Consultant Services for Community Engagement Strategies, Toolkit, and Capacity-building Series

SACOG serves as a Joint Powers Authority (JPA) of city and county governments in El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba counties. As the only public agency with members from all 28 jurisdictions in the greater Sacramento region, SACOG plays a unique role as the place where local governments can come together to take on critical issues facing the region and to tackle problems that are too big for any one jurisdiction to solve on its own. SACOG is tasked by state and federal law with long-range planning for the region but also plays an important role in working with local partners to advance more immediate solutions to some of the region's shared challenges of transportation, housing, air quality, climate change and the protection of the region's agricultural and natural resources. Starting with the development of the 2024 Blueprint, SACOG has committed to three strategic goals of equity, economy, and environment. For more information, please visit our website: https://www.sacog.org . SACOG has received a Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods grant that will advance planning, engineering, design, and project development activities to address barrier transportation facilities in ten federally designated disadvantaged communities that are (1) locally prioritized for infill development and (2) share the challenge of high volume, autocentric facilities that bisect existing neighborhoods to limit both economic and transportation mobility. The grant includes 10 unique projects in 9 separate jurisdictions that are sub-recipients to SACOG, all within Green Zones . The grant includes these specific deliverables: Task 3.1: SACOG has done extensive work partnering with Community Based Organizations (CBOs), to work in systemically oppressed and marginalized communities that have largely been left out of traditional planning processes. For this project, SACOG will establish a CBO Working Group that will enable each participating jurisdiction to tap into CBO's local expertise to foster inclusive outreach and engagement to inform planning efforts. SACOG will align the CBO Working Group with the work of its Race, Equity, and Inclusion (REI) Working Group and the Engage, Empower, Implement (EEI) program. The REI Working Group is made up of local elected officials from the SACOG Board and external members from public agencies, CBOs, and other organizations invested in improving equity outcomes in the Sacramento region. The EEI initiative guides participating jurisdictions in deploying equitable and justice-based planning practices that can transform community-identified issues and ideas into implementable projects. Task 3.2: The CBO Working Group will create and disseminate a toolkit for the participating jurisdictions to help incorporate community-led planning and design principles into each project. Task 3.3: The CBO Working Group will develop a community engagement strategy and schedule of meetings and events tailored to its local DAC Green Zone area. Community engagement strategies will build upon the EEI initiative to address barriers to participation for historically disadvantaged, vulnerable, and marginalized community members who are often left out of local decision-making.