How to get people interested in our neighborhood plan

Visitor Question: Several of us who are very active in our neighborhood association have finally managed to convince the city that they need to fund a neighborhood plan for us. Our neighborhood is sandwiched between a giant hospital complex and a university, and we have many concerns about traffic, the cost of housing, problem renters, and general noise and commotion in the evenings especially.

We thought that doing a plan would be a good exercise in making the city pay attention to our issues. Granted, our problems are not severe compared to some other neighborhoods, but nonetheless they make it less enjoyable to live here.

When we finally got the city to agree to do this, they selected what we thought was a good consultant, and we relaxed into thinking all would be well.

They had their first public meeting the other night, and exactly six people showed up. Three of us were the ones who had led the charge to get the city to pay for the plan in the first place. The city sent one staff member, and the consultants had two people there, but the room felt empty with only nine human beings in a large community room in the fire station.

What can we do to get more people out for the next meeting? I am afraid that if this keeps up, the city will just cancel the contract and go back to ignoring us, as they have been doing for decades.

Editors Reply: This must have been very disheartening. You didn't tell us what you did to promote and publicize this meeting, but here are our best ideas about how you can do this going forward. Make no mistake about it; with this kind of turnout, you are going to have to be the ones who get people excited about attending because it seems that the city and the consultants are not going to do it.

Having said that, our first tip is to prompt both the city and the consultant to give you some graphics and photos you can use. If the consultants have not been thinking about graphics yet, challenge them to think ahead to the finished plan when they certainly will need graphics and photos. If they have a cover image in mind, that can be used in your emails, social media, and/or flyers that you use to tell the neighborhood about the need for their participation.

Of course you can take great photos yourselves, illustrating either the beauty spots in your neighborhood or the challenges that you think need to be addressed. In a pinch you can come up with plenty of photos, but it is still a good idea to enlist the city staff liaison and the consultant to be thinking ahead and sharing their expertise with you.

Next, you must get your neighborhood association itself excited about doing the plan. You say this planning effort was initiated by the neighborhood association, and yet they did not show up for the event. Explain your perfectly reasonable fear that if there is a repeat of this dismal turnout, the city and the consultant will engage in lackluster work because they assume no one cares, or in the extreme case, discontinue the project entirely, as you fear. Then go on to list all of your concerns and ask the residents to express even more issues that conceivably could be part of a neighborhood plan.

This implies that you yourselves have a good understanding of neighborhood planning, so if you haven't read our page on that topic, do so now.

If possible, work with the consultant to come up with a tentative laundry list of the contents of the plan. Be respectful of their process, so if they don't want to do this, understand that they are just being true to the concept of letting the neighborhood drive the contents of the plan. However, they probably have an idea of what will be included, so don't hesitate to borrow from them to suggest to the people what the plan might cover. You don't have to credit the consultants, but just share your conversation as your educated guess.

From here, you just have to work your magic. If you have not had a door-to-door canvass of your neighborhood for a long time, this is the occasion when you need to organize one. Send the neighborhood association members out with a list of blocks to walk, armed with a nice flyer and any descriptive material you can come up with. Have a training session for these volunteers so that they know how to respond when residents are hostile, indifferent, rude, or much too talkative.

If you have any social media presence at all, flood your media with entries about the upcoming meetings, why you think the plan is important, the challenges the neighborhood faces, and some earnest appeals to civic pride and duty. Ask your members to like and share your posts. Be sure to enlist teens and young adults in this project in their native social media environments, even if you do not have any accounts yourselves.

If you have businesses in your neighborhood, ask them to post your flyer in their windows. Friendly businesses can be tapped for door prizes for the next public meeting, or maybe they give a discount the next day for people who can show they attended.

Similarly, congregations and nonprofits that call your neighborhood home can distribute flyers to their constituents and urge attendance. They probably need even more coaching than the residents about why the plan can be important, but all nonprofit organizations want to be located in a safe, inviting, and easy to navigate neighborhood. If these are concentrated on the edges of your neighborhood, as is often the case, you need to spend a little extra face time with them to convince them that what happens in the interior of the neighborhood also has a bearing on the future of their location.

You might be noticing about now that these suggestions also double as ideas for how to inspire more participation in your neighborhood association in general. If your organization is one that requires people to join (as opposed to the associations that automatically consider all residents as members), this is an opportunity for a membership drive as well.

From here, we can point you to a large volume of material on this website about neighborhood associations and neighborhood success. See also the community engagement page. Lastly, we have compiled a list of the pages of this website that typically are of interest to neighborhoods. We do this because community work could be indexed many different ways, and not everyone thinks in the same we use in our menu. Good luck to you.

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