The Great Plains Institute (GPI) launched the community engagement phase of its Electric Vehicle Education for All initiative in February 2024, subcontracting with three community-based organizations to carry out the engagement. Our initiative seeks to deeply engage frontline and historically marginalized communities within the Twin Cities area to learn firsthand how they perceive electric mobility, identify electric mobility literacy gaps, and provide educational materials to increase access to electric mobility benefits.

Before diving into the community engagement phase, we wanted to learn from climate and energy engagement efforts that have already taken place in the Twin Cities. In spring 2023, we reviewed literature and interviewed staff from local governments, nonprofits, for-profits, and other entities.

In this post, we highlight the results from the intel-gathering phase. You can dive deeper into a full summary of our results in Lessons Learned from Twin Cities Climate and Energy Community Engagement Efforts: Phase 1 Report of the Great Plains Institute’s Electric Vehicle Education for All Initiative.

Projects that led to engagement

All interviewees described different projects that led to community engagement, including seeking input on specific projects, capturing community perspectives during planning efforts, and ensuring community members are fully accessing various programs. Specific engagement efforts mentioned:

Interviewee responses demonstrate the wide array of community engagement possibilities, highlighting that any project or program can benefit from engaging the communities they serve.

Community identification methods

By and large, the most popular method our interviewees used to identify which communities to engage involved relying on prior networks.

They turned to their connections with community groups, partner organizations, and local governments to seek advice on which communities to engage for a particular program or project. However, they did caution that neighborhood associations may not represent the views of the entire community, so it’s important to include other groups as well.

The second most common strategy? Word-of-mouth, which is less helpful if your entity is just getting started with community engagement. Interviewees also suggested using resources like the Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool and Hennepin County’s human vulnerability map to make data-informed decisions.

Engagement and support methods

Many interviewees mentioned conducting virtual and in-person activities but found the greatest success with face-to-face meetings. In-person activities included door knocking, attending community-based organization events, engaging in high-traffic areas like libraries and laundromats, and interviews.

Ultimately, they found the best results when they engaged community members in the community instead of expecting community members to come to other sites.

To ensure community members could fully participate in engagement activities, interviewees mentioned they provided financial compensation via gift cards or stipends, translated materials into languages used most in the communities, offered interpretation services, provided bus funding, and offered childcare and ethnically appropriate food.

Challenges and solutions

Over the course of the interviews, three main challenges kept coming up:

  • Engagement fatigue: In a world that is increasingly turning to frontline and historically marginalized communities for their input on programs and projects, these communities are starting to feel overburdened. Avoiding engagement to alleviate fatigue is not the solution, however. Instead, interviewees recommended increasing transparency to community members (e.g., letting them know how their input would be used) and shifting to models of community empowerment rather than extractive processes. One interviewee mentioned their organization is trying to align with the community ownership model described in The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership.
  • Compensation models: Many organizations are still trying to figure out what type of compensation enables meaningful community engagement. For meetings, it may be enough to offer an ethnically appropriate meal, supply childcare, and provide transportation funding. When projects would benefit from dedicated community-based organization support, interviewees recommended providing substantial support upwards of $10,000. More support provided to community-based organizations can help them build capacity to do more engagement work within the communities they serve.
  • Overcoming community distrust: Interviewees mentioned that distrust among communities of color grew after George Floyd’s murder and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly toward government entities. Interviewees worked to gain community trust back through respect and transparency.

Lessons learned

Two main lessons learned arose during the interviews. Nearly all interviewees recommended familiarizing oneself with community priorities and values before doing any type of engagement. Attending public events, speaking with community and local faith-based leaders, reaching out to organizations previously engaged with the community, and reading neighborhood websites are all ways to build this understanding. Additionally, many interviewees recommended contracting community-based organizations or other groups with strong community ties to do the actual engagement since they already have established community trust.

Dig deeper

The full report includes more lessons we learned about from prior climate and energy Twin Cities engagement efforts. Download the report below to dig deeper. And look for our phase 2 report next year, which will include lessons learned following the community engagement phase of the Electric Vehicle Education for All Initiative.

Download the report
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