City of San Diego Inclusive Public Engagement Guide

The City of San Diego is preparing an Inclusive Public Engagement Guide (IPEG) to help the City reach and engage more people in City decision-making processes and ensure that people who reflect the diverse makeup of the City are included. Ascent is leading a team, including Imagine Creative services and Kearns & West, that is working with the City to prepare the IPEG, and is helping conduct inclusive outreach and engagement as part of the process.

The guide focuses on providing the City with tools to improve the engagement processes for all City Departments. The Ascent team is working with the City to prepare the IPEG, which will:

define goals for the guide;
outline inclusive engagement principles;
create a checklist for conducting inclusive engagement;
establish guidelines for language translation, providing food at meetings, and other topics;
identify a range of techniques to share information, collect and compile input, and for bringing people together; and
promote understanding of different considerations for engaging underrepresented groups and vulnerable people.

In the development of this guide, the Ascent team is employing innovative techniques to share information, collect input, and foster unity within the community, such as piloting pop-up engagement at community events and using different facilitation techniques at community workshops. Imagine Creative Services produced a video about the IPEG in English and Spanish (shared below). The Ascent team also helped create and facilitate “Focused Discussion Group” meetings that were designed to get feedback about different inclusive engagement approaches, and hear more about what the City can do to engage more people. The members of the Focused Discussion Group were selected from a pool of applicants to represent a variety of different perspectives and experiences, and the Ascent team helped the City with creating an application process and selecting applicants, as well as facilitating meetings.