#715 How Not to Engage Historically Marginalized Communities with Chyanne Eyde, Washington, DC - GovLove - A Podcast About Local Government

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[00:00]
A
Foreign. Coming to you from Durham, North Carolina, this is govlove, a podcast about local government brought to you by engaging local government leaders. I'm Tony Thompson, Director of Strategy for North County Department of Human Services and your Gov Love co host for today. Today we are talking about failing in engagement with historically marginalized communities and lessons Learned with Cheyenne Ide. But first, the best way to support GovLove is to become an ELGL member. ELGL is a professional association engaging the brightest minds and local government. Now, let me introduce today's guest. Cheyenne Ide is the Deputy Chief of School Planning at District of Columbia Public Schools. Cheyenne has worked in city government of Washington, D.C. for the past 12 years. Her work centers on expanding access to high quality public education through data, informed planning and service design. Early in her career, she partnered with Title 1 schools to strengthen their engagement efforts with a focus on getting families in at risk communities enrolled in early childhood education. Later, she used demographic and program quality data to guide the expansion of the District's high quality pre kindergarten programs, sparking a larger interest in urban planning and spatial data. She now leads a planning team that pairs qualitative data from community surveys and focus groups with quantitative data to intentionally plan significant changes at schools, including programmatic shifts and school openings. Cheyenne, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Welcome to govlove.
[01:48]
B
Thank you. I'm excited.
[01:50]
A
Yeah. So we start our episode, Cheyenne of Gov Love with a lightning round to break the ice and for our listeners to get to know you a little bit better. So my first question I have for you is, what is currently inspiring you in your professional work?
[02:04]
B
Sure. I think I've been learning a lot in the past couple of years about service design and that particular approach to local government. And a little silver lining of so many changes happening on the federal level is that here in D.C. there have been a lot of people who have done interesting work with USDs and 18F and they've just really opened up their doors and their minds to a lot of people to talk about their experiences. So that's. There's been a lot of great opportunities to learn lately.
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A
Awesome. What's a book, a podcast, or a show that you think every public service should check out at least once?
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B
I know this one has been shared before, but I was really positively influenced by Recoding America by Jennifer Palka.
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A
What about that that influenced you?
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B
I think it does a really good job of sort of synthesizing what the challenges are in government. Right. She was talking from a federal perspective, but so Much of it resonated with me on the local level of some of our processes that can have a hard time dynamically reacting to the situation. Right. We get very stuck in the bureaucracy.
[03:15]
A
Yeah, I love it. I need. It's still on my book list to highly recommend. All right. I'll make it a priority this year for sure. Okay. So what is a food dish that you had while in Sicily? I noticed in your LinkedIn profile that you've done a lot of traveling, so I just was curious, like, what's the food dish you had in Sicily that you wish you could find in America more consistently?
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B
Yeah, I've been very fortunate to travel, and my husband happens to actually be from Sicily. He's a tremendous cook, but the one thing he really cannot recreate is granita, which you're not familiar with. It is so hard to explain, which is such an annoying thing to say, but it is basically. One example is that they take pistachios, they pulverize them, they freeze them, it becomes this, like, really unique. It's not water ice. He'd be so upset for me to compare it to water ice, but it has a really interesting, like, creamy, icy texture, and they eat it for breakfast.
[04:14]
A
Oh, wow. Has. Has he tried. Has he been trying to recreate it?
[04:17]
B
Honestly, it's, like, so hard to get anywhere. No, I don't think. I don't know. He might have tried years ago, but not really.
[04:24]
A
Okay. Granise. I'll have to look that up and see. Maybe we can find it so somewhere locally, just to see a sample of what it looks like. Next question. Next lightning round question. What is a fictional world you would most like to live in, and why this one?
[04:41]
B
I find this one so hard, which made me think that I am, like, too stuck in reality. But I just finished reading IQ 84, and the story is not glamorous. It's not like the. Anyway, if some. If someone's read it, they might question my. My response. But I really enjoyed the book, and as I read it, I was like, wow. Like, a key part of the book is this idea of there being two moons in this fictional world. And I just love the idea of seeing these two moons. So the story is kind of. It's kind of chaotic. I might not want to be, like, a main character, but the idea of living like 80s Tokyo and seeing two moons, I think would be fun.
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A
I think that's pretty cool little science fiction. Yeah, I like that. Okay, last lightning round question. And last but not least, because we'll get into the other part of our, of our discussion today. But what's the best professional advice that you've ever received?
[05:36]
B
So I think that a lot of people have sort of one quote on a post it, post it note on their desk and mine has been there for years. And it is what is eminently doable and what is morally correct are not always the same. And while actualizing the former, we can't lose sight of the latter. I find it so resonant in so many things. Right. So oftentimes we just have to like, take the win of getting done what we can get done, but stay cognizant of the fact that it's not where we want to be ultimately. And I find that sort of reassuring that like, there's a win in both ways. Right. Things don't be perfect for you to feel pride in your work anyway. So I copied that out of an article in the Atlantic and then only years later I like realized it was written by Ta Nehisi Coates.
[06:24]
A
Yeah, that's one of my favorite thinkers right now. So that's great. I love that quote. Awesome. Thank you so much for those quick icebreaker lightning round questions. Can you tell us a little bit about your path to an in local government? How did you get to where you are today?
[06:42]
B
Sure. It's an incredibly simple path. I interned at my current office when I was in college, so I interned in central office of D.C. public Schools as a college student. I had absolutely no intention of pursuing a full time job in D.C. afterwards. But the team I worked for was just. They were so effective, they were so smart, they were really supportive of each other, they had a great culture. I oftentimes say that, like, my ambition is to build a team as strong as that one was. I think I'm pretty close right now, so I've been on strong teams since. But I will. I do like to joke that they tricked me into local government because there are strong teams, but it was a little bit of an oversell. So there's. But I've, you know, I've come to enjoy the struggle also.
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A
Yeah. This makes me think of another question, like, what are the characteristics of a strong team that you try, you're trying to recreate?
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B
Sure. You know, it's one of my team and I just talked about team norms on Tuesday. We have a couple of new members and I wanted to like get input. But one that's really important to me is that people feel like they can kind of openly share the things that they think are going well and things that are not. I just think when the people who work for me in particular feel comfortable telling me things that they're not happy about, like, that just feels really healthy. That just feels like actually a great sign to me.
[08:08]
A
Yeah, I like that. You know, just honestly helps you build better. I love that. Okay, so as part of your work, I saw that you recently presented at a conference, a very interesting topic, which inspired me to ask you to come on and have this conversation with me. But you were talking about all the ways that you have failed engaging with historically marginalized communities. And I thought this was a very interesting and vulnerable topic to discuss and relevant given today's environment. So I wanted to hear more about your experiences. So why is engaging historically marginalized communities important, not just in your role, but for local governments in general?
[08:57]
B
Sure. And, you know, I should. I should give credit first to the reason I talked about this topic at a conference was one, the conference was organized by Civic Tech Toronto, and they did an incredible job organizing and they really specifically made one day of the conference open to informal, unplanned sessions. And so I think if I had gone to the conference from the lens of, like, let me prepare the most useful thing I could talk about to people and, you know, put together a PowerPoint deck and make it really shiny, I probably never would have come up with this topic. But instead, I listened to a talk by a gentleman, Victor Urua, who works in dc, really great thinker, and he really inspired me to bring this sort of unplanned session about failure and engagement. So I just, you know, love opportunities to sort of in person, get people to talk honestly. And anyway, so credit to Civic Tech, credit to Victoria. But why is it important? I think that when I talk to peers in other places, there's just huge variation in how local governments are engaging people from like zero to a ton. D.C. is probably, I'd say, on the ton side of the spectrum. So that's my context. I think if you are coming from this, from like a service design perspective, then you have to hear from people in order to make your services work. So this very much gets into the culture of different city agencies, municipal agencies. If you don't have that feedback loop, it's easy to get insulated. It doesn't matter. But I think most people do want to feel like the service they're providing makes sense. And you can't do that unless you hear from people directly. I don't think engagement means, like making everybody happy and having these really like, kumbaya public sessions all the time. It doesn't mean every interest group gets the thing they want. Right. I think what we're going to end talking about is that part of engagement is upsetting people. And I don't mean that to be flippant. I don't think it's good, but I do think it's natural. Right. If you are doing an important service, people are going to have strong opinions about how it's done. And when people's opinions are different, not everyone can walk away really, really pleased, but they can walk away respected and feeling what they said was heard and they understand where the government's decision came from.
[11:20]
A
Yeah. And what, what, particularly around the importance of engaging historically marginalized communities, especially in D.C. is so critical as a part of your work.
[11:31]
B
So I think this idea that in order for service to work, you have to hear from a community, I think it applies to all communities, but it's. We have to keep really cognizant of the fact that sometimes the, the kind of office worker coded approaches that we tend to take, you know, read this email and fill up this survey and meet this deadline. Like, those just don't always work for marginalized communities. Whether we're talking about finances or just like time. Employment background time. Exactly. So I think we want the same outcome from everybody. We want people to feel like they can share what they think. We want to feel like the service we're designing makes sense for them, but we just have to realize that getting that from different communities is going to take different action and particularly going to be unique for low time, low finance communities.
[12:26]
A
Yeah, gotcha. So you've been doing all this engagement work and you have had enough experience to have some failures. So can you share with our audience some of the difficulties that you are having in engagement and how it was potentially negatively impacting your work and the community?
[12:46]
B
Definitely. So when I think of my failures, sometimes it's stuff like I released this community survey and people responded, but I didn't get input from a particular subgroup or I had an event and only the community members who we knew were already invested attended. So nothing crashed and burned. And you know, I definitely had the option that I could go to my boss and say, hey, we got 200 survey respondents, isn't that amazing? Or like, hey, 50 people came to this event. Isn't that great? But it's more, it's in the end gonna be so much more effective to be able to say, hey, like we had a success in that this happened, but we missed this part. And I think that is where I Want people to be able to sort of embrace their failures. So much of public engagement, being successful in public engagement is being willing to miss in the beginning. You're not going to, it's building a relationship. You're not going to just like linearly have this very clear success. So I think failure can feel like a really scary term. And I understand people maybe not going to their boss and like proclaiming like, I'm a failure, but I think if you are not clear about the ways that you failed, you're not going to ultimately succeed.
[14:07]
A
Yeah, for sure. Okay, walk us through some of the failures, some specific failures that you've had and the lessons learned that has improved your engagement experiences.
[14:20]
B
