2024 SKILLS SYMPOSIUM: Designing for Diversity: Ethical, Equity-centered Engagement

Designing for Diversity: Ethical, Equity-centered Engagement

As stakeholders and perspectives become increasingly diverse, practitioners are challenged to intentionally design, plan, and successfully implement ethical, equity-centered engagement processes. Structured around a comprehensive Engagement Framework, participants learn and practice through cases, audio vignettes, exercises and reflections, and multiple templates. They expand their understanding of the spectrum of diversity and leave the course with the skills to design their own equity-centered processes, develop robust and inclusive workplans, implement with fidelity, and use a participatory evaluation approach to refine their efforts. The course explicitly incorporates the International Association for Public Participation’s Core Values, Code of Ethics, and Public Participation Spectrum.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this professional development course, participants will:

● Appreciate the spectrum of diversity and understand the value and critical importance of bringing multiple perspectives forward to address complex community issues

● Learn how to define clear engagement objectives for increasing and deepening diversity within public engagement efforts

● Gain experience in stakeholder identification and analysis, and appropriate participation tools

● Understand the essential art and science of engagement design, and how to translate that into effective and successful implementation

● Develop ethical and equity-centered approaches and techniques for supporting and engaging diverse participants

● Explore underrepresentation, how to recognize and explain it, and what to do to ensure all stakeholder voices are heard

● Understand how to evaluate and redesign during implementation, and post-process to improve future engagement efforts

● Know how to translate new learnings into successful and inclusive practice

Click here to view Course Agenda 

Professional Certification/Credits

• This course is eligible for APA - AICP Continuing Education Credit 

Trainer: Anne Carroll 

Anne Carroll has been a consultant and trainer in public involvement and strategic planning for many years, serving primarily the public sector in both the USA and Canada. She focuses on designing and implementing ethical and equity-centered stakeholder engagement on important public issues, reaching out to and engaging diverse groups of people and perspectives, and tackling complex and multi-stakeholder environments. She served for 16 years as an elected member of the citywide St. Paul, Minnesota Board of Education, and serves as a board or committee member with IAP2 USA and the Minnesota Chapter, and the Minnesota Education Equity Partnership.