In a previous Learn Center Article, “How to Host Inclusive Community Workshops” we laid out what kinds of workshops you can host, how to go about inviting participants in an inclusive way, and how to ensure your workshops are accessible. Here we’ll get into the details and best practices of running community meetings, including sample agendas and the types of activities you can include in your meetings (we’ve assembled many examples of those resources in this accompanying slide deck). The purpose of this article is to give you tangible tools to make the most of your meetings and the time you have with your participants.
Workshop Agendas
Pre-Planning
When inviting people to your meeting, ask people to register beforehand- that way you have a list of participants to send your meeting materials to and a sense of how many people will attend. It also makes it easy to follow up after the meeting. Finally, it’s a great way to ask folks about their access needs in advance to make sure that the meeting is accessible to all participants.
We also recommend sending out a pre-event survey (here’s an example of one we’ve used for a workshop focused on breaking down needs in disability-forward housing). These surveys can be a great way to get people thinking about the workshop content in advance and to solicit insights in writing, which can sometimes be more accessible to get engagement from people who may be less verbal during the workshop. The Kelsey makes sure to ask what participants think are the most important issues and asks if they are willing to share their personal stories (which can also be asked during the session). Review these surveys in advance as you finalize your agenda and consider if there are people you’d like to call on or engage (with their permission) based on their responses.
Plan to have a way of taking attendance at the meeting so you know who is there- for in person meetings think about the best way for people with different access needs to sign-in. Having both a paper sign-in sheet and a way to sign in on a digital tablet can make it accessible for everyone. Make sure to capture participants on zoom as well.
How to Effectively Plan for your Meeting
Spend time planning your meeting so that you have an understanding of what feedback you’d like to take away from the workshop and what tools you’ll use for that. The best way to plan for this is to create a detailed agenda, laying out what the workshop will cover, and the time each component will take. Below we’ve listed items to include in your agenda as well as a link to a more detailed sample agenda. Adapt them to your own project and needs.
In your preparation for the meeting, make sure you have a way for participants to introduce themselves- if the meeting is virtual you could suggest including your preferred pronouns in their zoom name (and give instructions on how to add it) and in person meetings should always have name tags (with instructions to add pronouns as well). As the session leader, be sure to use those name tags and address people directly! Also be aware of including image descriptions for any images you’ll be using, for greater accessibility.
To Include in Your Agenda
- Introductions & Ground Rules: Make sure to have both the organizing team and the participants introduce themselves and share how they are connected to the project.
- During introductions you can build in an icebreaker question around the focus of the day. Some icebreaker questions we’ve used:
- What are three words that capture the meaning of “home” to you?
- What do you like best about your neighborhood?
- Why was it important for you to attend this meeting today?
- This is also the right time to establish baseline community agreements around participation, but make sure these aren’t too lengthy or onerous. The goal is to establish a safe space to share, and creating too many rules can be intimidating and have the opposite effect.
- One important ground rule is reminding participants that accessibility is a baseline for the meeting, even if that means waiting longer for an interpreter, or for everyone to process information.
- Project Overview or Session Goals: Introduce the project (no matter what stage it’s in) or goals for the session so that your participants have context in what you’ll be discussing.
- This is also a good time to clarify what you are asking for insights on and what is not relevant. These guardrails help ensure participants’ time is spent on useful feedback. (For example if the site has already been chosen for the project, it isn’t useful to spend time talking about what makes a great location.)
- Interactive Community Engagement Sessions: These can take many different forms, depending what kind of feedback you’re looking for (broad, specific, very early needs assessment, construction check in, etc.)
- See the next section for more detail of what kinds of sessions you can include.
- Q&A: Always leave some time for participants to voice their questions.
- Next Steps: Let participants know you’ll send out the materials presented in the meeting via mail, as well as a follow up with the output of the session, how this knowledge will be incorporated into the work, and so on.
- Thank Yous: Make sure participants feel appreciated for their time and insights. They’ve given you valuable information, thank them for it.
For an example of a specific agenda, see this slide deck.
Communicating Your Agenda
Your agenda isn’t just for you- it’s also for your participants! Send it (maybe in simplified form) to the participants two days before the meeting, so everyone knows what to expect. This helps support participation among people who may want extra time to process an agenda or think about their responses to answers or activities. Make sure to include questions you plan to ask participants and any brainstorming, open ended questions, or prompts for individual stories. You can also include any background resources or information they might want to review which would be useful to have coming into the discussion.
It is also important to manage expectations of what will happen after the meeting. Be explicit that participation in the workshop does NOT guarantee someone gets a unit in the future building. This can be hard to hear, but it’s important to not set community members up with false expectations or outcomes from the workshop.
Workshop Sessions/Discussions
How to Plan your Sessions
Think about the kind of feedback you’d like to get from your workshop and plan your sessions to generate that feedback.
- If the sessions would benefit from breaking a larger group into smaller groups, have a plan for how you will do that.
- Think about how many people would be the ideal size for each discussion so you’ll be able to manage each conversation.
- Plan enough time for each session to gain meaningful feedback from your participants.
- Less can be more- think about the most important questions to ask, instead of trying to overload the community by asking everything.
- Sometimes it takes time to warm up to a prompt or thought exercise, so block out time for a short “ice breaker” activity to properly get into the depth of what you’re discussing.
