How we work
We chose the harder preposition.
Every project starts with one question: what would this look like if it were truly guided by community? The answer is a constraint, not a value — and it is in our name on purpose, so you can hold us to it.
A value you cannot be failed against is a mood
Informed by is the standard
Gather input. Consider it. Decide anyway. The community is a data source — consulted, thanked, filed. The plan would survive their absence.
Guided by is a constraint
They set the direction. We bring the craft. The plan cannot survive their absence, because it was never ours to begin with. The room is never the whole community — so we go and find the rest.
What the name commits us to
Four things that follow from the preposition.
Each one is more expensive than the alternative. That is rather the point.
Engagement early enough to change the answer
A comment period on a decision already made is not engagement. It is notification with extra steps.
The people who live it hold expertise
Your community knows things no site plan holds. We treat that as data with standing, not color for an appendix.
We name who isn’t in the room
Absence is never random. We find the mechanism that produced it and we write it down.
We hand the tools over
The goal is a community that does not need us in order to read its own place.
How we start
The first thing we do is not a meeting.
Four moves, in order. The room is the third one, which is why ours has the right people in it.
Draw the catchment
Who is within reach of your site, who is not, and by what mechanism. A map, not a mailing list — and the step almost nobody does.
Go to them first
Empathy interviews on their ground, before we ever ask them onto ours. The people who skip public meetings are busy, and the meeting is at seven.
Then open the room
By now we know who is missing and why, so the room is built to hold them. The charrette produces something before anyone leaves.
Hand it back, then over
Findings return to the people who gave them, in language they can argue with. Then your team learns to run the next one.
Most firms start at step three. That is why the same nine people come.
Why us, specifically
Every engagement firm runs a good room. We are hired for what survives it.
We are planners, not facilitators for hire
AICP and PMP. Most firms hand you a “what we heard” report and leave. We are the people who then have to phase it, fund it, and defend it at a hearing.
The toolkit is native to us
Charrette, visioning, participatory design — your sector borrowed these from urban planning, and mostly borrowed the words. We learned them where they were invented.
We can draw the room and run it
GIS practitioner and facilitator in one practice. Most who can run a room cannot tell you who is missing from it. We map the catchment, then go knock on it.
We know what happens to what you heard
We wrote our own framework on data harm. We know how a community member’s quote becomes the justification for cutting their program three years later.
Two ways in
We run it. Or we teach you to run it.
Same method, two doors. One costs more and moves faster. The other costs less and is still there after we go. Both of them work.
When the stakes or the calendar are real
We run it
We design and lead the engagement — outreach strategy, the charrette, the interviews, the analysis, the report your board and your funder both need. You get the findings and a plan that already reflects them.
Engagement strategy · Charrette · Qualitative research
When the budget is thin — or you want it to last
We teach your team
Through Place + Perspective Learning, your staff learn to run it themselves: facilitation, empathy interviews, storytelling, and spatial empathy as a practice. It costs a fraction of an engagement and does not stop when the invoice does. The Environmental Defense Fund’s Justice & Equity team came through this door and has been running it for five years since.
Workshops · Staff training · Standing practice
If your budget only stretches to one of these, we would tell you to pick the second.
Let’s read your place together.
Tell us about the site, the community, and the decision you are trying to get right.