Sure. Let's see. So when I've talked with people about this, sometimes I start off with like some of the small scale failures. So I benefited a lot in my career from being able to do some like small scale engagement years ago. And I sailed tremendously, but it wasn't so noticeable because it was just my own time it being wasted. It wasn't, I wasn't leading the level of initiative that I do now. So years ago I embedded myself in a few elementary schools and you know, I really saw them as hidden gems. They had strong teachers and good school culture, but they weren't fully enrolled. So I spent a few days a week at each of these schools, got to know their strengths, started building content and planning events. And I had really clear failures. Right. Like people didn't show up to these events that I was organizing or I had at one point I like developed some content and like one of the teachers didn't agree with it and I was like, I felt like, oh man, this darn it. I like really missed the, missed the bullseye on this one. But it was ultimately okay, right? Because it was small scale. It was just me. I wasn't wasting anybody else's time. It was kind of, it was an add on. So I, I do think, I would say for people who are in some sort of leadership position, there's a lot of value in giving people early in their career some latitude to like, do some exploring. I just think there's a lot of, a lot of value in that. But, and because I really, like, I eventually found new strategies right, in that sort of laboratory that I'd created for myself. I did end up figuring out how to kind of plug myself into different community members who could drive event attendance or I found like people in the school building who are willing to really sign off on my content and like make it single. So it took. It feels so vulnerable and it feels so. It really stinks to, like, run a thing and it not work out. But I think sort of having that experience of doing it and it fails on the small scale just like, gave me that muscle to be able to withstand it.
[16:30]
A
Yeah. So it sounds like, you know, you were able to really create deep personal relationships. Right. And find those people who were kind of cornerstone, kind of key gate holder members that could help give you the access to the people that you. You needed to engage with. And that's. And I think that's really cool and. And fundamental lesson, definitely.
[16:53]
B
And I think sometimes, like, relationship building can feel almost like it's something. It's a. It's a term people say a lot when we talk about public engagement. And it can feel almost kind of cliche and like, yeah, you have to build relationships, but. But I think sometimes we gloss over how, like, awkward and hard building relationships out of nothing is. Right. Especially when, like, you're coming in as, like, the government worker who has goals to meet and you're being paid for the work that you're doing. And so you're asking this person in the community to trust you. And, you know, they. Maybe they've had other people in your role before who have had them do things that weren't useful. You're asking people to trust you, to possibly waste their time with you and for them to basically kind of vouch for you to other people in their community. So sometimes they don't want to do it. And it's. It takes being willing to, like, be rejected and kind of come back at them, be like, hey, I'm still here. Still interested in working with you.
[17:48]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
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B
Most of the time. There's so many community members who are so committed to their larger community that, like, it doesn't take too much resilience to, like, build that trust with them, but. But it takes some, you know, and you have to be willing to get out there.
[18:02]
A
Yeah. A level of vulnerability that's important. Let them know that you also are putting skin in the game. For sure.
[18:08]
B
Yeah. So I just want to, like, acknowledge for people that it's not always this, like, beautiful. Oh, relationship building. It's not always this, like, beautiful, magical process that, like, you should be able to pull off flawlessly. Like, sometimes it's, you know, awkwardly making some phone calls and feeling annoying and just keeping at it.
[18:26]
A
Keep showing up. Keep showing up.
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B
Yeah, exactly.
[18:29]
A
Okay, so let's go through a hypothetical situation. Like, you have a new project that you need engagement in and you're trying to get some insights. And now you've turned those failures into better engagement. So walk our listeners through how an engagement process might look for you today.
[18:48]
B
Sure. So a lot of my engagement these days, oftentimes it's almost like a campaign because I'm sort of asking people to commit to this thing, to make this really profound choice like enrolling their kid in a school. So I just want to acknowledge that that is usually my context. I'm kind of building momentum for something that's coming, right. In that past example, it was like getting people to enroll in an early childhood program. Recently, I've been involved in like, the opening of schools and trying to like, get people to feel committed and trust in a school that's going to open in the future. So my approach that usually I think, but I think is true for most processes. You have to identify your audiences. Typically different stakeholders need different levels of information and engagement. And if you are doing, if you, if you get rolling with this work, it can become really easy to overlook what one stakeholder group for others. And so I find that just having like a literal tracker, right? I just make an Excel sheet, but you can do this any way that works for you. But just being explicit from the beginning of like, this is who I think I need to get input from. And these are the sort of different levels, right. You're going to have people who need every update and you're going to have people who need the quarterly update, the annual update. So there's some levels and I think while you have like, your clear mind before things get rolling, try to just define that, that for yourself. I think those audiences are going to have different areas of interest, different expertise to bring into the process. It's going to take work to confirm exactly what those are, but trying in the beginning to define it can be helpful. I also think, and I think this can get into some interesting territory, but I think you have to identify your most engaged group and I think spend a little extra time with them up front and understand what motivates them. We have a lot of sort of underutilized kind of political energy in D.C. right. I always think that the fact that we lack a voting member of Congress leads to an extremely, a much larger amount of sort of political activity on the local level. People just don't only have so many outlets. And so we have these really interested community members who, you know, they may just really focus on these sort of hyperlocal issues, which in the end benefits us. But I think identifying those People, I mean, they will. They will raise their hands to you, they'll make themselves very clear. And figuring out if you can use them as like an ambassador in your process, sort of direct their energy, I find that really valuable. I will say this is something that I think this is kind of a. This is like a unique approach that I have. I think sometimes people like to kind of push down those sort of high flyer voices, right. Maybe they're very highly resourced people. Maybe they're professionals. Maybe they just feel like really loud voices and so there's a temptation to kind of like quell them. I take a little bit of a different approach, I think, investing a little bit of extra time with them up front. Either I've had big success getting them to kind of use their energy to like, organize other people. Right. And sometimes more marginalized groups get to like, build some connections with people across groups. So that's been a big win. Or I've just found that making them feel trust that they, like, will come to me with their concerns will save me time later. Right. I've had community members who, in projects of the way, way past, they've like advocated up and up and up the chain. And so we end up, you know, spending days writing very formal letters to respond. And I'm. When I came into the role that I'm in now, it was like, okay, I'm gonna build this relationship so we can handle things directly. We don't need to escalate and escalate. So I think from those two angles, I'm actually a big advocate of, like, identify your. Your sort of most active, oftentimes associated with privilege kind of participants. Put a little extra love on them and find a way that you can make this relationship useful.
[23:10]
A
Gotcha. Yeah. Your response made me think of another question about engagement methods. Had you done this work, what have been the. What have been some engagement methods that you found more or least effective in this work that you might tend to use as a tool to get the feedback that you need, particularly with these different groups.
[23:38]
B
I think when we are figuring. I think we are tempted oftentimes to give everyone the same survey, the same same sort of. The same sort of content to chew on. And I found that when we are wondering why, like a marginalized group, why a subgroup isn't responding as much as we want them to, it can be for all the good reasons of, like, they're working, they don't have time. The language different. The language difference is hard. Even if you're translating materials, there's so much jargon that's hard to translate. All that is very real. I also think it's worth considering, like, are you asking them about things that this particular subgroup largely cares about? Right. And not to paint with such a big brush, but like, are you. Yeah, I mean, are you talking to them about something that is of interest? And so I have found sometimes focus groups being a really useful way to go off script a little bit. Right. So something that we have done a few times is we have a fairly large scale survey. We compare the results to our intended audience list and we say, okay, which of our intended audiences did we really not get to through this survey? If one of those audiences is Amharic speaking families, okay, can we find a way to talk to some Amharic speaking families directly? And we have. That is really honestly where some of these, like, highly engaged, sort of highly resourced members kind of come and play. I've had great experiences where, you know, a really involved PTO parent. I don't want all the feedback to come from that person, but they want to be involved. They're excited. And I've had great success in having them in kind of giving them that charge of like, hey, I need a couple of Amharic speaking families that you think will be open to talking with me. I'll set up an interpreter, I'll do all the logistics, but I want to sort of. I want to want some help from you to try to bridge this relationship and find this connection. And that can be this really great way to make. Make that highly resourced person, that really involved person, feel valued. Like they're contributing, but they're contributing in a way that is like, really towards our goal of engaging marginalized communities. So that's ended up anyway. And then getting to that focus group, then we sometimes discover, like, oh, like we're trying to ask you about, like, what should this building physically look like? Because we'd like to engage you about the design of the building, but like, you don't care about that. Like, you want to talk about transportation and after school. And so sometimes we just find that you can do all the best practices in the world. And they're just like, I don't. This is not the thing I want to talk to you about.
[26:23]
A
Yeah. And then how do you. When you're finding those things that they are actually interested in talking about and giving them that space, what do you do with that feedback? If it's not necessarily the project that you're working on right now, do you send it to somebody else? Or do you hold it for another relevant project? Or is it just ongoing data that you're using to continuously inform your work? How are you holding space for that feedback? And that isn't necessarily aligned with, you know, the outcomes that you're looking for in a specific project.
[26:56]
B
Totally. That's. That's a great question. So I would say that in general, I'm really big on just being upfront with people about what I can immediately use and what I can't. But especially when you're in this sort of space where you're directly talking to someone, that's so clearly messages that, like, you are important. I want to hear what you say. So even if I start off a focus group saying, like, okay, you know, we wanted to form this group because we did this survey about building design and we got good responses, but we didn't get as many as we were hoping. And so we want to talk to you more about this and discover if there are other things you want to talk about. So we'll usually say up front all those other things, like, we may or may not be able to directly address them, but we want to know what they are. So we can really explicitly say, like, I just want to know what they are. And then we can kind of next step decide if we're going to be able to address them. And I think when we sort of proactively say that community members are fairly responsive to that. Right. We're not going in there saying, tell me your dream list, everything that you ever wanted to see changed, and we're going to do it. We are trying to be really clear up front of, like, what feels possible. And then, you know, I have definitely had situations where I thought that. I thought that a problem. I thought that a problem was X, and I talked to community and it's Y, and I'm sort of like, oh, like, I didn't know that this is a thing I should actually be advocating to my leadership about. So will that community immediately know that, like, that changed my practice? Probably not from their experience. They mostly just know that, like, I and my team are, like, willing to spend that hour talking to them. And oftentimes I find that, like, that is effective enough to make people willing to engage later. And I, I kind of take solace in that and know that sometimes it results and we can do something different, and sometimes it doesn't. It also might be as simple as, like, in future communications, we'll emphasize that topic.
[28:58]
A
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. And then when you're Getting that data. You have all this data, all this feedback. How does your team prioritize or weigh the feedback from different groups in terms of ultimately making a recommendation?
[29:15]
B
