Building Relationships and Creating Trust in Public Engagement

To address today’s challenges, the PDC bridges local governments, residents, and stakeholders using cutting edge communication techniques to move critical public issues toward resolution. Our collaborative, customized approach builds relationships and creates trust, resulting in constructive public meetings, creative problem solving, and empowered decision making processes.
PDC’s public engagement techniques will help you:

  • Design outreach processes to create broader citizen understanding, trust, participation, responsibility and commitment in resolving critical community issues
  • Design and facilitate dialogue processes to generate quality interactions and ideas that lead to the best possible outcomes
  • Gather feedback on community priorities and perspectives to help elected officials make recommendations on critical issues like budget, land use, and general plan updates
  • Develop concrete, action-oriented solutions to identified problems and challenges
  • Move forward through difficult community issues with tested communication processes that foster understanding, invite multiple perspectives, and find common ground between opposing views and diverse populations
  • Clarify and create courses of action among  conflicting beliefs, values and interests held by various stakeholders
  • Create better relationships between local government and residents, characterized by increased trust, respect and mutual understanding
  • Build staff and citizen understanding of and capacity for successful civic engagement processes

In the process of achieving these outcomes, community members will experience:

  • A more engaged, effective and satisfied level of participation
  • More constructive relationships among diverse stakeholder groups
  • Recognition of their own and others’ legitimate interests, respect for their beliefs and experiences, and increased understanding of both sides’ underlying beliefs and values
  • An understanding of how community members shape and define issues and problems by their joint actions, and help participants moving forward into more constructive patterns of communication
  • Emergent leadership and the capacities within the community to organize and run high-quality, inclusive, and constructive meetings
  • Concrete plans and decisions based on collaboration and consensus, resulting in greater buy-in and community ownership

Our Commitment to You
PDC Services
Free Initial Consultation