Public outreach & Engagement
This page is My experience as an Intern for Aim consulting |
Aim Consulting was established in 2005, by Gladys Cornell. Aim specializes in communications and public outreach for land-use, transportation, transit, water, and waste-water projects. Aim provides public engagement, communication, strategic planning, public information, and community relations consulting services to both public and private clients throughout Northern California. Aim has and continues to work successfully with public agencies and private businesses to develop and implement communication strategies that inform local, regional, and national audiences of challenges and opportunities to help build broad base support for their clients’ initiatives.
AIM is certified as a Small Business Enterprise by the State of California, Department of General Services, an Emerging and Small Business by the City of Sacramento, and an Underutilized Disadvantaged Business Enterprise by the State of California, Department of Transportation. |
While working for Aim Consulting I helped the team provide the aforementioned services, by collecting and recording data from: community workshops, online surveys, pop-ups, and all other interactions with stakeholders and project team members. Additionally, I found venues to host community workshops, then I notified all stakeholders of the time and location of the community workshop, and then I helped facilitate the workshop. I also wrote up reports that summarized the findings from the community workshop as well as many articles, memos, and social media posts about various projects. Similarly, I helped write scripts for informational videos that I then helped film. There is no short way to explain all the ways I helped Aim serve communities because Aim understands that every community functions differently and adjusts their practices to match.
To increase livability we must understand a community's priorities |
The work Aim does, public engagement for planning projects, is vital to a communities’ livability. Aim is based out of the capitol of California, Sacramento, which is the perfect case for why their work is so important. First Sacramento is extremely diverse, in fact in 2002 the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University named Sacramento as America's Most Diverse City. Because of this, there are many different communities with very different needs, which makes creating and implementing successful planning projects much more complex. That is where Aim steps in to help their clients identify and connect with stakeholders to facilitate a partnership so that everyone affected by the project will have an opportunity to be informed about projects and to use their voice to influence outcomes.
Aim strives to connect citizens with the project team so that both parties have an understanding of each other’s visions. These groups should always work together, but for far too long this has not been either a priority or an actual part of the project implementation process. More typically, our top down system wherein politicians create laws that public servants implement with little or no effort to engage the public and, as a result, we the people suffer. With the help of an engagement specialist like Aim, everyone is brought to the table to have a dialogue about the realities of the project. Here, stakeholders have the opportunity to explain to the project team their main issues as well as assets within their community that an outsider might not be aware of, in turn, the project team is also given space to explain to stakeholders their reasoning behind their plans. If this is done successfully the community will feel more connected with the proposed project which will make the implementation of the project, go much smoother. |
Sacramento 2040: The general plan update and climate action plan
While I worked on many different projects at Aim, the one I felt closest to was Sacramento 2040: The General Plan Update and Climate Action Plan. This plan is a long-term planning project that will be the blueprint for how and where the City of Sacramento will grow over the next twenty years. Because of this the city needed to understand the priorities of all its citizens. So the City of Sacramento hired Aim to set up a series of workshops, online engagement platforms, and more in order to connect their Planning Department with the community. The first series was the Citywide Visioning Workshops, in which Aim hosted four meetings in different areas of Sacramento. Then Aim started Phase 1 of the Community Plan Area Meeting series, where they went to the ten neighborhoods in Sacramento to get a better understanding of each of neighborhood’s specific needs. And now Phase 2 in in the works.