Sure. Oh, I mean, it so depends on what the thing is, right? I will say let's use a concrete example. I've been in a situation before where we are working with a school and we're talking about new programming and there is some sort of public engagement around, like, what is that new academic programming going to be? So a sort of like, I think maybe like a failure. We had that. Then we, like learned a lesson at one point was we had. We had a community that kind of took over the conversation. We had to sort of wrangle it back. Right. And a lesson we got from that was that the next time we were in sort of a similar academic programming conversation, we got really explicit up front with our leadership with like, what is the menu of options? What are the things that we could possibly put on the table? Because I want to. If a community member brings up this other thing, I want to be able to just up front just say, that's a fantastic. That could be a really valuable idea. But we're not going to be able to do it. So let's focus on these options. So if we are getting conflicting input, I will say, I wonder if this would map to other types of government work. But I will say, so often in education, people are talking about different programming, right? They want an international baccalaureate program. They want AP classes. They want students with special needs to be well served. They want, you know, rigorous, academic, whatever. They want arts. They'll name many different programs. But, like, ultimately they just want a quality program. Right? It's fairly rare that you meet someone who's like, I will only go to this school if it offers band. There are people. Band is important. But it's oftentimes what they're really saying is like, I want this to be a great school and then I'll send my kid there. And so what we find more so is that if we can be clear about what all the options are up front. And then we tend to do public surveys where, like, the. The input we get is public. Like, the answers people give are public. So I think that also encourages a level of transparency of like, we're not hiding the ball here. This really is what people said. We tend to get sort of a critical mass of people who like, form around an option. And like, because we've already gotten that, we already. The menu was approved by leadership, then it's not too Big of a hurdle to get that most favored option chosen. I think the struggle is more when you're either not offering people options you're too open ended in your feedback collection or you're offering options that you can't actually come through on later where things get really dicey. So I think I would mostly, I would say make sure everything you're talking about up front is actually possible as much as possible. And then I do think people tend to circle around the thing there, There are times where the different. Well now I'm. All these different examples are like popping into my mind.
[32:36]
A
I love it. Yeah.
[32:38]
B
The most. I'd say the most controversial times where like A, there are. There really does become sort of an A and a B. You know, we're going to build a school at this site versus this site 1. It's so binary. Someone's going to be upset. You don't choose one or the other. I think that's actually just when you have to be really clear for yourself and what the reasoning behind the decision was. I've had moments where the decision was made and I didn't agree with it myself, but I understand the rationale behind it and I just give that rationale to our community members and I just, I repeat it. You know, I think that's, that's when you just sort of, you, you pick a direction and you stand, you, you stand firmly in it.
[33:20]
A
Yeah. So your team does you mention work in quantitative and qualitative data. How do you combine those things? Well, to make informed decisions. And how do you present both of the, well, quantitative data in particular, because you're collecting quality data. How do you present quantitative data to the community as you're helping them engage on a topic?
[33:54]
B
I think oftentimes something I like to do is to do some quantitative analysis for my team because we're doing planning work. Sometimes that's spatial data. Sometimes we're mapping distances that students live from a school. And how are those commute times going to change if the boundary of the school changes, if the location of the school changes. Right. Something I like to do is put together that analysis. Right. QC it really thoroughly ourselves and then just put it in front of our community members particularly. Sometimes we have kind of like working groups of people who are invested. We'll put that in front of them, we'll explain our process to them. This sometimes kind of scratches the itch of people who are kind of data oriented who are just sort of like want to know the nitty gritty. And then we will ask that the group sort of generally, here are the outcomes that we found. Does this resonate with your life? You know, if we say that 45% of students at this school can walk to school in 30 minutes, hypothetical, does that resonate with what you see? Do you see a lot of people walking to school? Does this feel, feel right to you? And then that can sometimes give us like, that's usually a good conversation starter of, hey, like we're the, we're the nerdy office people with the data. This is what we're seeing. What can you layer on top of that? And it does help us sometimes find like the big outliers where they say, okay, yeah, this is true for most people. But then we have a really big problem in this one neighborhood that's really geographically landlocked and they can't walk and there's no bus. Like, like some of them surface that stuff that we may have been blind to before.
[35:37]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I love that. All right, so I have a couple more questions for you. I want you to. You've already kind of touched on some projects that you've had in your past, but I really would love for you to tell our audience, you know, a project that you've completed in your time there, that you leverage engagement to get a really cool or cool or important outcome for the community and how that engagement helped deliver that result. Oh,
[36:13]
B
okay. The one that's really jumping out to me that feels like fully closed, but I can like map its journey from beginning to end. Years ago, this DC has done really great investments in early childhood care. And so, you know, if you have a three year old, you have a four year old in D.C. you can get them into full day free public pre K. And for kids younger than that, they are increasingly offering partnerships between public schools and sort of local providers to offer sort of zero to three care. Right. Child development centers. Now these are focused on our marginalized communities. They're focused on families who meet at risk criteria, who receive government benefits, et cetera, to like quality qualified. But sort of early on, as the city was doing more investment in this, I had a great opportunity to help cite some of these locations and had a really positive experience at one where we were planning to cite it at this particular school. But sort of like from sort of the big decision makers needed some evidence that there were people who were really going to show up and enroll at this school place and that it was going to be the Head Start eligible, the at risk criteria meeting community that they were hoping to serve with this child Development center. And so we, the team that I worked in at the time, we like, had access to the addresses of families who applied through the lotteries, which indicated they had young children. Right. And they were families in the system that we serve. And so we felt comfortable sort of reaching out to them and saying, hey, there's this new opportunity where the city is going to open a child development center. And so this really is. I mean, this. The neighborhood that I'm thinking of is, you know, one of our lowest income in the city. Really great sort of school cultures, but not always a ton of like, community input into the school. School. And so we really, from the very beginning, right, we didn't. We didn't even start with like, let's do a virtual survey and see how it goes. No, we just, from the very beginning were like, we're gonna knock on some doors and we're gonna like, go to the community rec center and we're gonna try to find some people who can tell us, where do we find really young families in this area? And ended up being successful. We ended up, you know, we had a team that was willing to go out into the community, knock on doors. We joked that it ended up, you know, we had sort of a list of addresses. We ended up sort of knocking on the doors of anybody that had like, toys in their front yard and said, hey, the city is considering opening a child development center down the street from you. If that's exciting to you, please come to this event and show that that's exciting to you. We did. There wasn't a huge Spanish speaking community in this area, but there was some. And so we went to like a health clinic that was known to serve Spanish speakers. That was sort of a tip we got from a neighbor in this door knocking process, right. Distributed flyers in Spanish. We were frankly just very surprised. We had like, set up a Spanish interpreter. We were frankly, like, worried that that person was have nothing to do, but ended up did having several families who showed up who spoke Spanish. So that ended up. We ended up getting, gosh, this was years ago, but I want to say we got like 30, 35 people who showed up to this event, which for this community was like a really tremendous turnout. And it kind of gave the district confidence that like, okay, if we put it here, it'll be successful. And could they have made that decision without the sort of community showing up? It's possible, but there were, there were debates, right? And so that kind of sealed the deal. And so I think that felt really good to us. That by like getting out. I think, I think people underestimate the value of just like knocking on doors and walking around equity.
[40:10]
A
Yeah.
[40:12]
B
Show up.
[40:13]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, I want to see if we can condense like some, some key insights like as our listeners are trying to say, okay, what are the takeaways? What are some insights that you've learned in your engagement work to improve the specific communities that you've worked with that our listeners can maybe take with them in their own work? Sure.
[40:37]
B
I mean, I think my big headline in general is really just like, be willing to be critical of your work. Don't just stick to the total number of people you engaged. Really scrutinize who your responses are coming from. Are these really the people who are going to use the services and are these people going to use the services who have the fewest outside options? So I think just be harsh on yourself. It doesn't mean that you have to put that in your annual performance review, but I think be really critical of your engagement outcomes in the beginning to help decide what you're going to do next. Let's see, that should really drive sort of like the subsequent work you're doing. Secondly, I would say I think equitable engagement does not mean turning down the voices of your sort of most privileged group. At least that's not, that's not the. It's not just that. Right. I think it is finding a way to redirect the people who are sort of the most willing to be involved in your process. So don't cater the process to them. They can navigate the process no matter what it is. But those sort of high resource individuals who are like banging down your door, don't just ignore them. Sometimes they're so annoying. You have to. But like, oftentimes it just takes a. It just takes. I have found so much power in doing a call with a really highly resourced community member who's like kind of demanding just doing a call with them and saying, hey, you know, you are known to spend a lot of time on this work. Tell me about why, like what brings you to this? And I've had people be really honest with me and you know, right off the bat just be willing to say, I don't feel professionally fulfilled. I feel like I have skills that are valuable in this process. And so I like to use my time to try to support community processes. And I think being able to see, kind of humanizes people that they're not just so selfishly demanding you make the decision that they want you to make. But Instead, like, they're looking for a way to be useful and feel valuable. I think just asking people some of those questions about their why can be really valuable and help you take some of their energy and like, push it towards the work that has to get done to engage more marginalized groups. Right. It just. It takes a lot of work to engage folks who don't answer emails and don't answer surveys, and so take all the capacity you can get. You know, if you have a community member who's willing to, like, do some door knocking, do it like. Fantastic.
[43:22]
A
All right, so what's next? What is your team working on that our listeners should be looking out for?
[43:28]
B
Let's see. I mean, there's a lot of exciting stuff happening in D.C. public schools. I think particular city has had really great investments in middle schools. Urban districts all over the country are seeing enrollment decline. D.C. is a little bit different in that, but I'm excited to see sort of how we address it. I will say that I personally, because of sort of a personal. My. Because of my personal life, I'm actually moving to Canada. So I am figuring out how to bring, like, my interest, my passion for service design into a professional setting in Canada. So that's like a big new transition that I'm embarking on.
[44:09]
A
Yeah, I love that. I mean, that's a really great transition. And we'll definitely have to keep track of, you know, how you bring services on to your. To your new location. So that's really cool. Maybe they'll have you find some Granada
[44:19]
B
there
[44:22]
A
if you have better luck.
[44:25]
B
More ice.
[44:27]
A
Cheyenne, thank you so much for coming on today. Last question we ask everybody is if you could be the gov love dj, what song would you pick as the exit music for your episode?
[44:42]
B
Oh, man. So a song that's been really on my mind lately that I'm just gonna go with is the band. There's a French band called Limperatrice. Who knows if I pronounced that correctly, but they have a song called Peu de si, which means fear the girls. It's very melodic and sweet, and there's just something about the fact that the lyrics are about how scary women are that I just think is a fabulous contrast and very fun.
[45:11]
A
I love it. I love it. I think this is the first time someone has mentioned a French song when I post it. So maybe we can find it. I don't know. So that ends our Goblo episode for today. Thank you, Cheyenne, for coming on and talking with me. Govlove is brought to you by EOGL and the best way to support GovLove is to become an EOGL member. You can reach us online@eogo.org govlove or at govlovepodcast on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X. Subscribe to govlove on your favorite podcast app. A new episode drop every Friday. If you are already subscribed to GovLove, go tell a friend or a colleague about this podcast or share on social media. Media Help us spread the word that govlove is the go to place for local government stories. Thanks for listening. That has been Gov Love a podcast about local government.

