Preparing for Public Participation

The Funding Guidelines for Agencies that Administer California Climate Investments strongly recommends that administering agencies conduct a robust public participation process to help potential applicants access funding, particularly for priority populations. Public participation includes conducting outreach and community engagement throughout development and implementation of a program, including, but not limited to, solicitation development, project planning and criteria considerations, project selection and implementation, and after projects become operational, wherever feasible.  

Community engagement serves as a powerful tool to align programs with the needs of communities, particularly priority populations. However, underserved communities like priority populations are often responding to multiple priorities and operating over capacity, which can present challenges to participating in engagement. Through making use of available resources and implementing best practices early, administering agencies can gain a greater awareness of the many challenges faced by communities, prior to public participation efforts. This fosters richer engagement and can help agencies avoid asking communities to repeatedly answer the same questions or retell the same frustrations. 

This page provides 4 recommended approaches for building an early awareness of community priorities, needs, and barriers ahead of designing a community engagement process:

1. Develop an equity-focused perspective

2. Establish a strong historical foundation

3. Understand on-the-ground impacts, needs, and priorities

4. Proactively identify and implement best practices

Develop an Equity-Focused Perspective

Creating a program that provides equitable access to California’s varied communities requires considering key factors that create disparities in available resources and funding access. By understanding how these factors are introduced or intensified, administering agencies can better apply available tools to ensure that historically underserved communities do not continue these heightened disparities.

Approaches that can support developing an equity-focused perspective

• Identify and complete training opportunities that foster an understanding of the experience of others. Training can be internal or external to state government and may include topics such as:

  • Cultural sensitivity training

  • Racial equity training

  • Implicit bias training

  • Facilitation and community engagement training

• Identify and apply an appropriate racial equity tools and revisit the tools when conducting engagement throughout program implementation. Racial equity tools walk users through key questions necessary for facilitating racially equitable program design and provide a space to untangle complicated questions and record crowdsourced knowledge. Tools may be developed by an administering agency or may be established tools intended to support governments through equitable planning. Some relevant tools and resources include:

  • Guides that provide foundational knowledge on the role, application, and scope of common racial equity tools.

    • Example: The Government Alliance on Race and Equity’s (GARE) Racial Equity Toolkit. 

  • Guides that support users through tools that aim to improve program outcomes.

    • Example: GARE’s Racial Equity: Getting to Results Resource Guide provides guidance on applying Root Cause Analysis and Results-Based Accountability tools.

  • State agency tools and frameworks that foster consistency across programs. Examples include:

    • California Racial Equity Commission’s Statewide Racial Equity Framework

    • Strategic Growth Council’s Racial Equity Resource Hub

    • California Air Resources Board’s Racial Equity Lens

Establish a strong historical foundation 

Learning the needs and barriers faced by communities often requires an understanding of how local, statewide, and national decisions have shaped people, culture, and landscape. While historical injustices cannot be erased and their impact often cannot be fully mitigated, understanding these injustices can help programs address disparate impacts and advance equity. At times, it can also help inspire ideas on how to mitigate impacts.

Approaches that can support establishing a strong historical foundation 

• Consult the history surrounding the creation of the program, including previously documented community concerns, needs and motivations of advocacy groups, and insights on who is most impacted by the issue the program aims to correct or alleviate, or the outcomes of the program. This may include: 

  • Support and dissent letters 

  • Legislative committee analyses 

  • Comments made during legislative committee hearings 

• Identify historical injustices related to the program’s goals and initiatives. Administering agencies should set goals to recognize and, to the extent possible, alleviate past and ongoing injustices through program design to advance equity. This is particularly important in instances where historical burdens and injustices have resulted from past government action or inaction. Identifying relevant historical injustices may include: 

  • Consulting resources that highlight impacts resulting from past government action. For example, the CalEPA Pollution and Prejudice Story Map illustrates how governments perpetuated institutional and structural racism through land use policies such as redlining in the 1930s, which directly contributed to many of the environmental and housing disparities affecting communities of color across the state today.  

