Community development requires networks and trust. If your agency wants to build those networks and trust, it’s critical to understand that your decision-making approach matters. 

Implementors – state and local staffs – need to get projects planned and completed. But community leaders, institutions, residents, and other stakeholders all want to be informed and consulted. They may want to participate in key decisions, set goals, track progress, and know about compliance problems and how they will be resolved. They will want to know how they can comment and complain, and to understand how their feedback will affect program choices. 

In other words, your decision-making approach must incorporate information-sharing and feedback processes designed to meet your community’s expectations. (And, yes, different communities can have different expectations.)

Use an engagement plan

One way to organize your overall decision-making approach is using an engagement plan. An engagement plan can help organize communications and decrease implementation drama that can pull program staff away from required compliance tasks. Your plan can identify: 

• Your audience/stakeholders
• Your communication “channels”
• What information belongs on those channels
• How often to share information
• The staffer or office responsible for that channel 

For example, for neighborhood residents near a project: 

• Your channels might be public meetings, a project status webpage with a project calendar, and an email address for questions or reporting issues. 
• The information on these channels is project status updates, requests for feedback, and official responses. 
• You might plan quarterly neighborhood meetings, monthly webpage updates, and initial email responses within 48 hours. 
• The plan would identify who is responsible for organizing and attending the meetings; who manages the webpage and who approves content; and who is responsible for the email box. 

Three decision approaches

Language around decision-making varies, but implementation experience shows three main approaches we’ll call consensus, voting, and solo. Understanding the differences between the paths, and what they are useful for, can help you design an appropriate engagement plan that will support keeping your projects on track. 

Note: Many grant programs require specific elements in a compliant citizen participation or community engagement plan. This is not about those elements – it is about understanding which approaches support long-term compliant implementation. 

The tool below shows key characteristics of pure versions of these three common engagement approaches that lead to decisions. Obviously, hybrid approaches are quite possible. Which does your organization or agency use – and are there ways you can optimize?

Why intentional decision-making matters

Clearly, community development, disaster recovery, and affordable housing programs require financial resources. But getting those programs funded sufficiently and sustainably – then effectively implemented –  also requires social capital. 

Social capital: The networks, relationships, trust, and reciprocity that channel people to work together to solve local problems. A community with deeper social capital can better find and apply its resources, advocate for shared interests, weather adversity, and sustain development efforts over longer timeframes.

By choosing decision‑making approaches that invite meaningful information-sharing and feedback, agencies can not only keep programs on track and compliant, but also strengthen the relationships that make implementation smoother. In turn, this intentional engagement helps build the social capital a community needs to sustain progress and support lasting, strategically aligned solutions.