Community Engagement Toolkit:
Essentials for Planning & Facilitating Meaningful Conversations
Introduction to the Toolkit
The National Aging and Disability Transportation Center thanks you for your interest in holding a community meeting to discuss community transportation!
NADTC’s Community Engagement Toolkit is a compilation of resources and tools to help organize and facilitate a community meeting to discuss community transportation, identify areas of need and ways to address those needs.
Through the experience of the local meeting, transportation stakeholders, community members, and transportation users will have an opportunity to address the struggles people may have with the existing transportation options in their communities. The culmination of the community meeting is the development of an action plan to begin working on the identified issues.
The toolkit contains six sections. Find the section that best meets your needs or download the entire toolkit.
Community Engagement Toolkit – Full Download
Section 1: Meeting Facilitation Guide
Successful meetings require careful planning and preparation. The physical location must be chosen carefully to ensure all attendees can participate, and the general atmosphere of the meeting needs to be set and maintained by the facilitator. None of this happens automatically but can be arranged by using the meeting facilitation guide below.
Section 2: Recruitment Strategies
This resource provides suggestions on the sectors that should be represented at the meeting, the types of people who would make good participants and guidance on the recruitment process to assemble a group of people with varying perspectives and influence.
Section 3: Sample Agenda
This agenda offers a suggested format for your meeting which can be revised to meet your needs.
Section 4: Workshop Discussion Guide
The first part of the meeting will focus on helping the attendees get to know one another and become comfortable talking together. Then the group will move to the topic of the day, improving transportation in your community. Use the discussion questions in the guide to facilitate the conversation.
Section 5: Creating an Action Plan
Use the ideas generated in the group discussion to create an action plan that lays out steps the group will take to improve transportation programs in the community. Developing a formal plan increases the likelihood of forward progress.
Action Plan Tutorial and Template
Section 6: Introductory Letter for Participants
This letter template offers suggested language for providing information about the meeting and confirming the expectations of the attendees.