Facilitation, building shared buy-in, and supporting people-driven systems change
To ensure success, it's critical to gain input from a broad range of stakeholders from the very beginning. Stakeholder input for planning and decision-making provides three key benefits:
Improve quality of information generated through collaborative input
Enhance legitimacy of decisions made by increasing state program manager and leader buy-in and understanding
Increase capacity of those involved to understand issues and move solutions forward
With any collaborative learning effort, we can expect what may be stark differences in opinions and priorities. By providing for meaningful engagement, we can surface and work through these differences to highlight many shared goals and strategies.
Freshwater has extensive experience in precisely this kind of setting. Read more about our experience.
People-Driven Reports
At Freshwater, we recognize the power of elevating all Minnesotans’ voices, including those normally excluded, through our proven participatory engagement methods to change systems and institutions’ approach to water.
The following reports made use of community-sourced input.