Engaging the Public on Long-Term Urban Growth

The Town of Oakville is creating a framework for growth for the next 30 years in central Midtown. With a goal to create a transit-supportive and complete community for people to live, work and play, public input is essential.

For the final public engagement event of the first phase of this project, I worked as an Engagement Strategist as part of the Bespoke Collective team to develop, design and deliver a series of activities that engaged 160 members of the public. With a wide range of strong opinions in the community, it was critical to design an approach that would be inclusive and effective for all, while generating valuable input from the public. In collaboration with the team, I created a series of large-scale activity sheets with focused prompts for six stations, where people could respond to presented concepts, see others’ input and also ask questions from the project team, resulting in rich dialogue and feedback.

The extensive feedback was synthesized and organized into key themes (cluster analysis). The full event report. I then prepared provided both a high-level summary and detailed findings by theme to share with all stakeholders, along with project and event overviews for context.