Summary7 min read

Podcast Summary

Podcast: GovLove – A Podcast About Local Government
Episode Title: #715 How Not to Engage Historically Marginalized Communities
Guest: Chyanne Eyde, Deputy Chief of School Planning, DC Public Schools
Host: Tony Thompson
Release Date: February 13, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode explores the pitfalls, lessons, and evolving best practices in engaging historically marginalized communities, specifically from the perspective of Washington, DC. Chyanne Eyde, with more than a decade of experience in DC's public sector, shares candid reflections on her failures and growth as a local government engagement practitioner. The conversation goes beyond platitudes, delving into real stories, awkward moments, and actionable advice for building authentic relationships and making public services more equitable.

Lightning Round – Getting to Know Chyanne

[01:49]–[06:23]

Professional Inspiration: Chyanne is currently inspired by service design in local government, noting how DC has benefited from experiences with organizations like USDS and 18F.
- “There've been a lot of great opportunities to learn lately.” (B, 02:31)
Recommended Book:
- Recoding America by Jennifer Palka
- "It does a really good job of…synthesizing what the challenges are in government. She was talking from a federal perspective, but so much of it resonated with me on the local level…” (B, 02:50)
Favorite Food from Sicily: Granita – specifically, pistachio granita, which she describes as "creamy, icy" and unique to breakfast in Sicily.
Fictional World: Inspired by the dual-moon world in Haruki Murakami’s IQ84—“...the idea of living like 80s Tokyo and seeing two moons, I think would be fun.” (B, 05:19)
Professional Advice:
- Quoting Ta-Nehisi Coates: "What is eminently doable and what is morally correct are not always the same. And while actualizing the former, we can't lose sight of the latter."
- “That just feels like actually a great sign to me.” (B, 07:38)

Path into Local Government

[06:42]–[08:08]

Chyanne started as an intern at DC Public Schools and was won over by the effectiveness and culture of her team.
She highlights the importance of open team norms, especially the ability for team members to share honestly both positive and negative feedback.

Main Discussion: Failing at Engagement and Lessons Learned

Why Engage Historically Marginalized Communities?

[08:57]–[12:25]

Chyanne credits inspiration for her conference talk on failing at engagement to Civic Tech Toronto and Victor Urua, emphasizing vulnerability and learning from failure.
Engagement is essential for effective public service design; not everyone can be fully pleased, but everyone should feel heard and respected.
Standard engagement methods (emails, surveys) often miss marginalized groups who may lack time, financial resources, or comfort with government processes.

“You can't do that unless you hear from people directly...part of engagement is upsetting people. And I don't mean that to be flippant...when people's opinions are different, not everyone can walk away really, really pleased, but they can walk away respected and feeling what they said was heard.” (B, 10:46)

Failure Stories and What They Taught

[12:46]–[18:26]

Early failures included low turnout at events and missing input from key subgroups.
Chyanne recounts small-scale failures—like lackluster events or teacher disagreement—that allowed her to experiment and ultimately refine her strategies without high stakes.
Relationship building, though often cited, is awkward, slow, and vulnerable for government actors, especially when asking for trust and time from community members.
She emphasizes the value of persistence and "showing up" even when initial efforts flop.

“If you are not clear about the ways that you failed, you're not going to ultimately succeed.” (B, 13:31)
"It's not always this beautiful, magical process...sometimes it's awkwardly making some phone calls and feeling annoying and just keeping at it." (B, 18:08)

How Chyanne’s Engagement Process Has Evolved

[18:48]–[23:10]

Planning Engagement:
- Treat engagement like a campaign, identifying specific audiences and tracking communication levels.
- Use tools like Excel to visually map out stakeholders and necessary touchpoints.
Engaging Engaged Participants:
- Invest intentional time with highly-resourced, “loudest” participants—they can serve as ambassadors and help reach others.
- Proactive relationships with these individuals mitigate future escalation and complaints.

