Over the last 16 months, the City of Cincinnati has partnered with the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University as one of thirteen cities globally in the Bloomberg Innovation Training program. Through this program, a core team of twelve City staff members and a dedicated design coach moved through a process to better understand the challenges around and improve community engagement with local government.
Role: Equity & Engagement Lead and Learning Lead
The Bloomberg Innovation Training has provided an opportunity for a cross-departmental team of city staff to learn the "Path to Innovation" framework to better understand the community engagement experience of those historically excluded from the process.
Throughout this year, the City undertook an extensive research process; observing current engagement practices, researching best practices around the world, and having difficult but important conversations with government leaders and community members. Overall, we collected more than 600 data points across three research groups, uncovering important insights to acknowledge the real challenges with community engagement and move us forward.
After our extensive research and reframing of the problem, our team worked with community members in-person and virtually to generate ideas for improving engagement. With our design criteria and key research insights as our guides, the 38 community members and city staff generated more than 300 ideas for ways to improve engagement for historically excluded people. From a Domino's pizza-style tracker for community feedback and requests to billboard ads in space, it was clear that thinking creatively and challenging the current boundaries on community engagement was yielding results.
Following ideation, our team worked with our design coach to define the impact of these ideas and prioritize them based on the impact of each and difficulty of implementation. Evaluating the collect of ideas based on their impact and difficulty, we were then able to review and debate which ideas would be included in our portfolio of initiatives to carry forward into prototyping. Our team tried to select a solid mix of ambitious and easily achievable ideas that the community expressed would be impactful. We had hard but important conversations around existing resources and leadership support, while focusing on the true needs of the community.
With limited time before the close of the program, our team was able to design, prototype, and test two new engagement concepts with the community: the Mobile Engagement Unit and the Neighborhood Ambassador Program. Throughout the testing and refining process, we held four community pop-up events and received feedback on our ideas from four local advocacy organizations, more than fifty residents, and ten city staff members. Overall, we had meaningful conversations on the importance of meeting residents where they are, both physically and based on their understanding of city services, and that there is incredible energy in our community to work with local government.
After our testing period concluded, the Mobile Engagement Unit was officially integrated into city engagement processes, focused on in-place creative pop up opportunities to gather feedback and connect with our residents.
At the conclusion of our time with Bloomberg, the City Manager directed our team to create a new internal action team dedicated to pushing the initiatives in our portfolio into the future. I am currently serving as the Chair of this new group, in partnership with the City Manager's Office of Communication and the Department of City Planning and Engagement, focused on building a city-wide community engagement strategy. The City is also grateful to remain closely partnered with Bloomberg on this project as we continue to create new ways to better engage with our community.
