Boulder is Building a Culture of Meaningful Engagement

Boulder is building a culture of meaningful engagement that is inclusive, consistent and transparent for our community.

The City of Boulder recognizes that local government makes better decisions and creates more responsive programs and services when the community it serves has a meaningful voice.

Meaningful engagement is more than just a seat at the table; it’s about shaping the future of the place we all call home. When we listen to our residents, we don’t just make better decisions—we build a more resilient and inclusive Boulder for generations to come

Boulder's Strategies for Community Engagement Success

As the city works toward culture change, it has identified seven strategies that will serve as focus areas:

Learn Together

Build skills and a shared understanding of core principles, practices and processes associated with high-quality community engagement.

Help People Know What to Expect

Implement consistent processes to support the creation and use of effective and appropriately scaled engagement plans. Communicate clearly about opportunities for timely and meaningful public input and engagement.

Cultivate Respectful Relationships

Build and strengthen relationships with those affected by city decisions and programs through constructive dialogue. Pilot new approaches to invite and encourage all impacted individuals and groups to participate in ways that are welcoming to them.

Be Transparent

Develop and implement techniques that increase transparency into decision-making and democratic processes. Help everyone understand constraints and the variety of perspectives on any given issues and explain how the feedback received shaped the outcome.

Use the Right Tools

Assess our current and existing engagement tools and techniques and choose those that most effectively allow us to reach desired audiences.

Evaluate and Evolve

Demonstrated a commitment to innovation and continuous improvement through honest evaluation of clearly defined metrics as well as ongoing creativity in the pursuit of new ideas.

Equitably Engage

Co-design multiculturally proficient and multilingual engagement processes that center historically excluded communities. Reduce barriers and build capacity of historically excluded communities to participate in engagement opportunities.