclusive participatory research including in-language focus groups, listening sessions and one-on-one interviews
- Designing, promoting, and managing inclusive community events including developing and implementing compensation models and language access services
- Developing virtual community engagement platforms that support in-language review of planning materials
- Preparing outreach and education collateral that incorporates plain talk and culture-conscious visuals and messaging (transcreation)
- Coordinating the collection, analysis, and application of community input into planning processes and materials, across languages
- Managing feedback loops that keep communities informed as to how their input is being used