“I'm actually a big advocate of…put a little extra love on them and find a way that you can make this relationship useful.” (B, 22:59)

Effective (and Less Effective) Engagement Methods

[23:38]–[26:22]

Pitfall: Using the same survey or engagement format for all groups yields poor results, especially from marginalized communities.
Solution: Focus groups allow conversations to go off-script and surface unanticipated needs (e.g., finding Amharic-speaking families through parent liaisons).
Engage well-connected, privileged participants to recruit marginalized families for more direct engagement.

“We compare the results to our intended audience list and say, okay, which of our intended audiences did we really not get to through this survey?” (B, 24:11)

What To Do With Off-Topic or Out-of-Scope Feedback

[26:22]–[28:58]

Be upfront with participants about what input is actionable.
If issues arise outside project scope, communicate transparently, even if action isn’t possible; sometimes off-topic feedback ends up influencing future priorities or communications.

Prioritizing & Weighing Community Feedback

[28:58]–[33:20]

Limit choices in public feedback to options leadership is actually willing to consider to avoid frustration and false expectations.
Publicly share survey results for transparency.
In binary or controversial decisions, be forthright with rationale—“pick a direction and stand firmly in it.”

Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Data

[33:54]–[35:37]

Quantitative analysis (enrollment maps, commute times) is shared directly with community working groups for sense-checking.
Qualitative feedback from these groups surfaces exceptions or neighborhood-specific issues, creating a feedback loop between data and lived experience.

“We'll put that [data] in front of them...Does this resonate with your life?...That can sometimes give us...the big outliers where...we may have been blind to before.” (B, 34:22)

Highlighted Project: Early Childhood Center Siting

[36:13]–[40:09]

DC invested in early childhood care in marginalized neighborhoods. During site selection, Chyanne’s team skipped conventional surveys and knocked on doors, visited centers, and distributed flyers in multiple languages.
Turnout from families at a key event provided the data and confidence to go forward with the center.

"We ended up sort of knocking on the doors of anybody that had like, toys in their front yard and said, hey, the city is considering opening a child development center down the street from you. If that's exciting to you, please come to this event..." (B, 38:47)

Key Insights & Takeaways

[40:13]–[43:22]

Be self-critical about engagement numbers—scrutinize who is responding, not just how many.
Don’t ignore privileged, highly-engaged participants—redirect their energy towards helping connect with less reachable communities.
Ask people about their motivations and leverage their willingness to support equity, such as by assisting with outreach.
Relationship-building is time-consuming but essential.

“Be willing to be critical of your work. Don't just stick to the total number of people you engaged. Really scrutinize who your responses are coming from..." (B, 40:38)

What's Next

[43:28]–[44:09]

DC continues to invest in middle schools and address changing enrollment.
Chyanne is transitioning to Canada, looking to carry her passion for service design across borders.

Memorable Quotes

On balancing practicality and ethics:
"What is eminently doable and what is morally correct are not always the same. And while actualizing the former, we can't lose sight of the latter." (Ta-Nehisi Coates, quoted by Chyanne, 05:36)
On building trust:
"You're asking people to trust you, to possibly waste their time with you and for them to basically kind of vouch for you to other people in their community...It takes being willing to, like, be rejected and kind of come back at them..." (B, 17:28)
On transparency with communities:
“If we are getting conflicting input…I want to be able to just up front just say, that's a fantastic…idea. But we're not going to be able to do it. So let's focus on these options.” (B, 29:46)

Notable Segments and Timestamps

01:49 – Lightning round
08:57 – Importance of engaging marginalized communities
14:20 – Failure stories and lessons
18:48 – Chyanne’s evolved engagement process
23:38 – Effective/ineffective engagement methods
28:58 – Prioritizing and weighing feedback
33:54 – Combining quantitative and qualitative data
36:13 – Project highlight: Early childhood center
40:13 – Concrete insights and takeaways

Tone & Style

The conversation is candid, practical, and pragmatic—an honest look at both failures and incremental wins in government engagement work. Chyanne’s style is humble, approachable, and rooted in real-world experience, emphasizing that authentic relationship-building is often awkward, vulnerable, and hard-earned.

