Creativity, Compensation, and Culture: 3 Planners Share Community Engagement Innovations

Sophia Burns: Welcome to Short Takes, the three-episode podcast miniseries by the American Planning Association. I'm your host, Sophia Burns. Short Takes brings listeners into the field with planners who are pursuing newsworthy, innovative strategies for their communities and showing you why they worked.

In this episode, we hear about three different ways to build community through block parties, through compensation policies, and finally through “Frenchified” puns and beret-wearing antics. Connected communities are healthy communities. Planners know this, but helping people form those relationships with one another is more of an art than a science. There are so many different ways to do it.

My first guest is using block parties to deepen social networks in her city. She shared how her department brings neighborhoods together, embraces the diversity of her city, and grows neighborhood social capital that planners can later draw from.

Claudia Zarazua: I am Claudia Zarazua. I am the arts and cultural planning director at the City of Cambridge and the Community Development Department. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Cambridge, Massachusetts, we are a city with a population of 118,000 residents, and we are home to several major higher education institutions. Nearly 30% of our adult population consists of students who come from all over the world and often move away after graduation.

Sophia Burns: Something else interesting about Cambridge is that it has a large immigrant population. Around one in three residents were born in another country, which is much higher than in the state of Massachusetts. Coupled with the large student population, you can imagine that there is a lot of coming and going in Cambridge. That can make for a really dynamic and exciting place, but it can also be a sort of risk factor when it comes to building strong social networks. There's also a national trend at play here: a 2023 report from the Surgeon General's office said the U.S. has a loneliness epidemic. On average, individuals spent 24 more hours alone each month than they did in 2003. The COVID-19 pandemic made this trend even more pronounced from 2019 to 2021, study found that participants social networks shrank by 16 percent. Claudia saw this playing out in her community, and she also saw a way to intervene that was unique to Cambridge.

Claudia Zarazua: I am a planner by training, and even though I'm going to share more about block parties, I am not a party planner. Late in 2022, we noticed that residents were feeling more isolated after the pandemic, which was part of a national trend. So we started to hear from residents directly that they had an appetite for events. They were coming to the city staff asking us for the return of certain festivals, because that we had stopped organizing because of the pandemic. So we have a big annual River Fest, the arts festival in the city. They kept coming and asking us, when are you going to do the festival again? We need to be in community. We want to be in community.

As more information became available about the negative impact of loneliness on our health, we decided to take action. In 2023, we took advantage of a directive from our city council to make block party permitting process easier. We removed certain requirements, such as a signatures, and made it free to obtain a permit. We also added a $200 stipend and free play equipment to anyone hosting a party, no questions asked.

Sophia Burns: Claudia’s department then took to the streets to publicize the block party initiative. They made sure that the flyers and other communications looked fun and playful, and not like typical city notices that say, “shut down the street for sweeping.” Their outreach resulted in triple the number of block parties being held in 2023, with half of them being a neighborhood's first.

Claudia Zarazua: Although some neighborhoods had more fun than others, an evaluation survey found that almost everyone who responded met someone new at their party, and 89 percent have had some form of social interaction with their neighbors since then. Interestingly, the survey also showed that easing the permitting process was far more influential than the $200 stipend.

Sophia Burns: The Cambridge Block Party program has been a big success in more ways than one. It brought people together to build connection within neighborhoods, and it also delivered valuable data to the planning department. It revealed the pockets of growing social capital, as well as the places where the government was beginning to build trust with residents.

Claudia Zarazua: We already had a culture of block parties, but it was not evenly distributed across the city and so we took advantage of that. Let's use those communities that already know how to host a block party and use them to spread the word. So, they started to spread the word about the resources, the block parties. And from the perspective of community engagement, we are mapping where these block parties are happening. We know where that social capital is building or exists and where it isn't. In future community engagement projects, you know, reconstruction of a road or our new building or a planning study, we know where we can use word of mouth because of the neighbors that live there and where we need to implement other community engagement strategies because there's a lack of social capital.

Sophia Burns: Block parties were also a bridge to connect immigrant communities and the city government. And while they were successful, it took some creative translating to share that concept with those who had never been to or even heard of a block party. Cambridge is home to people from China, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam and more. So how did Claudia's team build excitement and understanding around block parties?

Claudia Zarazua: As an immigrant myself, I didn't know what a block party was before I came to the U.S. So, the fact that we were encouraging people to close down the street, have party loud music, paint the road and it’s sanctioned by the city, it was just new to me, like, wow, how are we going to translate that into literally different languages, but also different cultures?

We have a group of community outreach workers that represent different immigrant communities in the city. With all that feedback, we're putting together a how-to guide to help them understand, like this is what a block party is. This is what a permit is. These are the resources. This is how you can talk to your neighbors. We believe that the pilot program was successful with the resources we had available. This year we will offer $300, a little bit more than last year, and focus our outreach to neighborhoods that had low activity last year. And slowly but surely, we're building a social system that makes Cambridge a more resilient community.

