How Kinetic West’s Community Engagement Principles guided our engagement of the Seattle Community on the Downtown Activation Plan.
All images by Jonathan Boone (Boone Media)
Community Engagement for Seattle’s Downtown Activation Plan
Following the launch of the Seattle Downtown Activation Plan (DAP) in June 2023, the City wanted to demonstrate their commitment to timely progress on goals and the importance of continued community engagement around DAP implementation. In support of the City, Kinetic West led DAP community engagement efforts from July to November of 2023. Through this engagement, we sought to:
Continue to build awareness and excitement around the DAP.
Collect feedback from the community and a more diverse group of stakeholders.
Galvanize a conversation on the Future of Downtown Seattle (“civic big think”).
Throughout this process, we sought to make our community engagement principles come to life.
Kinetic West’s Approach to Community Engagement
Kinetic West takes a highly customized approach to designing community and stakeholder engagement plans that meet client needs while honoring the specific context of a place. To that end, we have a defined a set of core principles that guide our approach to community engagement:
Honoring the experts & prioritizing those most impacted
We take an asset-based approach to honor all the unique contributions that those with lived experience already bring to this work and engage community members in solutioning. We treat community members, especially those who will see the greatest impact of decisions, as experts who already have solutions. We work to balance the multiple individual truths with our understanding of the complexity of systems and policies.
Centering equity
We take good care to recognize the systemic challenges that have created barriers to access, opportunity, and engagement and design our approaches to ensure we reduce barriers especially for those who have historically gone unheard or overlooked. In our synthesis and reporting, this means balancing perspectives to bring forth both what is widely felt and what is deeply felt.
Relational & reciprocal
We focus on building durable relationships to ensure we are rooting our work in mutual benefit for both our client and those we’re engaging throughout the process. This includes appropriately compensating individuals for their contributions and investing in partnerships that build organizational capacity.
Transparency & fidelity
We set clear expectations, ask for feedback, communicate impact, and present our findings with fidelity. Related, we never want to make promises we can’t keep and are honest about what community input can and cannot influence. That said, we always want community engagement to move the needle in some way, including moving clients into deeper relationship with community rather than creating cover as consultants.
The importance of context
We know that an approach that might work with one group of people or in a particular neighborhood will not always work with another. Place, people, culture and history are important considerations that we integrate into an intentional approach, holding both historical and present-day experiences of (in)equity, (in)access, and (in)justice.
Here is how our Community Engagement Principles guided our DAP engagement:
Principle
How it guided DAP Community Engagement
Honoring Experts and Prioritizing Those Most Impacted
In designing our engagement, we developed methods and strategies to reach those who are most impacted by changes Downtown, especially those whose voices were not prominently featured in the DAP formation. In the context of this project, that included:
Downtown residents
Downtown non-office workers
Small ground floor retailers
Families with young children
Youth and teens
In order to engage these communities, we worked with local organizing bodies (BIAs, neighborhood groups, industry groups, etc.) to recruit participants for focus groups and listening sessions designed to solicit their feedback on the plan. However, we didn’t want to limit feedback to those who are connected to community based organizations, so we designed pop-ups at strategic locations throughout the city in order to meet people where they are and engage those who are unlikely to be part of pre-existing groups.
Centering Equity
To help reduce barriers to engagement, especially for those who have historically gone unheard or overlooked, we sought to identify the unheard voices and go where those voices already are rather than ask folks to come to us. We worked with organizers to identify venues that would be most accessible to the folks rather than ask folks to come to us. We opted for in-person, community-rooted spaces rather than virtual meetings whenever possible to avoid creating technological barriers to engagement. We were also intentional at placing our pop-ups in spaces where we wanted to capture voices that may not be represented in our formal engagement.
We employed creative strategies to create space for people to tell their own narratives through art and storytelling mediums, for example, working with youth photographers to create Downtown photovoice projects, and bringing Downtown residents and often first-time Space Needle visitors to look at the city from a different point of view, inviting them to dream big about Downtown’s future.
Relational & Reciprocal
We sought to be relational and reciprocal in several ways throughout this project. First of all, we sought to build relationships with organizers and leaders at community groups, and we had follow-up conversations or sessions with groups as requested, rather than considering our work complete based on “checking them off a list”. We see our work with the City of Seattle as one part of our organization’s bigger vision, which is an image paired with the words “build a world in which every person lives a life of dignity and meaning.” As a Seattle-based firm, that means that we want to be rooted with and connected to the ecosystem of place-based groups working to make our City a better place. We kept this approach in mind when engaging organizations on behalf of the City. In addition, we wanted to honor the expertise shared with us in our focus groups, so we offered compensation in the form of gift cards to avoid extractive practices of using community-based wisdom without fair compensation or reward.
Transparency & Fidelity
To ensure that community members felt that we captured their feedback with fidelity, we shared our findings back with focus group and listening session participants to provide visibility and alignment with what we were sending to our client. We recognize the history of local expertise being used by more powerful forces for their gain, and so we highly value and emphasize clear communication about what is possible based on community voice. Through this, we allow members to consider whether contribution is worth their time and effort.
We also recognize that when synthesizing community engagement from broad and diverse sources, the emotive and individual impact of stories can be lost in translation. To counter that, we experimented with modes to minimize our own filter and maximize the impact of community stories. A few ways we did this include:
Video interviews: We captured videos of people we engaged in pop-ups, community visioning events, youth engagement, and listening sessions. These videos were shared with the City so they could hear directly from community members wherever possible.
Day-in-the-life videos: Using first person cameras, we experienced Downtown through the eyes of two University of Washington students coming to Seattle for dinner, and a family with a young child as they traveled from their home in West Seattle to Seattle Center. This unique documentary style highlighted day-to-day challenges and opportunities in a way that is harder to articulate through text-based communication.
The Importance of Context
In communities that have historically faced systemic challenges, we adjusted our engagement approach to layer into the work that community-rooted organizations were already doing. We took this approach to center equity by honoring the work already underway, and to make best use of community members’ time by reducing the need for them to repeat themselves for our sake. For example, in the Chinatown-International District neighborhood, rather than planning our own engagement, we joined a pre-existing listening circle organized as part of the community-led strategic planning process. We understand that the C-ID is a part of Downtown often asked for their input and feedback, and we see the ways in which this is a drain on community resources. We took this approach so we could understand concerns that they were already raising in their forums and integrate community voice through pre-existing channels.
By grounding our Community Engagement in these principles, Kinetic West seeks to stay true to our identity as a values-based firm and ensure that we honor the particular context and history of places where we are asked to engage.