Loading summary

Transcript63 lines

[00:00]
A
Foreign. Coming to you from Durham, North Carolina, this is govlove, a podcast about local government brought to you by engaging local government leaders. I'm Tony Thompson, Director of Strategy for North County Department of Human Services and your Gov Love co host for today. Today we are talking about failing in engagement with historically marginalized communities and lessons Learned with Cheyenne Ide. But first, the best way to support GovLove is to become an ELGL member. ELGL is a professional association engaging the brightest minds and local government. Now, let me introduce today's guest. Cheyenne Ide is the Deputy Chief of School Planning at District of Columbia Public Schools. Cheyenne has worked in city government of Washington, D.C. for the past 12 years. Her work centers on expanding access to high quality public education through data, informed planning and service design. Early in her career, she partnered with Title 1 schools to strengthen their engagement efforts with a focus on getting families in at risk communities enrolled in early childhood education. Later, she used demographic and program quality data to guide the expansion of the District's high quality pre kindergarten programs, sparking a larger interest in urban planning and spatial data. She now leads a planning team that pairs qualitative data from community surveys and focus groups with quantitative data to intentionally plan significant changes at schools, including programmatic shifts and school openings. Cheyenne, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Welcome to govlove.
[01:48]
B
Thank you. I'm excited.
[01:50]
A
Yeah. So we start our episode, Cheyenne of Gov Love with a lightning round to break the ice and for our listeners to get to know you a little bit better. So my first question I have for you is, what is currently inspiring you in your professional work?
[02:04]
B
Sure. I think I've been learning a lot in the past couple of years about service design and that particular approach to local government. And a little silver lining of so many changes happening on the federal level is that here in D.C. there have been a lot of people who have done interesting work with USDs and 18F and they've just really opened up their doors and their minds to a lot of people to talk about their experiences. So that's. There's been a lot of great opportunities to learn lately.
[02:32]
A
Awesome. What's a book, a podcast, or a show that you think every public service should check out at least once?
[02:41]
B
I know this one has been shared before, but I was really positively influenced by Recoding America by Jennifer Palka.
[02:48]
A
What about that that influenced you?
[02:50]
B
I think it does a really good job of sort of synthesizing what the challenges are in government. Right. She was talking from a federal perspective, but so Much of it resonated with me on the local level of some of our processes that can have a hard time dynamically reacting to the situation. Right. We get very stuck in the bureaucracy.
[03:15]
A
Yeah, I love it. I need. It's still on my book list to highly recommend. All right. I'll make it a priority this year for sure. Okay. So what is a food dish that you had while in Sicily? I noticed in your LinkedIn profile that you've done a lot of traveling, so I just was curious, like, what's the food dish you had in Sicily that you wish you could find in America more consistently?
[03:36]
B
Yeah, I've been very fortunate to travel, and my husband happens to actually be from Sicily. He's a tremendous cook, but the one thing he really cannot recreate is granita, which you're not familiar with. It is so hard to explain, which is such an annoying thing to say, but it is basically. One example is that they take pistachios, they pulverize them, they freeze them, it becomes this, like, really unique. It's not water ice. He'd be so upset for me to compare it to water ice, but it has a really interesting, like, creamy, icy texture, and they eat it for breakfast.
[04:14]
A
Oh, wow. Has. Has he tried. Has he been trying to recreate it?
[04:17]
B
Honestly, it's, like, so hard to get anywhere. No, I don't think. I don't know. He might have tried years ago, but not really.
[04:24]
A
Okay. Granise. I'll have to look that up and see. Maybe we can find it so somewhere locally, just to see a sample of what it looks like. Next question. Next lightning round question. What is a fictional world you would most like to live in, and why this one?
[04:41]
B
I find this one so hard, which made me think that I am, like, too stuck in reality. But I just finished reading IQ 84, and the story is not glamorous. It's not like the. Anyway, if some. If someone's read it, they might question my. My response. But I really enjoyed the book, and as I read it, I was like, wow. Like, a key part of the book is this idea of there being two moons in this fictional world. And I just love the idea of seeing these two moons. So the story is kind of. It's kind of chaotic. I might not want to be, like, a main character, but the idea of living like 80s Tokyo and seeing two moons, I think would be fun.
[05:20]
A
I think that's pretty cool little science fiction. Yeah, I like that. Okay, last lightning round question. And last but not least, because we'll get into the other part of our, of our discussion today. But what's the best professional advice that you've ever received?
[05:36]
B
So I think that a lot of people have sort of one quote on a post it, post it note on their desk and mine has been there for years. And it is what is eminently doable and what is morally correct are not always the same. And while actualizing the former, we can't lose sight of the latter. I find it so resonant in so many things. Right. So oftentimes we just have to like, take the win of getting done what we can get done, but stay cognizant of the fact that it's not where we want to be ultimately. And I find that sort of reassuring that like, there's a win in both ways. Right. Things don't be perfect for you to feel pride in your work anyway. So I copied that out of an article in the Atlantic and then only years later I like realized it was written by Ta Nehisi Coates.
[06:24]
A
Yeah, that's one of my favorite thinkers right now. So that's great. I love that quote. Awesome. Thank you so much for those quick icebreaker lightning round questions. Can you tell us a little bit about your path to an in local government? How did you get to where you are today?
[06:42]
B
Sure. It's an incredibly simple path. I interned at my current office when I was in college, so I interned in central office of D.C. public Schools as a college student. I had absolutely no intention of pursuing a full time job in D.C. afterwards. But the team I worked for was just. They were so effective, they were so smart, they were really supportive of each other, they had a great culture. I oftentimes say that, like, my ambition is to build a team as strong as that one was. I think I'm pretty close right now, so I've been on strong teams since. But I will. I do like to joke that they tricked me into local government because there are strong teams, but it was a little bit of an oversell. So there's. But I've, you know, I've come to enjoy the struggle also.
[07:29]
A
Yeah. This makes me think of another question, like, what are the characteristics of a strong team that you try, you're trying to recreate?
[07:39]
B
Sure. You know, it's one of my team and I just talked about team norms on Tuesday. We have a couple of new members and I wanted to like get input. But one that's really important to me is that people feel like they can kind of openly share the things that they think are going well and things that are not. I just think when the people who work for me in particular feel comfortable telling me things that they're not happy about, like, that just feels really healthy. That just feels like actually a great sign to me.
[08:08]
A
Yeah, I like that. You know, just honestly helps you build better. I love that. Okay, so as part of your work, I saw that you recently presented at a conference, a very interesting topic, which inspired me to ask you to come on and have this conversation with me. But you were talking about all the ways that you have failed engaging with historically marginalized communities. And I thought this was a very interesting and vulnerable topic to discuss and relevant given today's environment. So I wanted to hear more about your experiences. So why is engaging historically marginalized communities important, not just in your role, but for local governments in general?
[08:57]
B
Sure. And, you know, I should. I should give credit first to the reason I talked about this topic at a conference was one, the conference was organized by Civic Tech Toronto, and they did an incredible job organizing and they really specifically made one day of the conference open to informal, unplanned sessions. And so I think if I had gone to the conference from the lens of, like, let me prepare the most useful thing I could talk about to people and, you know, put together a PowerPoint deck and make it really shiny, I probably never would have come up with this topic. But instead, I listened to a talk by a gentleman, Victor Urua, who works in dc, really great thinker, and he really inspired me to bring this sort of unplanned session about failure and engagement. So I just, you know, love opportunities to sort of in person, get people to talk honestly. And anyway, so credit to Civic Tech, credit to Victoria. But why is it important? I think that when I talk to peers in other places, there's just huge variation in how local governments are engaging people from like zero to a ton. D.C. is probably, I'd say, on the ton side of the spectrum. So that's my context. I think if you are coming from this, from like a service design perspective, then you have to hear from people in order to make your services work. So this very much gets into the culture of different city agencies, municipal agencies. If you don't have that feedback loop, it's easy to get insulated. It doesn't matter. But I think most people do want to feel like the service they're providing makes sense. And you can't do that unless you hear from people directly. I don't think engagement means, like making everybody happy and having these really like, kumbaya public sessions all the time. It doesn't mean every interest group gets the thing they want. Right. I think what we're going to end talking about is that part of engagement is upsetting people. And I don't mean that to be flippant. I don't think it's good, but I do think it's natural. Right. If you are doing an important service, people are going to have strong opinions about how it's done. And when people's opinions are different, not everyone can walk away really, really pleased, but they can walk away respected and feeling what they said was heard and they understand where the government's decision came from.
[11:20]
A
Yeah. And what, what, particularly around the importance of engaging historically marginalized communities, especially in D.C. is so critical as a part of your work.
[11:31]
B
So I think this idea that in order for service to work, you have to hear from a community, I think it applies to all communities, but it's. We have to keep really cognizant of the fact that sometimes the, the kind of office worker coded approaches that we tend to take, you know, read this email and fill up this survey and meet this deadline. Like, those just don't always work for marginalized communities. Whether we're talking about finances or just like time. Employment background time. Exactly. So I think we want the same outcome from everybody. We want people to feel like they can share what they think. We want to feel like the service we're designing makes sense for them, but we just have to realize that getting that from different communities is going to take different action and particularly going to be unique for low time, low finance communities.
[12:26]
A
Yeah, gotcha. So you've been doing all this engagement work and you have had enough experience to have some failures. So can you share with our audience some of the difficulties that you are having in engagement and how it was potentially negatively impacting your work and the community?
[12:46]
B
Definitely. So when I think of my failures, sometimes it's stuff like I released this community survey and people responded, but I didn't get input from a particular subgroup or I had an event and only the community members who we knew were already invested attended. So nothing crashed and burned. And you know, I definitely had the option that I could go to my boss and say, hey, we got 200 survey respondents, isn't that amazing? Or like, hey, 50 people came to this event. Isn't that great? But it's more, it's in the end gonna be so much more effective to be able to say, hey, like we had a success in that this happened, but we missed this part. And I think that is where I Want people to be able to sort of embrace their failures. So much of public engagement, being successful in public engagement is being willing to miss in the beginning. You're not going to, it's building a relationship. You're not going to just like linearly have this very clear success. So I think failure can feel like a really scary term. And I understand people maybe not going to their boss and like proclaiming like, I'm a failure, but I think if you are not clear about the ways that you failed, you're not going to ultimately succeed.
[14:07]
A
Yeah, for sure. Okay, walk us through some of the failures, some specific failures that you've had and the lessons learned that has improved your engagement experiences.
[14:20]
B
