Progress is Powered by Cross-Sector Collaboration
Reflections on our “Applying Human-Centered Design to Community Engagement” Workshop in Chicago
Professionals across sectors gathered at the Midwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (MEEA) offices on March 26 for a workshop on how to engage communities in a more human-centered way.
The workshop centered on three core questions: Who are we designing for? Who is missing from the table? And what assumptions are we carrying into our engagement work that we haven't yet examined?
Together, we grappled with power, privilege, and the way these ideas manifest in our work. Participants learned new approaches to map stakeholders inspired by the framework of targeted universalism and worked through new approaches to solve challenging engagement opportunities.
With participants spanning energy and public health, we were able to talk about strategies to work across silos—and why doing so is necessary to solve our biggest community challenges.
Why?
Because communities don't experience their lives in sectors. A family managing high utility bills is also navigating housing instability, health concerns, and food access. These are all deeply interconnected, systemic problems. When practitioners from different fields sit in the same room, we begin to see connections clearly and design solutions that accurately respond to the system instead of the symptom.
Too often, programs are built in isolation. We measure success by something easily countable, yet this number rarely captures what's happening in a household trying to survive an interconnected set of pressures all at once. People end up navigating too many programs, each with their own eligibility requirements and application processes, which provide barely enough support for them to survive.
Cross-sector collaboration can begin to dismantle that system. First at the program level, then at the level of how we understand problems in the first place.
Join Us Next
Thank you to everyone who joined us. We're already looking forward to the next one in Detroit on June 9. Will you join us?