- Finally- make sure you have different ways for people to give feedback- we all process information differently, so offering ways for folks to contribute written feedback when they’ve had a chance to process, or know they can always follow up after the meeting is important.
It’s also very important to plan for how you will record the feedback for each session. Will the moderator take notes? Another team member? Will the session be recorded? (Note: In Zoom, if a main session is being recorded breakout rooms won’t be automatically recorded- a participant in each room has to manually record the breakout room.) Are you administering a poll or survey? How will the results be captured?
Types of Sessions/Discussions
There are a number of different kinds of sessions you can have with your participants to get feedback. Below is a list of several which will be useful for different kinds of workshops and participants.
- Free-Form Discussions: Small group free-form discussions on a specific topic.
- Design Charrettes: Design activities using visuals, physical props or other tools to interactively engage with a location or design.
- Brainstorm/Option Generation: Brainstorm sessions to generate lots of options, answers, or ideas to a specific question. It’s usually good to start the question with “How might we….?”
- Personal Stories: Create a prompt to have participants share their individual stories or lived experiences.
For more notes and examples of different kinds of sessions, see this slide deck.
Tips for Engagement / What To Do When…?
Not everything always goes according to plan. Below are situations that might come up in your community meeting and some tips on how to respond or be prepared.
- What if access needs aren’t being met?
- Remind the group that accessibility is the baseline for the meeting (this can also be said up front, at the start of the meeting), so we’ll take the time to address the unmet needs.
- This means if an interpreter is late, you wait for them. If assistive technology isn’t working well, the conversation can pause until it’s sorted out.
- Taking this time builds norms around access needs and their value. Once everyone’s access needs are met, the conversation can continue.
- What if someone isn’t participating?
- If you notice a participant isn’t sharing anything, as moderator you can gently redirect to ask them if they’d like to share (and you know their name because everyone has nametags, right?). Be sure to make it optional, but sometimes all someone needs is an opening: “Kelly, is there anything you’d like to share?”
- What if someone is participating too much or dominating the conversation?
- You can remind the group to use the “step up step back” strategy. “To make sure we can hear everyone’s voice, make sure to step up with your input, and then step back to let someone else talk.” This could also be included in the ground rules you lay down at the start of the meeting.
- What should I do if the conversation gets off topic?
- As moderator, your role is to first of all be aware if the group is going off topic, and then gently redirect. “This is a really interesting conversation but let’s connect it back to the project.”
- This could also be a good time to interrupt the flow of conversation to go on to your next topic or activity.
- What if someone gives feedback that is definitely not possible?
- Do your best to give the participants tools to respond to that in a way that is productive. Let them know you hear their concerns, but you want to redirect the conversation to actionable areas.
- One example we encountered: At the community meeting for The Kelsey Civic Center, community members expressed wanting a swimming pool, which was not possible. We responded that an onsite pool was not part of this project, but we could work with the resident services team to make sure residents can be connected to community pools in the area.
- How can we support and manage individuals who want to share their individual housing stories/housing trauma with the group?
- Your goal is to both make sure people know their stories are important and also keep the conversation focused. One great way to do this is to ask in the pre-event and/or post-event surveys if people would like to share their housing stories. If it starts to dominate the conversation at the meeting, when the focus is elsewhere you can point people to the survey.
- “Housing stories are SO important and we want to make sure we capture them well- the post-event survey has a place for you to share as much as you’d like about yours so we can fully represent it.”
- What if fewer or more people than expected show up?
- Include this possibility in your pre-plan. If you are breaking into groups, have an idea of the size each should be, and scale the number of groups up or down as needed.
- How can we accommodate children if they come?
- Ideally you can ask in advance if your participants need onsite childcare, but you can also be prepared with some kid-friendly activities (coloring books and markers, WikiStixs) in case it’s needed unexpectedly.
- Depending on the childrens’ ages you can also do your best to incorporate children into the meeting. Babies can easily be held during meetings and depending on the conversation, children can have valuable input.
Next Steps After the Workshop
Collect and Evaluate The Information
You’ve just spent a lot of time generating input and ideas from valued voices. We’ve already noted that you should be recording that input during your workshop, but make sure to take some time after to analyze the data you’ve collected. Are there patterns that emerge? Especially useful insights? Think about how to apply, graph, visualize or make use of what you’ve learned. How can it inform the project as it moves forward?
Follow Up With Participants
Remember to follow up with your participants who have contributed so much to the workshop. This is both a recognition of the value they’ve added and a way to stay in touch.
Some ways to follow up:
- Send out the materials you used at the session.
- Thank the participants (again! Since you already did at the end of the workshop, right?) for their valuable insights.
- Send out a post-event survey to capture your participants’ reactions to the meeting. (Here’s an example.)
- Create a summary sheet of the information you learned at the workshop and share it with all the participants.
- Provide compensation, if that was part of the workshop plan.
- Provide any information on next steps or follow-up workshops, if there will be any.
Conclusion
In a community workshop you’ve spent lots of effort to gather important voices into the same room (physical or virtual). Make sure to put in the proper planning and thought so that your participants’ time and inputs are understood, valued, and applied. The tools here will help you frame and structure the time you spend together so that your project can benefit from the valuable input of community members. Do you have any great tools or resources you use in your community meetings we’ve left out? Please reach out to our team by emailing hello@thekelsey.org to share!