Bridging the Gap: An Equitable Approach to Hybrid Engagement

The COVID-19 Pandemic has changed our daily lives and the way people interact with one another. Community engagement has had to adapt quickly to health and safety concerns in order to ensure the preservation of public interest during the sustained pace of land use policy development, policy conformity exercises and other routine municipal and state processes. The outcomes of the pivot to virtual engagement programs are still being understood by the industry through a weighing of what has worked and what has not. During this period, one phrase has captured our industry’s imagination: hybrid engagement.

This session will highlight elements of WSP’s forthcoming White Paper on the topic of hybrid engagement and will provide an overview of how WSP interprets hybrid engagement. We will discuss the methods we use to responsibly maximize engagement budgets to increase community participation, reduce barriers to participation and apply lessons learned from the pandemic. Responsible engagement responds to renewed calls to dismantle systemic inequality brought to the forefront by movements like Black Lives Matter, Stop AAPI Hate and Every Child Matters (Canada). Our approach seeks to increase equity, diversity, and inclusion in engagement by applying lessons learned through the pandemic to challenge long-standing industry barriers that have stifled representative engagement.

We will utilize interactive polling throughout the session to capture feedback and ideas from participants who have conducted their own hybrid engagement. Results will be shared in follow up to the session.

Takeaways:

You will leave this session with an understanding of:

• How hybrid engagement can be implemented as an integrated model where digital and in-person tools are effective, efficient, and complement each other;
• The current gaps and challenges limiting equity, diversity, and inclusion in the engagement process and how hybrid engagement can solve these problems;
• Specific methods and tactics of hybrid engagement that can be implemented to support public interest.