about
about
Community Engagement Strategy for Nashville's Public Transit Improvement Program
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Context: Bloomberg Harvard Summer Fellowship
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Role: Applied Design Research & Strategy Fellow embedded in city government
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Timeline: 10 weeks
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Impact: Presented to the Mayor and senior leadership; frameworks adopted by the city
Project at a Glance
Context
Nashville’s largest-ever transportation investment, "Choose How You Move", with a 15-year implementation horizon.
Action
Served as embedded design research and strategy support for community engagement. Conducted qualitative interviews, stakeholder mapping, systems analysis, and synthesis frameworks.
Impact
Presented to the Mayor and senior leadership; engagement frameworks positioned for adoption across the city.
1.
Context
A System Under Pressure
In November 2024, Nashville voters approved Choose How You Move (CHYM), a half-penny sales tax initiative funding the city’s most ambitious transportation investment to date. The program aims to expand transit access, improve mobility options, and address long-standing inequities in a rapidly growing region.
Despite strong voter support, the city faced a critical post-referendum challenge:
how to sustain public trust during a long, complex rollout.
Previous transit efforts had failed. Engagement fatigue was high. Communication was fragmented across departments. Residents—particularly those in historically underserved communities—expressed skepticism about whether this initiative would deliver tangible results.
The success of CHYM depended not only on technical execution, but on how the city showed up, listened, communicated, and followed through over time.
2.
Challenge
Engagement Was Happening, But Not Working
Across Metro departments and partner organizations, community engagement was already taking place.
However, residents experienced it as:
Difficult to navigate
repetitive without visible outcomes
unclear in scope and expectations
disconnected across projects and agencies
Internally, staff struggled with:
siloed engagement efforts
limited capacity to translate technical milestones for public audiences
lack of a shared framework for deciding how and when to engage
The city needed to answer four key questions:
01
What engagement efforts already exist, and where are the gaps?
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What kind of engagement is needed now to rebuild trust post-referendum?
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How can engagement be inclusive and accessible across diverse communities?
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How can engagement be coordinated across departments and over time?
This was not a communications problem.
It was a systems coordination problem.
3.
Reframing the Problem
Residents were not disengaged: they were exhausted.
Repeated consultations without delivery had produced skepticism rather than participation. Engagement failures were less about outreach quantity and more about clarity, credibility, accessibility, and follow-through.
This reframed the work from improving individual tactics (e.g., more meetings, more surveys) to designing an engagement system that could:
manage expectations clearly
reduce participation burden
make progress visible
build trust incrementally over time
4.
Research Approach
lived experience → institutional dynamics → strategic synthesis
I used a mixed-methods, systems-oriented research approach, sequencing methods to move from lived experience → institutional dynamics → strategic synthesis.
In parallel, I conducted participant observation as a daily transit rider in Nashville, which informed how I interpreted gaps between official communication and lived experience.
5.
Synthesis
Designing for Trust Over Time
Synthesis of interviews and observations surfaced three recurring tensions.
6.
Outcome
Designing for Trust Over Time
At the end of my research fellowship, I've produced 3 tools to tackle the challenges I've identified.
6.1 Stakeholder Inventory
I created a structured stakeholder map identified organizations and individuals connected
to the region's mobility and transit work. The database organizes relationships by type,
level of involvement, geographic focus, and leadership, offering a clearer picture of who is
engaged, where interests align, and how decision-making flows.
This foundation provides a basis for coordinating across sectors, identify key partners, and
design more inclusive engagement.
Overview of the stakeholder inventory.
6.2 Engagement Strategy Matrix
The CHYM (Choose How You Move) Engagement Strategy Pipeline is a proposed framework for examining and coordinating the community engagement process in CHYM-related projects. Each project varies in its specific context, so it is important to consider the project’s circumstances, departmental communication guidelines, and other relevant resources.
overview of the engagement strategy pipeline and chapters
project evaluation guidelines
engagement strategy matrix
6.3 Public-facing Communication Toolkit
To model how research insights could translate into resident-facing materials, I developed a prototype communication toolkit using plain language and clear visual hierarchy.
The current communication has:
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Outlet: Too many separate materials
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Accessibility: Public & even CBO partners miss updates from .gov website
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Clarity: No simple pitch: “How does CHYM help me daily?”
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Language: Dense, not easy to skim
Modified CHYM baseline:
7.
Impact and Reflection
Rather than delivering a static report, the work produced reusable frameworks designed to support engagement across a 15-year rollout.
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Presented findings and frameworks to the Mayor and senior Metro leadership
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Engagement Strategy Matrix positioned for adoption across CHYM projects
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Research informed how departments coordinate engagement during early implementation phases
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Provided a shared language for discussing trust, inclusion, and follow-through
