Working toward creating opportunities for all community members to have power and autonomy and dignity and belonging—two of the three dimensions of upward mobility—requires that they are given the ability to make choices about their lives and contribute to efforts that shape their circumstances. For that reason, deep and meaningful community engagement is one of our six upward mobility principles and should be a key component of all upward mobility initiatives.
Community engagement is a process by which community members come together to reflect on and make decisions about the future of their community. When done properly, community engagement is accessible, fair, and engaging; it builds trust, uplifts local values and knowledge, and redistributes power from organizational leaders (local governments, community-based organizations, philanthropies, research organizations, and more) to community members. In this chapter, we provide strategies for community engagement, from informing community members of policies, programs, and practices being implemented to deferring to them on the policies, programs, and practices that should be created. Although not all decisions can be made by community members, we encourage you to remember that the ultimate goal of your upward mobility work is to build power for community members, foster more democratic participation, and achieve equitable outcomes.
Some members of the community should already be a part of your Mobility Coalition. Still, you will need to engage a broader range of community members to inform your upward mobility work. In addition to residents with lived experience of poverty, you should engage other community members with specific knowledge and perspectives, such as service providers, frontline staff, advocates, and business leaders. The methods we suggest can be used to engage all types of community members.
Keep reading to learn more about when to engage community members, best practices for community engagement, what methods to use, and next steps for creating a community engagement plan.
When to Engage Community Members
Community engagement can and should be integrated into every component of your efforts to boost upward mobility. Table 3-1 below illustrates how community engagement can be valuable at different phases of your work.
TABLE 3-1: When and Why to Engage Community Members
| Phase | Why engage community members at this phase? | How can community members influence decisions at this phase? |
| Embarking on an upward mobility planning process | To understand what initiatives already exist in the community and whether a new plan is necessary. To evaluate your community’s readiness to engage in a comprehensive planning process. To decide what form your work should take. To help write and launch your plan. To help disseminate the plan and build support for it. | Determine whether a new process and plan is needed or might be duplicative of other efforts. Decide what outputs (an investment plan, an action plan, or something else) might be most helpful to the community. |
| Building a cross-sector coalition | To build power and autonomy by offering community members key leadership roles. To foster dignity and belonging by building relationships between community members and other actors involved in the work. | Inform who should be part of the coalition and how members should work together. Determine priorities for upward mobility work. |
| Gathering data to understand mobility conditions and/or validating your findings | To help increase the rigor of the research and provide a more robust understanding of the data. To uncover new information sources. To learn about gaps in the available information. To gather insights about why conditions are the way they are. | Determine what types of data are needed. Decide on the optimal data collection methods and sources. Create a narrative of local conditions based on findings from—and gaps in—available data. |
| Identifying strategies to boost upward mobility and change systems | To understand how community members would prioritize different local challenges. To identify existing interventions or programs and understand how well they are working. To uncover new solutions to community challenges. To develop early buy-in. To solicit feedback on the design of new programs. | Prioritize between different strategies and/or decide on what strategies should be pursued. |
| Measuring your coalition’s impact | To learn how your efforts are affecting their intended beneficiaries. To solicit feedback on any course corrections that might be needed. | Identify priority indicators and outcomes to measure dimensions of upward mobility. |
| Sustaining upward mobility initiatives | To create a feedback loop that demonstrates your coalition values community knowledge and expertise. To create accountability for achieving your intended outcomes. | Determine whether course corrections or new/different initiatives are needed. |
Best Practices for Community Engagement
Before discussing specific methods for engaging community members, we share some engagement best practices, inspired by the work of the Kirwan Institute, PolicyLink, Chicago Beyond, the Urban Institute’s Community-Engaged and Participatory Methods Toolkits, the Fresno DRIVE's Race Equity Plan, Helen “Skip” Skipper of the NYC Justice Peer Initiative, and one of the authors of the first edition of this toolkit.
