Engaging Communities for your Projects
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As planners we are always needing to engage the community about new projects or changes to existing projects. There are increasing demands from the public and sometimes it feels difficult to meet those demands. The public can be passionate about parks and recreation facilities.
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This session will be highly interactive and will unpack some of the principles and considerations in engaging the public – what can go wrong and why? What are the components of good practice including being true to our promises to the public. If you are simply seeking feedback on existing plans be honest about that, if you are saying that you are co-designing be sure about what that means and that you can be accountable to the public for their participation in sharing in the creation of that design. Community engagement can be more nuanced that we might first think.
Margaret Harvie
Margaret is a community engagement consultant and Principal at PlanCom Consulting. She has a Bachelor of Recreation Planning from University of South Australia.
She works with proponents and their communities around projects and their impacts. Importantly she helps plan community input to identify matters that may impact their lives. She has assisted a range of urban projects that either impact or help to address the recreation needs of the public. Also she works on large infrastructure projects in urban, regional and rural areas and many of these can impact upon access to recreational facilities and activities.
Margaret is an International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) trainer for the Global Learning Certificate in Community Engagement and a trainer for course which help clients develop strategies for dealing with community emotion and outrage.
She works with government and private clients throughout Australia and trains in community engagement in Australia and in other countries. She works to create better outcomes for both communities and agencies that are causing and/or impacted by change from developments.