Metro’s Public Participation Plan Wins Planning Award

December 3rd, 2014

Major Award!

Major Award!

Over the last 18 months, Metro has been developing a Public Participation Plan (PPP) (.pdf, 4MB) to help us tailor our outreach strategies to the many diverse groups in our service area to ensure there are opportunities for all groups to be meaningfully engaged in Metro’s planning and programming activities.  It was quite the effort, but resulted in a plan we can be very proud of and are ready to implement!  It turns out the National Capital Area Chapter of the American Planning Association thinks so too, as our PPP received their 2014 Award for Distinction in Community Outreach and Engagement.  We feel very honored to have been chosen from applicants throughout the National Capital Area.

The PPP is one of several elements of Metro’s Title VI program and was recently submitted to the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) as part of our triennial program update.   The following Metro planning and programming activities will activate the PPP:  planning projects, selection of amenities and infrastructure, environmental analyses, service changes, public information campaigns and development of policy alternatives – such as fare changes.    The PPP has been designed to identify outreach strategies for each of these project types, while recognizing that different approaches and attention may be required depending upon the constituencies affected by these actions.

RI Ave Metrorail Station event

RI Ave Metrorail Station event

To develop the PPP we interviewed some of our peer agencies about their best practices in public engagement, as well as staff from across Metro that work with our ridership, and our Board members.  We also surveyed 200 community-based organizations (CBOs) asking about the communication preferences for those they serve, and gauging their interest in meeting with Metro for more in depth discussions on this topic.  This latter information was used to organize part of the next and most robust portion of the effort – a public outreach campaign called “Speak Up! It’s Your Ride” held this past Spring.

The Speak Up! campaign included 23 public events of a variety of formats held throughout the region, along with 15 focus group style meetings with representatives and clients from more than 40 CBOs serving minority, low-income, senior, disabled and homeless constituents.   We showed up at rail stations, festivals, shopping malls, community centers and universities – using fun activities to engage participants and offer them an opportunity to tell us about how best to reach them for future endeavors.

Our efforts paid off, with more than 3,500 people responding to a survey (administered in seven languages!!) telling us about how to best reach them when we have information to share and/or would like to obtain feedback.  Importantly, survey respondents reflected the demographic profile of our ridership with respondents that were 69 percent minority, 28 percent low-income, and 10 percent limited English proficient (LEP), which is no small feat when we consider some of the challenges faced by these groups.

Survey announcement in Vietnamese

Survey announcement in Vietnamese

Three major themes emerged from the survey, and form the basis of our PPP:

  • Go where people are.  Don’t expect people to come to you.  They are busy. Some have more than one job. They have kids. They want to spend their evenings at home.  Hold events where people already are going and at times where it’s easy for someone to stop and chat.  Rail stations and bus stops in particular are a great place to meet and greet riders of all stripes!
  • Tailor communications and meeting formats to individual demographic groups.  If you are working in an area with a significant linguistic or cultural population, make sure your materials ‘speak’ to them – in their language, and/or by being sensitive to cultural norms.
  • Work with community-based organizations to build relationships and trust across diverse populations. This is a big one.  Trust is essential to building relationships with constituents, especially traditionally underserved populations. CBOs are some of the best partners for reaching the many diverse communities in our region as they are working with them on a variety of matters every day.

Several institutional recommendations emerged from our work to help ensure that the PPP principles become part of the Metro culture.  These were presented to our Board in September and include:

  • Creating an on-line Public Participation Toolkit available agency-wide to help project managers identify the communities in their project area, and develop outreach plans that address the customer preferences for location, time, language needs, format, etc.

    GIS Tool for demographic analysis

    GIS Tool for demographic analysis

  • Providing formal public participation training to Metro staff involved in public outreach to ensure the successful, uniform adoption of the Toolkit and an Authority-wide understanding of Title VI requirements for public participation.
  • Establishing a central office to manage public outreach activities. To ensure consistency across Metro and PPP compliance, these Metro staff will provide expert assistance to project/planning staff; manage all project-based public participation activities; and oversee and coordinate public participation within Metro.
  • Establishing a CBO Public Outreach committee.  A number of our peers found that having an established group of CBOs that meet regularly has helped them to reach farther into many traditionally underserved communities to understand their needs.
  • Using performance measures to track the effectiveness of our outreach.  This is not an easy measure to track, but we believe we have developed some measures around participant demographics, feedback and follow-up that will indicate which strategies seem to be yielding the best results for public participation by diverse groups.

We noted earlier that FTA is currently reviewing the PPP along with the other elements of our updated Title VI Program. We await FTA’s concurrence that the PPP meets the federal requirements – and perhaps their nod that it goes a few steps further. In the meantime, we are moving forward with implementation.

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