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Sophia Burns: If you really want someone's honest opinion, pay them for it. Or at least that's the approach that some planners are taking. Planners need authentic engagement from community members to ensure that they're meeting people's needs. However, being an active participant in your city's planning process requires a significant time investment. That's why my next guest has helped create a system for compensating community members for their expertise. How much do you pay them and where does the money come from? Let's get down to the dollars and cents of effective and sustainable engagement.

Noah Boggess: I'm Noah Boggess. I'm from Seattle, Washington. I am a senior public engagement specialist with the Puget Sound Regional Council. The goals of our compensation policies are to, of course, get people to engage with us, but to encourage some more thoughtful input by valuing their time, building trust and establishing contacts, and then hopefully returning to some of those groups and conversations over time.

We've built out several different policies with our finance group to make these as applicable as possible. One of our first opportunities for compensating individuals comes in the form of surveys. Surveys are a little challenging because that's our largest sample size. We usually invite 20,000 people to conduct surveys and if we're lucky, we get a few thousand to complete them. So obviously we can't compensate everyone. So we tend to utilize a raffle system for that instead.

For our regional transportation plan update that we did about four years ago, we sent out 24,000 postcards in several different languages that are commonly used in the Puget Sound. We had 1,900 of those completed, and we were able to compensate five individuals with a $100 gift card that was selected at random for that process. However, we pulled from the list of people who completed those surveys and engaged with some of them for interviews, which we can compensate as well. These are direct conversations with stakeholders.

Focus groups are another way that we can compensate individuals. These are small groups of individuals that are sharing their experience. They usually come from a common perspective, like a group of local business owners or something like that. We tend to engage with those groups multiple times over the course of a project. And again, to kind of ground truth, some of that qualitative data. For example, for our regional housing needs assessment we did a couple years ago, we had focus groups of individuals who were experiencing housing instability, either actively or at some point in their life. We had three rounds of discussions that took place over six months. Each of those rounds of discussions were compensated at $125 an hour.

Sophia Burns: Other than surveys and focus groups, the Puget Sound Regional Council also offers a scholarship program. Now in its second year, it is available only to members of their Summer Planning Academy, a four-day leadership program for high school students. The academy introduces young people to the concept of planning and provides a path to a career in planning.

Noah Boggess: If they complete the program successfully, they're eligible to receive compensation for the four-day program. Last year, we did $500 scholarships that were directly mailed to the students. My finance team was very adamant that we called them scholarships, but for the students, for all intents and purposes, it was a $500 check. So I think everybody was pretty happy with that.

At the end of the day, it's helped us deepen our relationships with people, build some trust, and kind of reframe the narrative about what it's like to be a good partner in government. I encourage everyone to work closely with your finance team. More policies is more paperwork, but it helps you compensate for very specific lifts.

Sophia Burns: Noah says that offering compensation makes people more honest with their responses. Community members have made it clear that the government has not always been a helpful partner, and often overlooked some of the communities that they should actively represent. Being able to lead with a financial offer for their time helps diffuse some of that mistrust, he says.

Noah Boggess: Sort of like when people get an inroad with us and we're able to compensate them, it makes it easier to return to them for other lifts. A few examples: The surveys that we had, that was our directory of people. We could then do interviews and focus groups with those people that like kind of continued that conversation over a longer amount of time.

But we've also had people that we've engaged with, maybe for an interview or a focus group that we've then had opportunities for them to sit on some of our citizen advisory committees, for example. We're also able to compensate for certain committees. It's a little bit more flexible based on kind of when they happen and who they tend to be made up with.

But lastly, the Summer Planning Academy was a good example too, because we had a high school student last year who was really involved in our work, compensated her, got her on board, and she's actually contributed to events and citizen advisory committees since then.  She's now a standing committee member, which is pretty interesting. So, it's just a good way to meet people that are interested and helpful in your work and continue to engage them in some capacity down the line. There's no denying that dollar amounts jump off the page.

Sophia Burns: In Puget Sound, displacement is a prevalent issue. Both residents and businesses are at risk of being priced out of the areas where they've resided for years, forcing them to move somewhere more affordable. When Noah’s team brought this particular engagement strategy to those who have been impacted by displacement, they were able to tap into a network of organizers and service providers who were already doing that work.

Noah Boggess: Displacement is a huge problem. It's hard to know how to wrap your head around that thinking in 30-year timelines like we do for the whole region. So that was part of why we did this effort. It was to kind of bring a little bit more timeliness to the issue and figure out who was already doing a lot of that work. We kind of wanted to document what people were doing on the ground to help people stay in their homes, and I think that's what I was surprised about is how much of that work is already happening organically with community-based organizations, maybe alongside government partners, but maybe not.

And when we were able to compensate people, we got a foot in the door and then they could sort of introduce us to other groups doing similar work and do that same pitch kind of alongside or even for us to have a conversation with us that we can pay for. So it was a successful lift, I think.

Sophia Burns: Unfortunately, money doesn't grow on trees. So how exactly does Noah and his team find the money for this compensation policy? And is the price tag truly worth the results?