Clarify who “the community” is for this work. In short, it should include everyone who lives or works in a certain geographic area. However, given the history of structural racism, discrimination, and disinvestment in the US, the community members you should especially seek to engage for upward mobility work are people of color, people with low incomes, people with disabilities, immigrants, English-language learners, people experiencing housing instability or homelessness, young people, people involved in the justice system, and anyone with lived experience of poverty or discrimination. When preparing to engage community members, make sure you know your primary communities of interest and whether there are specific groups within those communities who are disproportionately affected by poverty and structural racism. For example, within the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, Cambodian Americans may experience greater barriers to upward mobility than Korean Americans or Chinese Americans. Analyzing data and consulting with key stakeholders, such as nonprofits and community-based organizations, can help you identify these groups.
Take time to learn about the community’s history of engagement or disengagement. It’s important to learn about the efforts that have been conducted in the past and how the community perceived them. Upward mobility work does not exist in a vacuum. So it’s important to understand whether there has been an absence of community engagement efforts or whether past engagement has been extractive, in which case people you are seeking to engage may have been over-engaged or over-researched and have participation fatigue. Both of these realities may lead to community members feeling skeptical of new engagement efforts or distrustful of power-holders in the community. Read Chicago Beyond’s guidebook, Why Am I Always Being Researched, to learn how to shift power dynamic in ways that help community organizations, researchers, and funders uncover knowledge.
Another reason to learn about the community’s history of engagement is to build on learnings from those efforts. When launching a new round of engagement, you should be clear about what is unique or additive about your particular effort.
The Investing in Us: Resident Priorities for Economic Mobility in Detroit report by the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions research center is an example of how to learn about what the community wants without conducting new community engagement activities. Instead of starting a process from scratch, the researchers acknowledged that Detroit residents have been sharing their thoughts on their city in a variety of public spaces over the last few years and worked to gather and summarize these thoughts from 129 neighborhood-level plans, 60 citywide plans, news articles, YouTube videos, and public meeting recordings.
Prepare thoroughly for the logistics of community engagement work. The Fresno DRIVE's Race Equity Plan makes the key point that “a precondition for community engagement is ‘readiness’ in terms of critical capacities (organizational capacities, funding, human resources, and infrastructure, such as space).” Before engaging community members, make sure your coalition has thoughtfully and appropriately prepared for what is needed by
- ensuring the team responsible for engagement activities is representative of the community in question and has been adequately trained;
- securing funds for community engagement activities, including compensation for community members’ time and the cost of transportation and child care;
- bringing in community partners to help facilitate, if appropriate;
- coordinating engagement activity schedules with external partners; and
- securing accessible and convenient locations for in-person engagement activities.
People responsible for this work in your coalition should have experience conducting deep and meaningful community engagement. If they do not, you should consider ways to develop this capacity or partner with external organizations that already have these skills.
Facilitate ongoing engagement. One of the most common mistakes teams can make is engaging community members too late or not at all in the decisionmaking process and not following up to share how the engagement shaped decisions. You’ve likely heard complaints from community members during town hall meetings where those in power present an already-developed plan that is unlikely to change substantively based on their feedback. Instead of gathering feedback on a settled plan, you should engage community members early and often. We recommend implementing a system, such as a continuous feedback and improvement loop, to ensure your work is responsive to the priorities and experiences of your community.
It’s also important to share your findings from community engagement activities and continue to engage community members after programs are implemented to keep them updated on the progress and understand whether any course corrections are needed. Ongoing engagement with the community can bolster trust by showing community members that their feedback is being actively used to shape programs and policies.
Center racial equity in the engagement process. Decades of discriminatory policies and practices have resulted in disinvestment in communities of color. The failure of government planners and other key stakeholders to engage residents of color in policy and planning decisions has compounded the harms of disinvestment. Redressing these wrongs requires an intentional focus on racial equity at every step of planning and decisionmaking processes. These steps should include ensuring outreach to households that reflect the diversity of your community, learning about historical and present-day inequities, uncovering implicit biases and assumptions that your coalition may hold, and working to shift decisionmaking power to community members. Learn more about putting racial equity and community engagement into practice in this Urban resource.
Prepare everyone to participate meaningfully in the engagement. Community members must know what to expect and feel well-prepared for the experience. They should be provided with the training and resources needed to participate in strategic planning discussions and the time to become comfortable with topics before being asked to engage. Facilitators should also take care to provide as much transparency as possible about how notes will be recorded and shared so participants understand what will happen with the information they share.
