Key questions:

• What are the community’s views on trees?
• What are the main priorities and issues identified by the community?
• How do those priorities connect with Tree Equity?

Conversations and dialogue are essential to inform actions that are consistent with the values of the community. To develop actions that resonate with the entire community, it’s critical to consider a diversity of viewpoints and ensure that you create space for all perspectives. This phase is as much about gathering information as it is about building positive, trusting relationships. Those relationships will be the bedrock of your success. This phase provides guidance on how to collect feedback about the community’s perspectives on trees, determine the biggest priorities for residents, and synthesize the information you collect. Completing this phase will equip your team to connect Tree Equity to the community’s values and ensure that your approach is equitable.

Strategies for determining community priorities

This step is about deciding your method(s) for collecting community input. Keep your audience in mind and consider what will be the most effective format. Along with suggested methods, additional considerations are offered here.

• Host an open meeting and facilitate a discussion. This is a more traditional approach that may be a lower lift logistically, but you will have to account for peoples’ schedules and their capacity to participate. This approach lends itself to in-person, hybrid and virtual options, and you should consult with invitees about accessibility needs. Make sure to take notes and record salient discussion points. Divvy up facilitation, note taking and other roles amongst your team. Take it a step further and hire a trusted community leader to facilitate the discussion. Lastly, you can introduce more interactive elements to your meeting by having attendees respond to questions via sticky notes on a board or using a virtual whiteboard if the meeting is held online.
• Develop and distribute surveys. A survey allows individuals to take their time to respond to and complete feedback on their own schedule, but be aware that many communities feel a high level of survey fatigue. Many residents in marginalized communities are regularly asked to fill out feedback surveys on planning activities and never receive any benefit for their time and expertise. If this is the case, see if you can obtain access to information gathered from past surveys and engagement efforts. If surveying is a strategy you go with, consider whether you can provide stipends, gift cards or other compensation. A survey in combination with other engagement activities or as a follow up to deepen discussion is also an improvement to a standalone survey.
• Have one-on-one dialogues to listen to peoples’ stories. This approach is more time intensive for your team but has a more personal touch. It is a great way to develop and strengthen relationships with key individuals in the community and to identify those experts with deep local knowledge. With the consent of participants, you can also record conversations to study community member stories in more detail. This approach allows you to dive deeper into topics, and you can take it a step further with group storytelling formats. You can host a community storytelling event centered around Tree Equity or another relevant topic to the community.
• Host an interactive and/or social event. This can look many ways, but the idea is that you would plan around some sort of interactive activity. Some examples include coordinated community tree walks, block parties, and neighborhood and park clean-ups. You would need to plan for how to integrate community input activities into the broader event. For example, if a block party is hosted, then poster boards and markers with specific questions for feedback could be on display for attendees to respond. In the case of community tree walks, your team could prepare worksheets with questions or have printed out maps of the neighborhood for participants to note their comments as they go on the walk.
• Table at existing local events.This approach is good if you know that there are many events coming up in the neighborhood and that residents may already be limited in time to attend them all. You can have a survey, comment form or worksheet available that residents can fill out to communicate their thoughts. You can also use the opportunity to conduct mini-interviews since folks might prefer to give their time while they are already there rather than schedule something outside of the event time.

Whatever the chosen method for collecting input, share out your findings and ask others to comment. It’s inevitable that you won’t be able to reach every person in the community and that you might miss a critical perspective in your engagement efforts. The purpose of sharing out your findings is twofold: It will give those who were not able to participate a chance to still provide input, and it will help ground truth the input you did receive. You may be familiar with the dynamic of the loudest voice in the community meeting that dominates the conversation. Sharing your findings will help to evaluate whether the input you received represents the perspective of others in the community and serves as a way of building shared understanding. It can also be illuminating for community members to reflect on their own perspectives and compare it to that of their neighbors. After you have compiled the input into a format that makes most sense for you and the community, some methods for sharing out the information include:

• Distribute an electronic link to a collaborative document that summarizes the input you received. Make clear how people can contribute their comments.
• Ask locally based organizations to share your document with their networks.
• If technology barriers exist, hold an open session for community members to review and discuss the input.
• If there is a community board or small businesses with bulletin boards, post printed copies of your document along with instructions for how to contribute feedback.
• Consider the use of social media. Some communities may have dedicated online groups where they communicate about community activities.

Some additional tips and considerations:

• When you bring up the topic of trees, people may have all kinds of questions or concerns. You don’t have to be the expert on every question, but it can help to have resources or a contact on hand that you can share.
• Think about how you can show your appreciation to those who support your efforts. At the least, emails or notes of gratitude go a long way to strengthen and maintain relationships with community stakeholders.
• Pay attention to who are your community champions and keep them engaged. They will serve as ambassadors for your efforts. People are often skeptical of government officials, university staff or other outsiders, but they trust expert voices from the community.
• You may need to hire a translator to translate printed copies and be available to translate any feedback.