engagement

Montgomery Planning’s approach to engagement: audience-centric, data driven, and focused on building trust

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By Bridget Broullire, Acting Deputy Director  

Community feedback is foundational to developing successful, sustainable plans. Combined with internal and external expertise and data sources, community feedback significantly informs our planning recommendations. However, stakeholder input has sometimes historically flowed from just a small portion of the community with the time and resources to participate in the process. That often led to communities of color, non-native English speakers, low-income residents, and others being excluded or marginalized from having their voices heard in community planning.

Montgomery Planning’s updated approach leverages a more equitable, transparent, and effective community outreach and engagement process to reverse historical trends and make it easy for all residents, business owners, property owners and leaders to understand and … Continue reading

Public Engagement During a Pandemic

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I’m interrupting our regularly-scheduled programming (explaining Thrive Montgomery 2050) to share some fresh data on public engagement with our agency during COVID-19 along with some thoughts about the use of technology as a tool for participation in government.

Thanks to our crack IT staff, we have continued holding hearings on development applications throughout the pandemic – in fact, we have not cancelled a single Planning Board meeting, delayed any master plans, or stopped any other project.

This chart shows the number of people who participated in Planning Board meetings remotely over the course of the year when COVID-19 restrictions on in-person public gatherings have been in effect and the number who participated in person over the previous twelve months:

… Continue reading