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

A data-driven approach to addressing equity issues in Montgomery County

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A conversation with Montgomery Planning’s “equity data team” on the award-winning Equity Focus Areas analysis and story map

By Pamela Zorich, Jay Mukherjee, and Karen Blyton

Montgomery Planning is committed to eliminating racial inequities and creating equitable communities within Montgomery County. One key part of this work is the Equity Focus Areas (EFA) analysis, created by our Equity Data Team. The team recently won a 2021 Data Viz Award from the Association of Public Data Users for their story map created to illustrate their findings.

We sat down with two members of the Equity Data Team, Pamela Zorich and Jay Mukherjee, to discuss their work on this analysis, how it may help create a more equitable Montgomery County, … Continue reading