City of San Diego’s Inclusive Public Engagement Guide

By: Cathy Smith, writer/trainer/engager

As the 8th most populous city in the nation, San Diego is also one of the most diverse. It’s both a border town and a beach town. It draws millions of tourists annually and has 1.4 million residents to serve. Those residents speak more than 100 different languages and have knowledge that could improve the quality of the City’s decisions, services and changes on issues including land use, public safety, and infrastructure.

Without an intentional focus on inclusivity, the City recognized that its engagement processes might not fully capture the range of perspectives within its diverse population. The public’s right to participate in decisions that impact them it is the first of seven Core Values defined by the International Association of Public Participation and essential to why engagement matters. So, the City embarked on creating its first Inclusive Public Engagement Guide, which was finalized just last month. This guide is intended to be used across all of the City’s more than 20 departments, 12,000 employees and many project types.  

We are pleased to bring the story of this new Guide to you in two parts. In this article, we hear from the City Planning Department’s Public Engagement Program Manager, Anisha Gianchandani. She shares the factors leading up to the development of the Guide, the engagement process for its development, insights she’s gained about the engagement process the City used, and what happens next. Next, we will provide a second article to hear from two community members—Andrea Schlageter and Tanisha-Jean Martin—who participated in the City’s engagement process for the Guide’s development about their insights for inclusive engagement.

We begin with this overview from Anisha about the City’s perspective on the need for this guide and the engagement methods and considerations to bring community voice into this its development, and its next steps for implementation.  

Question:  What was happening that caused the City to launch this effort?

Anisha: The Engagement Guide was identified as an implementation action in both the Parks Master Plan and the Climate Resilient SD Plan, which were adopted by the San Diego City Council in 2021. These plans called for consistent and inclusive Citywide public engagement practices.

Also in 2021, the Chollas Creek Coalition—an advocacy coalition of community-based organizations and community members in the Chollas Creek Watershed area—shared their proposed community engagement principles and practices with the City. The principles and practices include integrating community members and community-based organizations in public engagement efforts, providing transparency around the purpose of public engagement, and building trust and relationships with community members.

Question: How did  the City decide to have a Focused Discussion Group for the Guide’s development process ?

Anisha: We decided to create a Focused Discussion Group because we saw that this group could have a clear purpose (to advise on how to make public engagement inclusive and effective) and it was an opportunity to bring together people from different communities across the city with varying experiences—we had some members who had significant experience engaging with the City and some who never had. We saw this as an opportunity for a good engagement process in the development of the Engagement Guide.

What were the City’s  hopes or underlying values with the involvement of community members in the process to develop the Guide?  

Anisha: Our intention was that community members would be able to bring their lived experiences and perspectives on community engagement to strengthen the City’s framework for inclusive public engagement, and I think we were successful in that.

What’s at stake with understanding lived experience and perspectives of the community? Why in a planning effort is it important to do?

Anisha: We reach the best outcomes and decisions when we have the benefit of community perspectives. The City is responsible for making decisions while in many cases balancing constraints, trade-offs, legal requirements and more. Community input is a crucial part of that picture that helps ensure our decisions and plans for the future are grounded in community members’ understanding of their own needs.

How did the City invite and create a safe space for those lived experiences to be shared? What kinds of considerations should a host make to create that safety so that those stories can be shared, held and considered?

Anisha: We were able to provide participation support in the form of dinner and modest gift cards to help offset the costs of the Focused Discussion Group’s in-person participation and contributions. Coming together over a meal bolsters connection and helps support the participation of people who may otherwise be unable to participate due to needing to feed themselves or their family during dinner hours.

Besides participation support, having a warm welcome, ensuring information is clear and accessible, creating opportunities for both small group and full group discussion and ensuring staff listened actively were some ways we worked to create a safe space for the Focused Discussion Group.

What was your own favorite part of the Focused Discussion Group process to develop the Guide?

Anisha: It was fun to be able to pilot engagement techniques that the Focused Discussion Group recommended and then invite them to observe those engagement events and report back to us about how they went. We brought the Focused Discussion Group into the process for selecting engagement activities to seek public input on infrastructure priorities, which are considered for the City’s annual five-year infrastructure plan. It was an opportunity for the City and the Focused Discussion Group to partner on engagement and learn together.

Upon reflection, what did you learn about the Focused Discussion Process for this planning effort in particular, as well as for anyone considering incorporating this type of a process into their planning projects?

Anisha: Sometimes, as staff, we can be very focused on the input we’re seeking for a plan or initiative. A process like this reminds us that public engagement is also about what community members receive: how it builds their capacity to engage and advocate for their community and creates connections between people from different walks of life.

In our final meeting together, Focused Discussion Group members shared that the process helped them better understand what the City is doing, feel heard, and learn from each other. That is just as, if not more, important than the input we received.

How’s it going in implementation?

Anisha: City Planning has been using the Guide in public engagement planning for our new and upcoming initiatives such as Neighborhood Homes For All of Us, the Balboa Park Master Plan Update and forthcoming community plan updates.  

We are now working with our partners in Human Resources and Race and Equity on the creation of the Inclusive Public Engagement Guide staff training that we’ll be rolling out in 2026. The training will be tailored to the most common City employee roles in public outreach and engagement.

We’ll also be hosting more public workshops in 2026 intended to address a key barrier to participation we identified: that people lack awareness of the City, its responsibilities and/or how to get involved. The workshops will provide information about what the City does and how to get involved in City decision-making.

We’ll be  back soon with part two of this article. In it, two community members will share their experience about  participating in the  Focused Discussion Group process. We look forward to sharing their insights for the need and ways to make engagement more inclusive.