An official website of the Community-centered engagement commitments
Commitments
The following are the commitments to implementing a Community Centered Engagement approach in the projects, processes, and planning of the Met Council:
- Work to intentionally build trust with communities through Community-Centered Engagement.
- Build and sustain relationships, even outside of discrete projects.
- Co-create solutions and define clear roles for partnership and implementation.
- Act with transparency in practice and implementation.
- Dedicate financial resources, such as individual projects and division budgets, that support centering engagement across all our work.
- Measure effectiveness, coordinated with other regional indicators and based on standards defined by communities experiencing inequities.
- Recruit for advisory committees (and other appointments) in a way that results in participants and members who are representative of the region’s diverse population.
- Continue to evolve, prioritize, and fund activities that aim to increase meaningful participation among people who do not participate in conventional engagement activities like public meetings, public hearings, and formal public comment processes.
To implement Met Council commitments to the people of this region, the following community-centered engagement policies and actions are intended to implement the goals of Imagine 2050.
Policy
- The Met Council will compensate community members for offering their lived experiences and perspectives to inform Met Council decision-making.
- Engagement efforts with communities affected by a decision will be intentionally planned with those communities. Engagement activities will meet communities where it is most convenient and effective for them to participate. Engagement activities will occur prior to a decision, to ensure communities have a tangible impact on decisions.
- We will intentionally partner with communities to plan and execute engagement efforts. We will prioritize activities with and resources for overburdened communities. Partnership involves shared agenda-setting, shared expectations, shared outcomes, and compensation.
- Engagement activities will reflect the eight principles: equity, respect, transparency, relevance, accountability, collaboration, inclusion, and cultural competence.
Actions
- Continue to advance legislative initiatives to remove the prohibition of compensation for participation in Met Council advisory committees.
- Highlight and implement best practices in government and nonprofit engagement. Create case studies and convene conversations to lift up community examples and shift understandings of community expertise and power. Clarify relationships with and across levels of government to enhance coordination and reduce duplication and fatiguing community.
- Establish specific expectations related to project and program budgeting, to explicitly call out funds and resources for community engagement.
- Identify expectations for co-creation activities and create, in coordination with community experts, a framework for partnership and co-creation.
- Create a tool, in partnership with community experts, to assess and measure effectiveness of community-centered engagement in including voices and addressing equity.
- Invest in and support training and skill-building activities to build capacity for engaging community among Met Council and local government staff.
- Engage community voices in validating engagement principles, defining what it means to center voices in processes, and clarifying what transparency and accountability mean in community.
- Support, through technical assistance, local governments to create more community-centered engagement processes. Identify incentives for innovation in community-centered engagement practices.
The illustration below (Table 1) highlights an engagement spectrum that pairs elements of the spectrum championed by the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) with ways the community-centered engagement framework proposes to apply that spectrum. The spectrum identifies activities and roles with less impact to community members on the left and more impact to community members on the right.
Table 1. Engagement spectrum
| Inform | Consult | Involve | Collaborate | Co-create/Co-lead | |
| Impact | One-way communication | Provide access | Provide access, respond | Partner, address inequity, build capacity | Share power, share agenda, change systems |
| Participation Goal | Inform, educate about problem and potential solutions | Gather feedback and reflect concerns and interests | Work directly with people throughout the process and include concerns, ideas | Partner with constituencies in defining problems, developing alternatives, choosing solutions | Community, constituents have final decision-making power |
| Promise to Community | “We will keep you informed.” | “We will keep you informed, listen to concerns and feedback, demonstrate how feedback influenced decision.” | “We will work with you to ensure concerns and desires are reflected in the alternatives developed and demonstrate how feedback influenced the decision.” | “We will seek your advice and innovation, and include your advice and recommendations in decisions to the greatest extent possible.” | “We will set the agenda together and decide together. We will implement those shared decisions.” |
| Sample Activities | -Fact sheets -Web sites -Email newsletters -Open houses |
-Public comment -Surveys -Public meetings |
-Workshops -Working/ advisory groups -Deliberative polling |
-Shape strategies -Influence agenda setting |
-Direct agenda- setting -Direct decision-making -Establish expectations |
Community-centered engagement case study
During the development of Imagine 2050, the Met Council convened an American Indian Advisory Council. The effort represents one form of community-centered engagement in the Imagine 2050 process. The Advisory Council, described in more detail later in this section, met 13 times in 2024 to engage deeply with Met Council staff and develop recommendations for regional policy. Advisory Council members were compensated for their participation.
From the first meeting, Advisory Council members were collaborators in the agenda and process. Using a meeting structure of an inside-outside circle, meetings started with Advisory Council members sharing thoughts and reflections. During the first meeting, Advisory Council members advocated that the Met Council should make commitments to action before developing an acknowledgement statement. This recommendation guided the Advisory Council’s process.
Staff from each policy area of Imagine 2050 attended Advisory Council meetings. Discussions focused on areas where recommendations from the Advisory Council could impact Met Council policy and action. Throughout the process, transparency, relevance, and accountability were emphasized. Both the Advisory Council and staff understood that the Advisory Council’s recommendations needed to reflect community interests and be achievable within Met Council authority and influence.
Honest collaboration over many months helped build respect between Met Council staff and Advisory Council members. The Met Council understands that further developing trust relies on following through on the recommendations of the Advisory Council. The Advisory Council will continue to meet to support implementation of Imagine 2050 and maintain a relationship of collaboration and accountability.
