Building Relationships with Stakeholders for Informed Decision Making

Carolyn Hope, middle left, Mountlake Terrace Community Conversations

Let’s be frank, community engagement is challenging. In these times, there are so many things fighting for your attention: your family, friends, work, multiple forms of media and news outlets, and more.  And there are many people in our communities who work even harder, struggle more, speak other languages, and use completely different news sources.   

Carolyn Hope, LE 2014 BAM and Deputy City Manager at the City of Mountlake Terrace, likes to borrow a phrase from the health community, “No decision about me, without me.” She is a strong advocate for ensuring that public policy is made in partnership with those who are most impacted by those policies. 

At Leadership Eastside, we talk a lot about taking time to evaluate who our stakeholders are and finding strategies to engage them in decision making processes.  Cities across the country have requirements and values that prioritize community engagement. However, the typical approaches used for decades do not reach a large percentage of stakeholders. These approaches include marketing through city social media and mailings, fliers, and news releases. Engagement methods often include public meetings on weeknight evenings at city buildings or online engagement on the city’s website. These tactics don’t meet people where they are. 

Carolyn stood on the virtual balcony to evaluate the situation.  “I observed that governments often do not have relationships with certain groups of people, and  those groups might not use traditional communication channels, some may not see the value or understand how to engage in the civic process, and some may not trust government.” 

In addition to her Leadership Eastside experience, Carolyn leaned into learnings from local community organizers and anti-racism trainings to understand how to build relationships in the community.  Some key take aways were: this will take time, it’s an ongoing effort, we are working toward a two-way relationship that starts with listening and follow-up, we need to meet people where they are and meet their needs to participate, and we need to be aware of and able to manage people’s trauma and personal experiences that they bring to the conversation.  Cities are notoriously under-resourced in communications and community engagement, so this approach is daunting.  

“This is where adaptive change management begins,” says Carolyn. “In Leadership Eastside, we learn the need to take time to change major systems and processes.  This includes building support for the changes within the organization and celebrating small successes along the way.  It also requires analysis of what is working and where changes are necessary.”  

In late 2024, Carolyn and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Commission invited specific groups of people across the city to engage in a “Community Conversation” for the purpose of beginning to build authentic relationships and trust.  The approach included the lessons mentioned above. They sent invitations and personally asked acquaintances if they would join the city for a conversation. Early successes involved bringing people together through a common partner or cause like a community-based organization serving a specific cultural group, a school, church, or a service agency.  Carolyn described the goals of the conversations as, “We want to listen to what community members’ experiences are in the city (good or bad) and try to answer their questions, connect them with resources, and remove barriers.  We want to learn how to better communicate with people, understand their values, and stay connected.”   

Mountlake Terrace Community Conversations

While this work is ongoing, Mountlake Terrace residents are very appreciative. City staff and commissioners have had several follow up meetings with some participants, while others are connecting more with civic processes, volunteer opportunities, or even just attending fun events.  The city is learning new ways of connecting with people, meeting key leaders in various communities, and finding ways to connect people to the resources they need, even if they are not city services. This is how government begins to build trust. 

Carolyn summarized her lessons learned for us, “Community engagement requires courage and humility to reach out to new people whose opinions, experiences, and cultures you may not fully understand. It requires government employees to “open the gate” to show people what is available inside city hall and how to access services and participate in the civic process.  Ideally, in a policy-making process, governments engage with the community in ways that are actively collaborative, even co-creating polices, programs, or projects together. Mountlake Terrace is making small steps in this direction, and I am hopeful that we will see positive impacts from this work in the short and long term.”