NCR states on its webpages (About community engagement) that:

Community engagement is the process of involving residents and communities during the planning and implementation of City policies, programs and services. It is the process of working together to address issues. Community building, outreach and education are important parts of community engagement.

NCR further promotes the Core Principles of Community Engagement adopted by the City, based on the IAP2 Core Values.

Yet, despite the Core Principles, NCR routinely disregards input from Commissions, workgroups, focus groups, and special events, despite prominently advertising they were following IAP2 principles.

What does the data say?

The 2017 Neighborhood Cafés

In 2017, more than 500 residents participated in a series of “Neighborhood Cafés” around the City to discuss the role of neighborhood organizations in Minneapolis. The Neighborhood Cafés were funded by the MInneapolis City Council, and planned in partnership with neighborhood organizations, cultural organizations, and the Neighborhood and Community Engagement Commission.

Almost 40 volunteers participated in a three-day workshop facilitated by Dave Ellis on the Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter and the World-Café process. Dozens more helped plan, organize and arrange food and set up for the meetings. More than 500 residents participated, spending at least two hours talking with their neighbors about the work of neighborhood organizations.

Neighborhood volunteers, NCEC Commissioners, and residents participated in good faith, in the belief that NCR would follow through on the outcomes. Instead, the outcomes were entirely disregarded in the Neighborhoods 2020 Guidelines.

Learn more about the Neighborhood Cafés here.

City Staff Focus Groups for Neighborhoods 2020

NCR invited City staff to attend lunch focus groups on two ocassions. I prepared the memo for the second focus group held on October 30, 2017. However, NCR never shared the data with any subsequent workgroups. City staff attended and participated in good faith, reasonably assuming their input would be thoughtfully considered.

The 2020 Workgroups

After NCR abandoned the results of the Neighborhood Cafes, they started a whole new process of setting up three workgroups to help develop program guidelines and a governance structure.

Participants of one workgroup reported that "WG2 members were enticed to participate in a “transformative” process to help shape the future of our unique network of neighborhoods and community cultural organizations. We were told that we would play a “vital role” in “providing judicious advice” to the City Council, and that our recommendations could be transmitted as part of a staff report or as a distinct memo of our own content."

Their experience in reality turned out to be quite different than what was promised. The workgroup noted that "transparency was soon lost in the way we were managed and our ability to readily address our clear directives were thwarted by NCR."

In a letter signed by members of the workgroup, dated March 19, 2019:

From the outset, NCR dominated WG2 meetings: they created and ran agendas without input by WG2 members, and predetermined topics and content of presentations, some of which were not relevant or helpful to our discussions. WG2 did not have the latitude to structure meetings, locations, or times that would better achieve equitable work group and public involvement. Time and scheduling pressures were constant. WG2 members felt disempowered and distracted from our stated primary purpose...

After WG2 meetings were over, we discovered NCR had created their own recommendations which were an impossibly generalized and abbreviated version of our work. Their version was a repudiation of our efforts. While NCR touts the Principles of Community Engagement from IAP2, in our case, we do not believe these principles were honored. Our contributions were not thoughtfully considered as promised (Principle #2), nor was WG2 respected or provided with an explanation of how our input affected NCR’s decision (Principle #7).

It should be noted that NCR did not share information from either the 2017 Neighborhood Cafés with the 2020 Workgroups, nor the data from the City staff focus groups, even though it was directly related to the primary purpose of the workgroups. This would also violate Principle 6 of the IAP2 Core Values: "Public participation provides participants with the information they need to participate in a meaningful way."

The Northside Neighborhood Council

Workgroup 2 members were not alone in their complaint. The Northside Neighborhoods Council, a coalition of neighborhood organizations representing some of the most diverse neighborhoods in Minneapolis, issued an official statement about the process followed by NCR:

• Work Groups were rushed toward a deadline and convened far too late to have a meaningful effect on a supposed transformational process.
• Work Group recommendations do not reflect any critique of NCR, though critique was given from multiple work groups.
• NCR did not include the community data gathered from the “World Cafés” conducted with the public from 2016-2017.
• The Work Group process did not build with the community, but instead reflected a long-standing tradition of bringing a pre-planned program and getting input from the community, which is not reflective of the deep need residents are asking for.

The Northside Neighborhood Council recommended the City disband NCR.

The process followed by NCR garnered so many complaints that the City rejected NCR's recommendations and started a new process with an outside consultant. Unfortunately, NCR was left in charge of that process as well.

The Neighborhood Community Engagement Commission

The Neighborhood and Community Engagement Commission (NCEC) was founded in 2010 to, among other things, "partner In collaboration with NCR, study issues, courses of action, policies, and programs that affect the quality of life for City residents and make recommendations for improvements to City departments and the City Council as they pertain to community participation policies and delivery of services while integrating the voice of residents into the City’s decision-making processes."

As with the workgroups mentioned above, Neighborhood and Community Engagement Commissioners worked in good faith to partner with NCR and neighborhood organizations to develope and recommend policy to the City Council.

As a reward for their efforts, the NCEC was unceremoniousl axed by the City upon the recommendation from NCR.

The NCEC prepared a statement regarding NCR, in which it reported their sense that:

We have concluded that the latest Work Groups were but a smokescreen for the NCR Department’s plan that had been formulated in-house since early 2018 (reference “Neighborhood Program Options for Consideration, May 2018 Update). It appears to some that NCR turned away from true collaboration into obstruction of the NCEC’s Neighborhoods 2020 process in order to co-opt the same and to insert its own, not the communities, recommendations.

The NCEC also supported the conclusions of the Northside Neighborhood Council that

this latest process has revealed “a continual effort by NCR to centralize their role and keep their department at the center of control, where we believe residents and NO’s Neighborhood Organizations should be.”

IAP2 Code of Ethics

NCR's disregard of the City's adopted Core Principles would also appear to violate IAP2's Code of Ethics, including:

• 3. Trust: we will undertake and encourage actions that build trust and credibility for the process and among all the participants.
• 5. Openness: we will encourage the disclosure of all information relevant to the public’s understanding and evaluation of a decision.
• 7. Respect for Communities: we will avoid strategies that risk polarizing community interest or that appear to “divide and conquer.
• 8. Commitments: we will ensure that all commitments made to the public, including those by the decision-maker, are made in good faith