The panel will share wins in empowering multi-lingual/cultural communities, convincing leadership to fund implementation and not just planning, and working cross-disciplinarily to challenge the status quo. Over the last five years, the co-leads have created an award-winning multi-lingual/cultural community ambassador program, developed multiple action plans that moved from community-informed towards community-led, and provided grants to fund plan implementation. “Is it safe to try?” is one of the frequent questions of the community engagement co-lead and the NDAT has tried a lot of different approaches and can provide examples of what worked as well as what they did when an approach did not work. The co-leads will share how they built the community ambassadors, a language justice program created to facilitate multicultural bridge building to create and maintain relationships with community partners, businesses, and residents who represent linguistically diverse populations and/or historically underrepresented communities. They are in their third year of this program and many of the tools created to serve this small group have led to change for citywide engagement. The ambassador program is a perfect case study for how the co-leads have changed the way the City interacts with the community and touches on a wide range of priorities.
Learning Objectives:
be inspired in how they advocate for racial equity in their communities.
understand how to collaborate with and empower the community to implement plans and interact with planning efforts.
create a thoughtful engagement strategy that accounts for how diverse cultural and language communities can connect with planning efforts.