  • Referencing past data across previous years to identify areas experiencing longstanding or growing disparities. For example, using current and previous versions of California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment’s CalEnviroScreen to identify communities where air pollution burden has stayed consistent or is getting worse over time. 

  • Learning state and local history, particularly as it affects hard to reach populations. For example, the California Truth & Healing Council has created and compiled historical overviews and key information that are important to know when engaging with and serving California Tribes.

Understand On-the-Ground Impacts, Needs, and Priorities 

Use the best available information to understand the current impacts, values, ideas, priorities, needs, and recommendations of the communities most impacted by the program. Gathering this information prior to engaging communities reduces the burden to community members and demonstrates dedication to a well-prepared public participation process.

Approaches that can support identification of on-the-ground impacts, needs, and priorities

• Compile a diverse range of data sources, considering locally documented needs and barriers faced alongside academically published or government run data sets on current impacts experienced by communities. Potential data sources may include: 

  • Published literature documenting successes and challenges related to similar programs, or related fields of work, and lessons learned published by similar past programs. 

  • Qualitative and quantitative data from community members, leaders, and organizations. Community concerns should be treated as valuable data, alongside other academic or scientific documentation, whether the data be delivered through reports, verbal feedback, or written comment. Using both community-based data and scientific literature provides a complete picture and can lead to more nuanced design and better inclusion of priority populations. 

  • Reports supported by environmental justice organizations that document needs and burdens within underserved areas of the state. For example, the California Energy Commission’s Clean Hydrogen Program considered inputs, reports and other resources from different sectors including the Three Pillars of Green Hydrogen published by the American Clean Power and the Equity Principles for Hydrogen that was drafted collaboratively by eleven environmental justice organizations operating in California, to inform its program design. 

  • Data mapping tools. Examples include:

    • California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment’s CalEnviroScreen tool allows users to identify communities with the highest pollution burdens and vulnerabilities.  

    • Public Health Alliance’s Healthy Places Index provides information on social conditions that drive health outcomes. 

  • Health Impact Assessments to identify potential health impacts that may result from program policies, decisions, or projects. Examples include:

    • U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Health Impact Assessment Resources

    • U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Health Impact Assessment Resource and Tool Compilation

    • National Environmental Health Association Health Impact Assessment Toolkit

Proactively Identify and Implement Best Practices

Identifying and implementing program design or engagement best practices fosters greater program access and public participation, especially for groups or individuals that experience high barriers to accessing the program. Potential funding recipients facing severe capacity limitations may opt to not engage in public processes if the appropriate form of support is not explicitly available. Inclusion of best practices is one way to show smaller or capacity limited applicants that the program hopes to foster their participation.

Approaches for identifying and implementing best practices

• Use established program design best practices such as technical assistance, pilot project eligibility, set-asides, capacity building or planning program components. Resources for learning program design best practices may include: 

  • Best practices that support integration. For example, Strategic Growth Council’s Technical Assistance Toolkit teaches state agencies how to design technical assistance programs. 

  • Guidance that addresses the needs of a particular population. For example, California Climate Investments’ Funding Workbook for All California Tribes compiles program information that Tribes named as important to know when determining where to invest capacity. Providing this information up front supports Tribes through identifying compatible funding opportunities. 

• Coordinate with peers to learn about emerging or pilot program design or engagement best practices that may help resolve longstanding challenges and needs. Coordination can also help identify lessons learned, and ongoing data needs or gaps. Coordination activities may include: 

  • Participate in spaces for inter-agency collaboration. For example, California Climate Investments hosts meetings that foster interagency collaboration and mutual learning.

  • Reference and apply emerging best practices compiled by peer government agencies, advocates or longstanding community members from underserved areas. 

  • Seek out lessons learned from related or past programs. 

  • Identify similar or compatible programs and consider combining or coordinating timelines and application processes. This ensures that programs have clear and distinct scopes, while streamlining outreach and consolidating similar funding options for potential applicants. 

  • Identify peer programs that can support filling data gaps needed to support current or future solicitation rounds. This can include qualitative data, raw data, analysis methods, etc. This might involve coordinating with other teams within your agency or other agencies. 

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