Many proposals describe a community in confident detail and never mention asking anyone who lives there. The need statement is built from census tables, the program design comes from staff and the only resident in the document is a single quote in the last paragraph.
This article covers how to gather input before you write, how to pay people fairly for their time, how to show what you heard in the proposal and how to keep the community involved once the award arrives. You'll finish with a plan for one input session you can run before your next application.
Know why funders ask
Some funding programs write community involvement into their own rules. HUD's rule for jurisdictions that receive Community Development Block Grant and related funds, 24 CFR 91.105, requires a citizen participation plan. That plan must provide for and encourage residents to take part in developing the consolidated plan, and it singles out low- and moderate-income residents and people living in areas where funds are proposed to be used. It also requires at least two public hearings per year at different stages of the program year.
Other funders put it in the review criteria, in the program description or in their stated values. Read the notice for words like "community engagement", "resident input" and "lived experience", and check whether they appear in the scoring. If they do, you'll need specifics, not adjectives. If you want a systematic way to read a notice for this, how to read a funding notice covers where criteria hide.
Choose a way to gather input
There's no single right method. Match the method to what you need to learn and who needs to be in the room.
- Listening sessions: open conversations, best when you don't yet know the right questions.
- Surveys: useful for scale and comparison, weaker for depth. Keep them short and available in the languages people use.
- Advisory groups: a standing group of residents or service users who meet on a schedule and react to drafts.
- Existing partners: organizations that already hold a community's trust can host a session or help you reach people. See where to find partners and how to put commitments in writing.
Go to people where they already are: a church hall, a school, a laundromat, a community meal. An evening session in a conference room downtown tells you mostly about who can attend that session.
Pay people for their time
Asking residents for expertise and offering nothing back sends a message. Where you can, budget for it: a stipend, travel or transit costs, childcare, food and an interpreter.
Federal cost rules recognize some of these. Under 2 CFR 200.1, participant support costs are direct costs that support participants in a federal award, such as stipends, subsistence allowances, travel allowances, registration fees, temporary dependent care and per diem. A participant is generally someone attending program activities who isn't responsible for implementing the award. Someone who commits effort to developing or delivering program activities, for example a consultant, is not a participant. Section 200.456 adds that participant support costs are allowable and must be classified in your written policies and treated consistently across awards.
What that means in practice depends on your award and your funder, so ask your program officer how to budget community payments before you commit to an amount. Foundation grants usually follow their own guidelines.
Show it in the proposal
A reviewer wants to know that the input happened and that it changed something. Give specifics:
- Who you heard from: how many people, which groups and how you reached them.
- How you asked: the method and the dates.
- What they said: two or three themes, with a short quote only where it adds something.
- What you changed: the part reviewers look for.
Say a rural food pantry is applying to expand its hours. Here is how a hypothetical paragraph might read:
Between January and February we held three listening sessions with 46 residents, including 19 who use the pantry, at the library, the Grange hall and a Spanish-language session at the church. Residents named weekday hours as the main barrier because most work until 5:30. We moved the proposed expansion from Tuesday and Thursday mornings to Wednesday and Friday evenings and added a pickup-by-appointment option.
That paragraph has numbers, places, a finding and a design change. Compare it with "We consulted with community members, who supported the project." One quote doesn't amount to engagement, and neither does a list of names without any account of what was learned.
If the community said something you can't act on, say so and explain why. Honest limits are more credible than a proposal in which everyone agreed with everything.
Keep people involved after the award
A proposal that promises engagement and then goes quiet teaches people not to answer next time. Build follow-through into the plan:
- Report back. Share what you heard and what you did with it, in plain language and in the same places you asked.
- Give the group a real role, such as reviewing materials, helping set measures or joining hiring panels.
- Share results, including the disappointing ones.
- Decide what decisions are open. Be clear about what the group can change and what is fixed by the funder.
Record your notes, survey results and meeting summaries somewhere you can find them. They are evidence for this application and for later ones, which is part of how grants build community capacity over time.
Your next step
Plan one input session before your next major application. Pick a place residents already use, set a date, decide what you'll pay for and write down the three questions you most need answered. Take notes you can quote later, with permission, and share a summary with everyone who came.
SoliContraX can help you get from a funding notice to a finished application, working from your organization's own materials, so the notes and survey results you gather are ready to draw on. The listening itself is yours to do. Get started with SoliContraX.