Authentic Stakeholder & Community Engagement
Wellstone's principal, Jacob Bornstein, and affiliates have deep experience in community and stakeholder engagement. We believe that when engaging stakeholders and communities, it's important not just to receive input, but also to build buy-in.
We can help organizations, technical partners, and collaborative initiatives design an authentic engagement approach, facilitate a series of public input sessions, mediate between two or more parties in negotiations, or guide a complex group of stakeholders toward consensus through a series of meetings or a large summit. We work to ensure that input and engagement can meaningfully contribute to the path forward, ensure sustainability, and build buy-in. We can also help code the data in a meaningful way to bring to light true insights and identify top stakeholder concerns by stakeholder group. At the end of our stakeholder and community engagement, clients will have increased levels of buy-in, deep understand stakeholder concerns and insights, and for many projects a consensus package.
One of our unique values is our range of content expertise. Our content expertise in natural resources, environmental issues, health, education, environmental health, and many others allows us to partner closely with clients or technical partners.
A few of the opportunities for using Wellstone's stakeholder and community engagement approach include:
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Launching or rebooting a collaborative initiative.
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Designing and implementing an approach to work with one or more communities to solve a problem.
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Supporting processes working to determine the best infrastructure or environmental project before or part of an environmental impact statement.
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Facilitating a stakeholder group.
To every conversation, we bring a strategic lens. This can help ensure that the input and engagement can meaningfully contribute to the path forward, ensure sustainability, and build buy-in.
For those projects that require entering a community for the first time, we have a number of techniques to ensure that engagement is authentic and not transactional. These approaches range from techniques to encourage participation to helping find local voices that can speak to the community in culturally appropriate ways.
