Expanding the Table: Public Engagement in Multilingual Communities
In multicultural communities, language barriers, sense of belonging, adaptation to a new culture, or even legal status can influence people's trust in sharing their ideas and discussing the future of their neighborhoods.
Presenters share their experiences working in multicultural communities and offer practical tools for creating inclusive engagement processes that go beyond translation. Examples include working with trusted bilingual community partners to conduct
strategic outreach, meeting people in familiar places (like food pantries or cherished community events), and presenting a friendly face during the planning process. By showing best practices learned along the way, presenters reveal what an inclusive
multilingual engagement process entails and invite practitioners to rethink public engagement that welcomes more diverse voices to the table.
Become aware of challenges and learn how to foster more strategic collaboration with community partners, build local capacity, and co-create accessible, far-reaching, genuine participatory processes.
Learning Outcomes
- Learn about different community engagement approaches and what a multilingual engagement process entails.
- Identify challenges and common misconceptions about multilingual community engagement and learn how to overcome them.
- Explore field-tested tools and best practices to create an inclusive bilingual or multilingual community engagement process.
The NPC Peer Reviewers assigned this presentation a learning level of Intermediate. For more on learning level descriptions visit our General Information Page.