Treat people with lived experience as experts. So often when community members with lived experiences of discrimination, racism, and structural disadvantage are asked to participate in community engagement activities, they are paid paltry sums of money for their participation or not compensated at all. Yet these individuals are subject-matter experts and should be treated as such. Plan to compensate participants as if they were consultants on your projects. Of course, compensating participants fairly and in a timely manner requires having these costs budgeted before you begin your work. Aside from compensation, you should also provide participants with transportation or transit passes to get to meetings, child care during the meetings, and other resources they need to participate as appropriate. Learn more in this Urban resource about equitable compensation.
Seek to redress power differences and share power among participants. Power affects a person’s community engagement experience in many ways. Race, class, age, occupation, disabilities, and language ability—in essence, a person’s positionality—can all affect how comfortable someone feels sharing their opinions, create expectations about how much someone thinks their voice should be heard, and influence what feedback facilitators take most seriously. The engagement facilitator should be aware of their individual and institutional positionality and seek to redress power differences by sharing knowledge and making sure everyone understands the engagement process and their role in it. Learn more about examining your individual and institutional positionality in the Examining Your Individual and Institutional Positionality worksheet.
Try to avoid creating an event where people in power “talk at” attendees for too long. The goal for organizers is to listen and seek clarification and additions to the information collected. A skilled facilitator can help mediate discussions between people whose experiences are very different from one another or who may feel their lived experience is not reflected in the information gathered. They can also help redirect as needed to keep the conversation on track.
Highlight community assets in addition to challenges. Every community has both upward mobility assets to build on and areas of growth to investigate. We recommend you take an asset-based approach to avoid creating harm by putting blame on individuals rather than on the failures of systems, policies, and practices that are built on centuries of intersecting and compounding injustices. See chapter 1 for resources on asset-based language and framing.
Invest in developing community members’ power and autonomy and dignity and belonging. To work toward the ultimate goal of community ownership, your coalition should design opportunities for in-depth engagement that can build the power and capacity of community members. Besides having community members serve in key leadership positions in your coalition, create opportunities for them to lead portions of the coalition’s work and ensure they have the resources necessary to do so. You should ensure that your coalition is prepared to provide support and technical assistance should community members require it. Learn more about how to support community voice and power in the Urban Institute's Community-Engaged and Participatory Methods Toolkits.
Upward Mobility Cohort participant Boone County, MO, sought to redress power differences and share power with community members throughout its mobility action planning process. County officials decided to center the expertise of community members by hosting a Data Interactive for residents and community leaders to codetermine priority areas for future work. During the event, participants identified three key areas of focus: early grade literacy, jobs and workforce development, and fair and inclusive housing.
After determining the key areas of focus, Boone County continued to invest in developing community members’ power and autonomy by having them both lead and participate in the working groups. These community-driven working groups were empowered to identify strategic actions within each priority area. They ultimately developed the county's Mobility Action Plan that were distinct but had common themes of needing to address systemic racism and structural inequities.
Methods to Consider for Engaging Community Members
When planning your community engagement work, you will need to identify community engagement strategies that best fit your goals and capacity. Facilitating Power’s Spectrum of Community Engagement (figure 3-1) illustrates how different methods can help you reach a variety of goals. In this section, we highlight some community engagement strategies that fall under the consult, involve, collaborate, and defer to portions of the spectrum.
FIGURE 3-1: Spectrum of Community Engagement
Source: "The Spectrum of Community Engagement” (Salinas, CA: Facilitating Power, 2019), 5.
As mentioned above, while not all community engagement efforts can defer decisions to community members, the ultimate goal of involving community members in your upward mobility work should be to build their power, foster more democratic participation, and achieve equitable outcomes. As you read this section, we encourage you to diagnose where along the spectrum your existing community engagement work lives and to see if you can set goals that can help you move further toward sharing power.
Consult
Gathering information or feedback from community members is the goal of many community engagement efforts. Typically, we have seen the goal of this type of engagement is to get input on a plan that is in development or has already been made. However, as we noted in the best practices above, it’s important to consult community members before a plan is finalized. Two methods you might use to obtain community input are community surveys and focus groups.