Sure. Let's see. So when I've talked with people about this, sometimes I start off with like some of the small scale failures. So I benefited a lot in my career from being able to do some like small scale engagement years ago. And I sailed tremendously, but it wasn't so noticeable because it was just my own time it being wasted. It wasn't, I wasn't leading the level of initiative that I do now. So years ago I embedded myself in a few elementary schools and you know, I really saw them as hidden gems. They had strong teachers and good school culture, but they weren't fully enrolled. So I spent a few days a week at each of these schools, got to know their strengths, started building content and planning events. And I had really clear failures. Right. Like people didn't show up to these events that I was organizing or I had at one point I like developed some content and like one of the teachers didn't agree with it and I was like, I felt like, oh man, this darn it. I like really missed the, missed the bullseye on this one. But it was ultimately okay, right? Because it was small scale. It was just me. I wasn't wasting anybody else's time. It was kind of, it was an add on. So I, I do think, I would say for people who are in some sort of leadership position, there's a lot of value in giving people early in their career some latitude to like, do some exploring. I just think there's a lot of, a lot of value in that. But, and because I really, like, I eventually found new strategies right, in that sort of laboratory that I'd created for myself. I did end up figuring out how to kind of plug myself into different community members who could drive event attendance or I found like people in the school building who are willing to really sign off on my content and like make it single. So it took. It feels so vulnerable and it feels so. It really stinks to, like, run a thing and it not work out. But I think sort of having that experience of doing it and it fails on the small scale just like, gave me that muscle to be able to withstand it.
[16:30]
A
Yeah. So it sounds like, you know, you were able to really create deep personal relationships. Right. And find those people who were kind of cornerstone, kind of key gate holder members that could help give you the access to the people that you. You needed to engage with. And that's. And I think that's really cool and. And fundamental lesson, definitely.
[16:53]
B
And I think sometimes, like, relationship building can feel almost like it's something. It's a. It's a term people say a lot when we talk about public engagement. And it can feel almost kind of cliche and like, yeah, you have to build relationships, but. But I think sometimes we gloss over how, like, awkward and hard building relationships out of nothing is. Right. Especially when, like, you're coming in as, like, the government worker who has goals to meet and you're being paid for the work that you're doing. And so you're asking this person in the community to trust you. And, you know, they. Maybe they've had other people in your role before who have had them do things that weren't useful. You're asking people to trust you, to possibly waste their time with you and for them to basically kind of vouch for you to other people in their community. So sometimes they don't want to do it. And it's. It takes being willing to, like, be rejected and kind of come back at them, be like, hey, I'm still here. Still interested in working with you.
[17:48]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
[17:49]
B
Most of the time. There's so many community members who are so committed to their larger community that, like, it doesn't take too much resilience to, like, build that trust with them, but. But it takes some, you know, and you have to be willing to get out there.
[18:02]
A
Yeah. A level of vulnerability that's important. Let them know that you also are putting skin in the game. For sure.
[18:08]
B
Yeah. So I just want to, like, acknowledge for people that it's not always this, like, beautiful. Oh, relationship building. It's not always this, like, beautiful, magical process that, like, you should be able to pull off flawlessly. Like, sometimes it's, you know, awkwardly making some phone calls and feeling annoying and just keeping at it.
[18:26]
A
Keep showing up. Keep showing up.
[18:28]
B
Yeah, exactly.
[18:29]
A
Okay, so let's go through a hypothetical situation. Like, you have a new project that you need engagement in and you're trying to get some insights. And now you've turned those failures into better engagement. So walk our listeners through how an engagement process might look for you today.
[18:48]
B
Sure. So a lot of my engagement these days, oftentimes it's almost like a campaign because I'm sort of asking people to commit to this thing, to make this really profound choice like enrolling their kid in a school. So I just want to acknowledge that that is usually my context. I'm kind of building momentum for something that's coming, right. In that past example, it was like getting people to enroll in an early childhood program. Recently, I've been involved in like, the opening of schools and trying to like, get people to feel committed and trust in a school that's going to open in the future. So my approach that usually I think, but I think is true for most processes. You have to identify your audiences. Typically different stakeholders need different levels of information and engagement. And if you are doing, if you, if you get rolling with this work, it can become really easy to overlook what one stakeholder group for others. And so I find that just having like a literal tracker, right? I just make an Excel sheet, but you can do this any way that works for you. But just being explicit from the beginning of like, this is who I think I need to get input from. And these are the sort of different levels, right. You're going to have people who need every update and you're going to have people who need the quarterly update, the annual update. So there's some levels and I think while you have like, your clear mind before things get rolling, try to just define that, that for yourself. I think those audiences are going to have different areas of interest, different expertise to bring into the process. It's going to take work to confirm exactly what those are, but trying in the beginning to define it can be helpful. I also think, and I think this can get into some interesting territory, but I think you have to identify your most engaged group and I think spend a little extra time with them up front and understand what motivates them. We have a lot of sort of underutilized kind of political energy in D.C. right. I always think that the fact that we lack a voting member of Congress leads to an extremely, a much larger amount of sort of political activity on the local level. People just don't only have so many outlets. And so we have these really interested community members who, you know, they may just really focus on these sort of hyperlocal issues, which in the end benefits us. But I think identifying those People, I mean, they will. They will raise their hands to you, they'll make themselves very clear. And figuring out if you can use them as like an ambassador in your process, sort of direct their energy, I find that really valuable. I will say this is something that I think this is kind of a. This is like a unique approach that I have. I think sometimes people like to kind of push down those sort of high flyer voices, right. Maybe they're very highly resourced people. Maybe they're professionals. Maybe they just feel like really loud voices and so there's a temptation to kind of like quell them. I take a little bit of a different approach, I think, investing a little bit of extra time with them up front. Either I've had big success getting them to kind of use their energy to like, organize other people. Right. And sometimes more marginalized groups get to like, build some connections with people across groups. So that's been a big win. Or I've just found that making them feel trust that they, like, will come to me with their concerns will save me time later. Right. I've had community members who, in projects of the way, way past, they've like advocated up and up and up the chain. And so we end up, you know, spending days writing very formal letters to respond. And I'm. When I came into the role that I'm in now, it was like, okay, I'm gonna build this relationship so we can handle things directly. We don't need to escalate and escalate. So I think from those two angles, I'm actually a big advocate of, like, identify your. Your sort of most active, oftentimes associated with privilege kind of participants. Put a little extra love on them and find a way that you can make this relationship useful.
[23:10]
A
Gotcha. Yeah. Your response made me think of another question about engagement methods. Had you done this work, what have been the. What have been some engagement methods that you found more or least effective in this work that you might tend to use as a tool to get the feedback that you need, particularly with these different groups.
[23:38]
B
I think when we are figuring. I think we are tempted oftentimes to give everyone the same survey, the same same sort of. The same sort of content to chew on. And I found that when we are wondering why, like a marginalized group, why a subgroup isn't responding as much as we want them to, it can be for all the good reasons of, like, they're working, they don't have time. The language different. The language difference is hard. Even if you're translating materials, there's so much jargon that's hard to translate. All that is very real. I also think it's worth considering, like, are you asking them about things that this particular subgroup largely cares about? Right. And not to paint with such a big brush, but like, are you. Yeah, I mean, are you talking to them about something that is of interest? And so I have found sometimes focus groups being a really useful way to go off script a little bit. Right. So something that we have done a few times is we have a fairly large scale survey. We compare the results to our intended audience list and we say, okay, which of our intended audiences did we really not get to through this survey? If one of those audiences is Amharic speaking families, okay, can we find a way to talk to some Amharic speaking families directly? And we have. That is really honestly where some of these, like, highly engaged, sort of highly resourced members kind of come and play. I've had great experiences where, you know, a really involved PTO parent. I don't want all the feedback to come from that person, but they want to be involved. They're excited. And I've had great success in having them in kind of giving them that charge of like, hey, I need a couple of Amharic speaking families that you think will be open to talking with me. I'll set up an interpreter, I'll do all the logistics, but I want to sort of. I want to want some help from you to try to bridge this relationship and find this connection. And that can be this really great way to make. Make that highly resourced person, that really involved person, feel valued. Like they're contributing, but they're contributing in a way that is like, really towards our goal of engaging marginalized communities. So that's ended up anyway. And then getting to that focus group, then we sometimes discover, like, oh, like we're trying to ask you about, like, what should this building physically look like? Because we'd like to engage you about the design of the building, but like, you don't care about that. Like, you want to talk about transportation and after school. And so sometimes we just find that you can do all the best practices in the world. And they're just like, I don't. This is not the thing I want to talk to you about.
[26:23]
A
Yeah. And then how do you. When you're finding those things that they are actually interested in talking about and giving them that space, what do you do with that feedback? If it's not necessarily the project that you're working on right now, do you send it to somebody else? Or do you hold it for another relevant project? Or is it just ongoing data that you're using to continuously inform your work? How are you holding space for that feedback? And that isn't necessarily aligned with, you know, the outcomes that you're looking for in a specific project.
[26:56]
B
Totally. That's. That's a great question. So I would say that in general, I'm really big on just being upfront with people about what I can immediately use and what I can't. But especially when you're in this sort of space where you're directly talking to someone, that's so clearly messages that, like, you are important. I want to hear what you say. So even if I start off a focus group saying, like, okay, you know, we wanted to form this group because we did this survey about building design and we got good responses, but we didn't get as many as we were hoping. And so we want to talk to you more about this and discover if there are other things you want to talk about. So we'll usually say up front all those other things, like, we may or may not be able to directly address them, but we want to know what they are. So we can really explicitly say, like, I just want to know what they are. And then we can kind of next step decide if we're going to be able to address them. And I think when we sort of proactively say that community members are fairly responsive to that. Right. We're not going in there saying, tell me your dream list, everything that you ever wanted to see changed, and we're going to do it. We are trying to be really clear up front of, like, what feels possible. And then, you know, I have definitely had situations where I thought that. I thought that a problem. I thought that a problem was X, and I talked to community and it's Y, and I'm sort of like, oh, like, I didn't know that this is a thing I should actually be advocating to my leadership about. So will that community immediately know that, like, that changed my practice? Probably not from their experience. They mostly just know that, like, I and my team are, like, willing to spend that hour talking to them. And oftentimes I find that, like, that is effective enough to make people willing to engage later. And I, I kind of take solace in that and know that sometimes it results and we can do something different, and sometimes it doesn't. It also might be as simple as, like, in future communications, we'll emphasize that topic.
[28:58]
A
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. And then when you're Getting that data. You have all this data, all this feedback. How does your team prioritize or weigh the feedback from different groups in terms of ultimately making a recommendation?
[29:15]
B
