By Rebecca Gruszka, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The City of Burlington wants you to get involved with the City Council, and after ten years of being guided by the current Community Engagement Charter, it’s time for an update. After asking Burlington residents what good community engagement means to them, the city is now analyzing the answers given to inform the next iteration of the Charter.
City Manager of Engagement and Volunteers Michelle Dwyer shared, “The Charter sets the tone and expectations for engagement at the City of Burlington. It is an agreement between and among Burlington City Council and the community concerning resident engagement with city government and establishes the commitments, responsibilities, and fundamental concepts of this relationship.”
The Community Engagement Charter on the City of Burlington website states that “Engaging people on issues that affect their lives and their city is a key component of democratic society. Public involvement encourages participation, actions, and personal responsibility. The goal of community engagement is to lead to more informed and, therefore, better decision-making.”
Ten years may not seem like enough to warrant an update, but Dwyer says, “We don’t know what we don’t know. We needed to go back to the community, staff, and council and ask some key questions. We do know that Burlington’s demographics have changed quite a bit in 10 years,” and an update to the charter “makes sure that everyone feels represented and has a voice.” Over the last two months, the city has hosted workshops to gather information and seek advice on the Charter.
Since the Charter was instated, visible minorities in Burlington now “make up nearly 21% (38,400) of the total population. This is a 33% increase from 2016 (28,800), and an 85% increase from 2011 (20,800),” according to a Council Information Package from early 2023. Dwyer says, “The visible minority population in Burlington is significantly younger than Burlington’s overall population. In 2021, Burlington’s overall median age was 43.6 years, whereas the median age of the visible minority population was 36 years.” Council and staff frequently reference the Charter to engage the community, and given the changes in the city’s demographics, any engagement strategies should be updated to try to reach out to all members of the community.
The impact of a more engaged community, Dwyer explains, is that we then have a highly involved council and community. This engagement leads to the community taking pride and ownership in having a voice in the process of decision-making, something that is important to the city. “Incorporating their [community] feedback is ingrained in the staff’s DNA,” says Dwyer.
The Community Engagement Charter details the vision and mission statements and the commitments the city has made to ensure that goals are met.
And what are these goals?
“Burlington aspires to become increasingly more engaged and connected with its community,” and, secondly, to “provide Burlington citizens, members of City Council and City staff a plain-language, living policy document that guides and promotes active and meaningful citizen engagement in the City of Burlington’s planning, policy-setting and decision-making processes.”
Some of the commitments include: accountability for decisions, implementation, action, or inaction; inclusion and accessibility, to make sure everyone’s right to engage is possible; openness and access to information, by having multiple ways to access information through open data or how to make a freedom of information request; and transparency of the decision-making process.
The City of Burlington uses the five levels of engagement from the “spectrum of participation.” The spectrum of participation comes from the International Association for Public Participation and is globally recognized as the standard for identifying different levels of participation. Dwyer says, “The Charter enabled the city to use the IAP2 spectrum for engagement as a standard.”
These engagement levels are: Inform; Consult; Involve; Collaborate; and Empower. The levels each come with community participation goals and examples of what the City of Burlington promises in return.
“Inform” means providing the public with information with the goal of helping them understand what’s going on. The city promises to keep the public informed with the use of fact sheets, websites, and open houses.
The goal of “Consult” is to get feedback from the community on analysis, options, and decisions the council has made through public comment, focus groups, and surveys; the city promises to explain how community feedback is being used.
“Involve” means working together with the community to ensure that public wants and needs are understood by the city; the tools used at this level are workshops and deliberate polling. The promise from the city is that the public’s concerns are being included and considered in the decision-making process.
The goal of “Collaborate” is to have the city partner with the community in all aspects of decision-making by seeking advice and acting on that advice as much as possible through citizen advisory committees (like the inclusivity committee or the seniors’ committee), consensus-building, and participatory decision-making processes.
Finally, the goal of “Empower” is to give final decision-making power to the community. The promise is that the city will implement what the community decides, through citizen juries, ballots, and delegated decisions, though council does have final approval.
Given the demographic changes in Burlington and the city’s goal of increasing community engagement, how is the city reaching our community’s diverse groups? How does the city find people where they are in order to engage with them?
Dwyer shares, “Our tactics and technology have evolved. We are embracing a more hybrid approach allowing for more choice for your voice. Since the Charter’s approval, we have created an online engagement portal, which is a one-stop shop for all things engagement. It houses surveys, polls, story maps, a document library, key dates, Q&A, ideation tools, pinning on a map, and more. We offer both in-person and online meetings. Our online meetings have been enhanced by using things such as virtual sticky notes, breakout rooms, virtual polling, etc. We have been using telephone town halls that reach thousands of people by connecting with both residential landlines and cell numbers.”
And to gather information and seek engagement?
Dwyer goes on to say, “We are going to where people gather to get input, such as festivals, events, community centres, etc. We have been working with the Halton Multicultural Council (HMC Connects) to get the word out to newcomers about engagement opportunities and to have in-person translation as well as translation for surveys to ensure that we hear from all voices. We are making a point of going into schools, student councils, etc. in order to get a youth perspective.”
At the Nov. 2 engagement session in partnership with the Halton Multicultural Council, approximately 60 participants were in attendance, including speakers of six different languages, for whom the city provided interpreters. Staff have been going to various advisory committee meetings to connect with seniors, with those who advise on accessibility, and with other groups, all to work towards including diverse perspectives in any suggested changes to the Charter.
As an incentive to participate and as a way to “reach a broad audience,” the city created an event called Food for Feedback, in which city staff go out to meet the public and gather input on numerous city projects. “In exchange for input, lunch from a food truck is provided. This event and innovation has recently won two North American awards,” says Dwyer.
So, what’s coming in the future and what’s going to change?
The information from surveys and workshops is being analyzed now, so Dwyer says we need to “stay tuned for more information” and that “efforts [are] in place starting in 2024 to better represent the broader community…we will continue to combine both high touch and high tech in order to meet the needs of the most people.”
If you are feeling inspired to get involved with the city, make positive change, and have your voice heard, the city has just put out a call for community members to volunteer on various city committees. There are nine committees currently looking for new members:
- Burlington Accessibility Advisory Committee (one vacancy)
- Burlington Agriculture and Rural Affairs Advisory Committee (six vacancies)
- Burlington Cycling Advisory Committee (nine vacancies)
- Burlington Downtown Parking Advisory Committee (two citizen representatives and two alternates)
- Heritage Burlington Advisory Committee (nine vacancies)
- Burlington Integrated Transportation Advisory Committee (two vacancies)
- Burlington Mundialization Committee (four vacancies)
- Burlington Sustainable Development Advisory Committee (10 vacancies)
- The new Pipeline to Permit Standing Committee (five vacancies)
Please send in your applications to the city at burlington.ca/committees by Nov. 27. Find out more about the Charter engagement process and find a link to the Charter itself here.
Sources:
City of Burlington. Jan. 27, 2023. 2021 Census release: Immigration, place of birth and citizenship, ethnocultural and religious diversity, and mobility and migration. Council Information Package, p. 10. Url: https://www.burlington.ca/en/council-and-city-administration/resources/Council/Council-Information-Packages/Council-Information-Package-January-27-2023.pdf (accessed Nov. 8, 2023).
City of Burlington. n.d Engaging with City Council. Url: https://www.burlington.ca/en/council-and-city-administration/engaging-with-city-council.aspx (accessed Oct 21, 2023).