You might consider conducting surveys with community members to collect original data that can be used for analysis or to solicit their input or opinions. Pick a survey style and scope that suits both your goals for data collection and your capacity for implementation. Rigorous, randomized surveys can offer more information from a representative sample of your community, but they can be complicated and expensive to perform. If you decide this is necessary for your purposes, you might consider whether partner organizations host ongoing surveys that you can add questions to instead of creating your own.
On the other hand, if you are not too concerned with generalizability and mainly want to use a survey to surface useful insights and capture ideas, less statistically rigorous approaches may be a better choice. For example, an opportunistic survey of people leaving a specific venue in a particular neighborhood might provide the information you are looking for. Consider the prompts in the Considerations for Collecting Original Survey Data worksheet to determine whether designing and fielding an original survey might be appropriate for your needs. Further along the spectrum, you might also consider involving community members in the design and administration of your survey. For more information on how to do this, consult this Urban resource.
Focus groups are another way to collect community members’ thoughts on upward mobility and racial equity in your community. They can be conducted independently or incorporated into existing community events. They can take many forms but may include a short presentation on the “why” and “what” of your coalition’s work, including what distinguishes your effort from previous initiatives the community may have seen or participated in, as well as small-group discussions on certain questions or topics led by skilled facilitators. For an example of what you might want to cover in a focus group with community members, read this discussion guide created by Upward Mobility Cohort member Washington, DC.
Be prepared to have both a facilitator and a notetaker to capably guide the conversation and record as many thoughts as possible. When reviewing recordings or notes from a focus group, consider which voices are loudest and whether that is causing those opinions to receive more weight and attention than others. When reviewing qualitative information, always interrogate your assumptions to make sure you do not perpetuate misunderstandings about why certain conditions exist. For more information on how to conduct focus groups, consult this Urban resource.
Upward Mobility Cohort participant Washington, DC, partnered with three community-based organizations to lead stakeholder engagement with residents in their three priority domains of housing, workforce and adult education, and financial well-being. These engagement activities included focus groups, surveys, and interviews with affected residents. Washington, DC, also worked directly with more than a dozen community-based organizations, including organizations that focus on community development, workforce training, affordable housing construction and operations, youth and adult education, and human services.
Involve
Involving community members in decisions that affect their lives is critical to building power and autonomy and dignity and belonging. Although consulting community members often happens after a plan or program has been developed, involving community members integrates community needs and assets from the beginning. One way to involve community members in planning or decisionmaking is to host hands-on workshops such as Data Interactives (sometimes known as Data Walks).
Data Interactives are a method of community engagement that presents data and information to community members through posters or another visual format, allowing individuals to engage with, analyze, and ask questions about information relevant to their lives. Whether held in person or virtually, a Data Interactive is a way to invite residents, service providers, and members of the community to engage with quantitative and qualitative data and spark conversations about what your coalition should prioritize and how the data do or do not align with lived experiences.
When deciding who to invite to your Data Interactive or other community workshops, we encourage you to think about these questions to ensure a broad range of voices is represented:
- Which groups of residents do your Mobility Metrics or other data highlight as being particularly positively or negatively affected by the issue(s) in question?
- Are there groups not highlighted in the data that you know to be disenfranchised or that you are concerned about?
- Are there groups or organizations well-positioned or empowered to act based on what they learn from the data?
- Are there groups that would benefit from greater insight into their community and environment?
By engaging community members in a Data Interactive or similar event, you can bring to light new insights about the data that members of your coalition may not see. Note that you may want to hold more than one Data Interactive with different groups, in different locations, or at different phases of the information-gathering and analysis process. Learn more in this Urban resource about hosting a Data Interactive.
Mobility Action Learning Network member Kansas City, MO, formed a Mobility Action Team in 2024 comprising the city’s District 3 Councilwoman, representatives from Metropolitan Community College, and representatives from the Health Forward Foundation. The team was interested in better understanding the experiences of Kansas City residents across four key priority areas: jobs, transportation, housing, and education.
After working to identify and consolidate key data sources that shed light on resident experiences in these areas, the team realized that while there was plenty of quantitative data available, there was not much qualitative data that described how residents actually engaged with programs in these areas. The numerical data lacked the context of the people behind those numbers and what their day-to-day experience was like taking public transportation, using housing vouchers, and sending their children to school.
