Cultivating Meaningful Inclusion Through Community Engagement

Is your conservation organization interested in deepening its community engagement? Many organizations understand that efforts to gather feedback about conservation projects are necessary, yet community engagement for such projects is often used to affirm existing assumptions rather than an opportunity to gain new perspectives. As a result, workshops and surveys often barely scrape the surface of meaningful inclusion and engagement. Such engagement efforts often ask the wrong questions and/or leave out large swaths of the community, resulting in feedback that is unintentionally biased and incomplete. That feedback then skews project and organizational strategies and results in projects that perpetuate the exclusion of marginalized communities in the conservation and outdoor sphere.

This workshop will detail the community engagement process undertaken by the Penn Trails Team for the Sarah B. Foulke Friendship Trails Master Plan, including the targeted community engagement process designed by consultants Karen Strong and Judy Anderson (respectively of Strong Outcomes and Community Consultants). This process sought to go beyond typical community engagement efforts to include input of non-traditional, or potential trail user communities, to gather input for a trail system that would address issues of inclusion and access. Learn about the values that established the project design, the methods of listening more deeply, and how they integrated the feedback into trail designs and the final master plan. This workshop will also explore limitations and lessons learned to allow your land trust to explore what is appropriate for you.