Noah Boggess: So, I would say look at some of our engagement reports and see the success that we've had and who we've been able to speak to and how many times over the course of a year we've been able to speak to them.

Then I would also say, take a look at some of our policies themselves, because at first when I was working with our finance and admin teams, there was a lot of like back and forth and really specific, kind of like it could feel bureaucratic how long some of these policies were starting to look like. But then I realized that they're actually just like trying to find ways that they can be comfortable spending that money. And if it means that it's a long policy for a very specific thing, then they can spend that money to compensate someone for this. I would say just spend some time looking at both sides of that coin, how we've drafted these policies and who we've been able to engage with.

Transition music

Sophia Burns: Planners are accustomed to engaging people in the communities they serve, but some planners also make it a point to engage with other planners. Sure, there are the usual happy hours and the mix and mingles with colleagues. I asked Jeffrey Goodman Goodman to tell us about how he brings together planners and planning enthusiasts in a fun and pun filled way.

Jeffrey Goodman: My name is Jeffreyn Goodman. I'm a urban planner, a letterpress printer, a captain and founder of Krewe D’Ensité, an urban planning themed Mardi Gras crew. And I am based in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Krewe D’Ensité, which is a walking crew, which walks as part of a larger parade called Krewe Boheme. We are a crew of about 150 people who dress in a kind of “Looney Tunes” French way, with a striped shirt and a beret — I'm wearing a beret right now — and we march through the streets of New Orleans, giving out throws, which are the little trinkets that Mardi Gras krewes give out.

Normally that would be beads. In our case, it is stickers, mini protest signs made out of popsicle sticks, all on urban planning, themes on real estate, themes on resiliency. We've been doing that for eight years. In a lot of the other parades the people are dressed in crazy costumes, they're celebrating celebrities they love, they're playing musical instruments. And then we show up dressed as French protesters with puns about zoning.

Sophia Burns: Puns about zoning, and with a French twist? How many of those could there actually be? Turns out there's about 80. Jeffrey shared a few with me.

Jeffrey Goodman: We've had mini protest signs. “Master of my eminent domain,” “The more things climate change, the more they stay the same.” We've done “Gentrifiers against gentrification” was one of our themes. “What I love about tourism jobs is that I get older, they stay the same wage.” “Marie condo board asks do renters spark joy?” “Gentrification pairs well with white wine (whine)” I was very proud of that one. We're endlessly amazed that we've gotten this far, but you will never run out of French puns, urban planning buns, or French and urban planning puns.

Sophia Burns: Hang on, did he just say “gentrifiers against gentrification”? He did. And while the sign certainly grabs attention, he says it's an excellent tool to confront the issue with humor and diffuse tension around a difficult topic.

Jeffrey Goodman: To me it's funny because obviously you look at parts of New Orleans, you look at parts of a lot of major cities and they're gentrifying. But if you ask individual people, “are you a gentrifier?” No one would say they're a gentrifier. You know, we often talk a lot about these processes that happen in our cities as if they are not controlled or occurring because of people, that they're just things that kind of wash over the place. Yeah, we thought it was funny to claim that. And of course, that's a little bit of making fun of ourselves.

Sophia Burns: Jeffrey and I continued our conversation about why it's so important for planners to have more fun. They're often stressed. He says planning requires juggling multiple projects and priorities, all while trying not to step on toes. A community of planners provides a space to joke about work while also having fun with like-minded folks. For Jeffrey and his krewe, that looks like sitting around a table making parade throws and gluing popsicle sticks to mini protest signs.

Jeffrey Goodman: Planners often are in positions where we have to be more even-handed. We're always triangulating on a lot of our projects. I think it's important as a discipline to be able to have a space where you can have fun, where you can joke about these topics, where you can point out where the discipline isn't doing a great job or it's doing too good a job.

The parade is wonderful, but it's sitting around the table making the throws, gluing popsicle sticks together. And we've got people who are 22 and straight out of college. We've got people who are retired, we've got people who are working in housing, we’ve got people who are doing resilience. We’ve just got all sorts of different kinds of people, and it's just great to have that kind of conversation, to be able to sort of just talk about what people do, what they're interested in while you're sitting there making a button.

It's just a great, great time for everyone to come together about planning in a way that isn't so business focused or isn't so career focused. It's a way for people to come together and have fun on topics that can be pretty heavy. So I'm very proud to have done that now for many years, and we're going to keep doing it until they tell us to stop or I run out of puns, which will never happen.

Sophia Burns: Thanks for listening to this episode of “Short Takes,” an APA podcast. Be sure to join us for upcoming episodes that will feature innovations in parking and zoning processes, and tips to upskill your career, including how to ask for a raise. And if you want to hear more great conversations with experts from across the planning landscape, subscribe to APA podcasts so you'll never miss an episode. And if you like what you're hearing, rate us on iTunes. You can find APA podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find our entire library of episodes at planning.org/podcast.