Sure. Oh, I mean, it so depends on what the thing is, right? I will say let's use a concrete example. I've been in a situation before where we are working with a school and we're talking about new programming and there is some sort of public engagement around, like, what is that new academic programming going to be? So a sort of like, I think maybe like a failure. We had that. Then we, like learned a lesson at one point was we had. We had a community that kind of took over the conversation. We had to sort of wrangle it back. Right. And a lesson we got from that was that the next time we were in sort of a similar academic programming conversation, we got really explicit up front with our leadership with like, what is the menu of options? What are the things that we could possibly put on the table? Because I want to. If a community member brings up this other thing, I want to be able to just up front just say, that's a fantastic. That could be a really valuable idea. But we're not going to be able to do it. So let's focus on these options. So if we are getting conflicting input, I will say, I wonder if this would map to other types of government work. But I will say, so often in education, people are talking about different programming, right? They want an international baccalaureate program. They want AP classes. They want students with special needs to be well served. They want, you know, rigorous, academic, whatever. They want arts. They'll name many different programs. But, like, ultimately they just want a quality program. Right? It's fairly rare that you meet someone who's like, I will only go to this school if it offers band. There are people. Band is important. But it's oftentimes what they're really saying is like, I want this to be a great school and then I'll send my kid there. And so what we find more so is that if we can be clear about what all the options are up front. And then we tend to do public surveys where, like, the. The input we get is public. Like, the answers people give are public. So I think that also encourages a level of transparency of like, we're not hiding the ball here. This really is what people said. We tend to get sort of a critical mass of people who like, form around an option. And like, because we've already gotten that, we already. The menu was approved by leadership, then it's not too Big of a hurdle to get that most favored option chosen. I think the struggle is more when you're either not offering people options you're too open ended in your feedback collection or you're offering options that you can't actually come through on later where things get really dicey. So I think I would mostly, I would say make sure everything you're talking about up front is actually possible as much as possible. And then I do think people tend to circle around the thing there, There are times where the different. Well now I'm. All these different examples are like popping into my mind.
[32:36]
A
I love it. Yeah.
[32:38]
B
The most. I'd say the most controversial times where like A, there are. There really does become sort of an A and a B. You know, we're going to build a school at this site versus this site 1. It's so binary. Someone's going to be upset. You don't choose one or the other. I think that's actually just when you have to be really clear for yourself and what the reasoning behind the decision was. I've had moments where the decision was made and I didn't agree with it myself, but I understand the rationale behind it and I just give that rationale to our community members and I just, I repeat it. You know, I think that's, that's when you just sort of, you, you pick a direction and you stand, you, you stand firmly in it.
[33:20]
A
Yeah. So your team does you mention work in quantitative and qualitative data. How do you combine those things? Well, to make informed decisions. And how do you present both of the, well, quantitative data in particular, because you're collecting quality data. How do you present quantitative data to the community as you're helping them engage on a topic?
[33:54]
B
I think oftentimes something I like to do is to do some quantitative analysis for my team because we're doing planning work. Sometimes that's spatial data. Sometimes we're mapping distances that students live from a school. And how are those commute times going to change if the boundary of the school changes, if the location of the school changes. Right. Something I like to do is put together that analysis. Right. QC it really thoroughly ourselves and then just put it in front of our community members particularly. Sometimes we have kind of like working groups of people who are invested. We'll put that in front of them, we'll explain our process to them. This sometimes kind of scratches the itch of people who are kind of data oriented who are just sort of like want to know the nitty gritty. And then we will ask that the group sort of generally, here are the outcomes that we found. Does this resonate with your life? You know, if we say that 45% of students at this school can walk to school in 30 minutes, hypothetical, does that resonate with what you see? Do you see a lot of people walking to school? Does this feel, feel right to you? And then that can sometimes give us like, that's usually a good conversation starter of, hey, like we're the, we're the nerdy office people with the data. This is what we're seeing. What can you layer on top of that? And it does help us sometimes find like the big outliers where they say, okay, yeah, this is true for most people. But then we have a really big problem in this one neighborhood that's really geographically landlocked and they can't walk and there's no bus. Like, like some of them surface that stuff that we may have been blind to before.
[35:37]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I love that. All right, so I have a couple more questions for you. I want you to. You've already kind of touched on some projects that you've had in your past, but I really would love for you to tell our audience, you know, a project that you've completed in your time there, that you leverage engagement to get a really cool or cool or important outcome for the community and how that engagement helped deliver that result. Oh,
[36:13]
B
okay. The one that's really jumping out to me that feels like fully closed, but I can like map its journey from beginning to end. Years ago, this DC has done really great investments in early childhood care. And so, you know, if you have a three year old, you have a four year old in D.C. you can get them into full day free public pre K. And for kids younger than that, they are increasingly offering partnerships between public schools and sort of local providers to offer sort of zero to three care. Right. Child development centers. Now these are focused on our marginalized communities. They're focused on families who meet at risk criteria, who receive government benefits, et cetera, to like quality qualified. But sort of early on, as the city was doing more investment in this, I had a great opportunity to help cite some of these locations and had a really positive experience at one where we were planning to cite it at this particular school. But sort of like from sort of the big decision makers needed some evidence that there were people who were really going to show up and enroll at this school place and that it was going to be the Head Start eligible, the at risk criteria meeting community that they were hoping to serve with this child Development center. And so we, the team that I worked in at the time, we like, had access to the addresses of families who applied through the lotteries, which indicated they had young children. Right. And they were families in the system that we serve. And so we felt comfortable sort of reaching out to them and saying, hey, there's this new opportunity where the city is going to open a child development center. And so this really is. I mean, this. The neighborhood that I'm thinking of is, you know, one of our lowest income in the city. Really great sort of school cultures, but not always a ton of like, community input into the school. School. And so we really, from the very beginning, right, we didn't. We didn't even start with like, let's do a virtual survey and see how it goes. No, we just, from the very beginning were like, we're gonna knock on some doors and we're gonna like, go to the community rec center and we're gonna try to find some people who can tell us, where do we find really young families in this area? And ended up being successful. We ended up, you know, we had a team that was willing to go out into the community, knock on doors. We joked that it ended up, you know, we had sort of a list of addresses. We ended up sort of knocking on the doors of anybody that had like, toys in their front yard and said, hey, the city is considering opening a child development center down the street from you. If that's exciting to you, please come to this event and show that that's exciting to you. We did. There wasn't a huge Spanish speaking community in this area, but there was some. And so we went to like a health clinic that was known to serve Spanish speakers. That was sort of a tip we got from a neighbor in this door knocking process, right. Distributed flyers in Spanish. We were frankly just very surprised. We had like, set up a Spanish interpreter. We were frankly, like, worried that that person was have nothing to do, but ended up did having several families who showed up who spoke Spanish. So that ended up. We ended up getting, gosh, this was years ago, but I want to say we got like 30, 35 people who showed up to this event, which for this community was like a really tremendous turnout. And it kind of gave the district confidence that like, okay, if we put it here, it'll be successful. And could they have made that decision without the sort of community showing up? It's possible, but there were, there were debates, right? And so that kind of sealed the deal. And so I think that felt really good to us. That by like getting out. I think, I think people underestimate the value of just like knocking on doors and walking around equity.
[40:10]
A
Yeah.
[40:12]
B
Show up.
[40:13]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, I want to see if we can condense like some, some key insights like as our listeners are trying to say, okay, what are the takeaways? What are some insights that you've learned in your engagement work to improve the specific communities that you've worked with that our listeners can maybe take with them in their own work? Sure.
[40:37]
B
I mean, I think my big headline in general is really just like, be willing to be critical of your work. Don't just stick to the total number of people you engaged. Really scrutinize who your responses are coming from. Are these really the people who are going to use the services and are these people going to use the services who have the fewest outside options? So I think just be harsh on yourself. It doesn't mean that you have to put that in your annual performance review, but I think be really critical of your engagement outcomes in the beginning to help decide what you're going to do next. Let's see, that should really drive sort of like the subsequent work you're doing. Secondly, I would say I think equitable engagement does not mean turning down the voices of your sort of most privileged group. At least that's not, that's not the. It's not just that. Right. I think it is finding a way to redirect the people who are sort of the most willing to be involved in your process. So don't cater the process to them. They can navigate the process no matter what it is. But those sort of high resource individuals who are like banging down your door, don't just ignore them. Sometimes they're so annoying. You have to. But like, oftentimes it just takes a. It just takes. I have found so much power in doing a call with a really highly resourced community member who's like kind of demanding just doing a call with them and saying, hey, you know, you are known to spend a lot of time on this work. Tell me about why, like what brings you to this? And I've had people be really honest with me and you know, right off the bat just be willing to say, I don't feel professionally fulfilled. I feel like I have skills that are valuable in this process. And so I like to use my time to try to support community processes. And I think being able to see, kind of humanizes people that they're not just so selfishly demanding you make the decision that they want you to make. But Instead, like, they're looking for a way to be useful and feel valuable. I think just asking people some of those questions about their why can be really valuable and help you take some of their energy and like, push it towards the work that has to get done to engage more marginalized groups. Right. It just. It takes a lot of work to engage folks who don't answer emails and don't answer surveys, and so take all the capacity you can get. You know, if you have a community member who's willing to, like, do some door knocking, do it like. Fantastic.
[43:22]
A
All right, so what's next? What is your team working on that our listeners should be looking out for?
[43:28]
B
Let's see. I mean, there's a lot of exciting stuff happening in D.C. public schools. I think particular city has had really great investments in middle schools. Urban districts all over the country are seeing enrollment decline. D.C. is a little bit different in that, but I'm excited to see sort of how we address it. I will say that I personally, because of sort of a personal. My. Because of my personal life, I'm actually moving to Canada. So I am figuring out how to bring, like, my interest, my passion for service design into a professional setting in Canada. So that's like a big new transition that I'm embarking on.
[44:09]
A
Yeah, I love that. I mean, that's a really great transition. And we'll definitely have to keep track of, you know, how you bring services on to your. To your new location. So that's really cool. Maybe they'll have you find some Granada
[44:19]
B
there
[44:22]
A
if you have better luck.
[44:25]
B
More ice.
[44:27]
A
Cheyenne, thank you so much for coming on today. Last question we ask everybody is if you could be the gov love dj, what song would you pick as the exit music for your episode?
[44:42]
B
Oh, man. So a song that's been really on my mind lately that I'm just gonna go with is the band. There's a French band called Limperatrice. Who knows if I pronounced that correctly, but they have a song called Peu de si, which means fear the girls. It's very melodic and sweet, and there's just something about the fact that the lyrics are about how scary women are that I just think is a fabulous contrast and very fun.
[45:11]
A
I love it. I love it. I think this is the first time someone has mentioned a French song when I post it. So maybe we can find it. I don't know. So that ends our Goblo episode for today. Thank you, Cheyenne, for coming on and talking with me. Govlove is brought to you by EOGL and the best way to support GovLove is to become an EOGL member. You can reach us online@eogo.org govlove or at govlovepodcast on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X. Subscribe to govlove on your favorite podcast app. A new episode drop every Friday. If you are already subscribed to GovLove, go tell a friend or a colleague about this podcast or share on social media. Media Help us spread the word that govlove is the go to place for local government stories. Thanks for listening. That has been Gov Love a podcast about local government.