From the end of 2018 to the end of 2020, Build With joined an interdepartmental team at the City of Charlotte, North Carolina to guide them through the process of co-creating a community engagement toolkit. Although the city had some approaches they wanted to draw from to write this hands-on best practice guide, staff really wanted to use our work together to challenge current practices (and department silos), and weave more relational organizing into their work.
We lead the team through a process that combined Build With trainings and teach-ins with co-design workshops and a modified “book sprint” to craft the toolkit and follow through on these goals. As a collective, we treated the toolkit writing process as a chance to model the culture and practice shifts we wanted to see within the city. The start of the pandemic in early 2020 radically changed our initial plans, but we adapted, crafting a virtual process that used short (30min max) creative exercises that let us finish the toolkit (and update it for a COVID-19 world) without further adding to burn out.