2024 Northern New England Planning Conference

Breaking Barriers: Transforming Community Engagement for Meaningful Collective Impact

Wednesday October 30th, 9:45-11:15am

This session will focus on the typical challenges in community engagement and provide an opportunity for professionals to share ideas, methods, and strategies for addressing these challenges. Despite the availability of new online tools, community engagement participation is declining, necessitating innovative approaches to enhance civic involvement. This session focuses on fostering inclusivity in engagement processes and improving feedback collection to ensure diverse community voices are heard and that participation is meaningful for community members to encourage continued civic engagement. Common challenges including creating an accessible and equitable approach, engaging young people, overcoming the digital divide, and navigating political divisiveness, will be discussed along with tools and techniques to address these challenges. This will be followed by a collaborative conversation allowing attendees to test new tools, discuss successes and challenges in engagement activities, and explore further approaches to improve the quality of engagement activities.

Speakers:

• Michelle Stephens, AICP, Granicus
• Keri Ouellette, AICP, BerryDunn
• Alison Tobey, BerryDunn
• Jeff Sereni, Granicus