The Kansas City team decided to host a Data Interactive as one way to gather some of this additional context. With support from Urban staff, the team planned and facilitated a Data Interactive at the Third District’s neighborhood convention in October 2024. The Data Interactive featured four stations, each facilitated by a local expert who helped guide residents through the data and led discussions centered around what the data revealed and how well (or not) it aligned with residents’ personal experiences.
FIGURE 3-2: Example of a Data Interactive Poster
Residents offered insights that challenged initial interpretations, highlighted gaps in the data, and pushed the team to rethink how fully the data reflects conditions in the Third District. Attendees’ insights will help shape solutions that the Kansas City Mobility Action Team intends to put forward in a forthcoming strategic action plan. Figure 3-2 above is an example of a poster displayed at the convention, showcasing one of Kansas City’s Mobility Metrics from the Upward Mobility Data Dashboard.
Collaborate
Moving along the spectrum from involving community members to collaborating with them requires working closely with community members and committing to cocreating solutions to boost upward mobility. Although including community members in your coalition is a good first step to delegating power, we recommend using other community engagement methods, such as community advisory boards, to ensure community members have a say in decisionmaking.
Community advisory boards (CABs) are one way to increase community engagement in research, policy, and practice and to ensure that your work is driven by lived experience. A CAB should be separate from your coalition and made up of community members who serve as a bridge between the broader community and your team. Refer to this Urban resource for guidance on how to establish a CAB.
The Mobility Action Team in Providence, RI, coordinated by One Neighborhood Builders (ONB), formed a Resident Advisory Council (RAC) to guide the work of its collective impact effort seeking to improve health, economic, and racial equity in the nine neighborhoods that comprise Central Providence. The RAC serves as ONB’s primary leadership and decisionmaking body in collaboration with strategic advisors from partner organizations.
The RAC has shaped how ONB measures and quantifies their impact by choosing which population-level indicators are most closely aligned with the outcomes ONB seeks. The RAC helps ONB ensure that its programmatic evaluation and long-term measurement decisions are grounded in community voice. Read our report on Engaging Communities in Measurement and Data-Driven Decisionmaking to learn more about ONB’s work and how to integrate community engagement into measurement efforts.
Defer To
At the far right of the spectrum is deferring to community members, which can help build community ownership over the work. As the Spectrum of Community Engagement notes, community ownership means that communities “have a direct say over what is needed to survive and thrive.” Investing in community ownership of mobility efforts takes both intentional planning as well as financial resources. You might need to train members of your coalition on community engagement best practices as well as provide training to community members to enable them to participate meaningfully.
One method you might use to build community ownership over decisionmaking is participatory budgeting, a civic engagement strategy where governments and other actors allocate funds to projects proposed and voted on by the community. Although local governments often serve as conveners of participatory budgeting exercises, they could also be facilitated by other actors, including community-based organizations, philanthropies, and advocacy groups. Participatory budgeting can help build stronger communities, deepen democratic participation and processes, and result in a more equitable distribution of resources. Consult Urban’s publication on best practices for inclusive participatory budgeting or the Participatory Budgeting Project’s Participatory Policy-Making Toolkit to learn more about how to design and implement a participatory budgeting effort.
If you are undertaking a full upward mobility planning process, you might also consider ways to make that process more community-driven, including by ensuring that community members play significant leadership roles in your coalition.
Determining Next Steps
Determining how to advance upward mobility and racial equity in your community will require extensive and thoughtful community engagement. You may find it helpful to create a Community Engagement Plan to outline the activities your coalition will undertake to meaningfully involve community members at all stages of the process. Your plan should consider how to inclusively engage with community members with varying backgrounds and lived experiences, which engagement methods you will use, who will lead the overall engagement and associated activities, what you are hoping to learn from each engagement, how partner organizations may contribute, and key ethical considerations for engaging community members who are part of marginalized groups.
For additional guidance on what to include in this plan, review our Community Engagement Plan Template. Urban’s Community-Engaged and Participatory Methods Toolkits also contain a wealth of information on community engagement methods and how they can help you share power with members of your community. The insights that members of your community provide can inform all the other components of your work to advance upward mobility, from using data to understand local mobility conditions to identifying strategic actions that can change systems.