Designing Community Engagement System and Strategy for Nashville's $3.1B Transit Initiative

strategy planning / public policy research/community engagement

Context: Bloomberg Harvard Summer Fellowship
Role: Applied Design Research & Strategy Fellow embedded in city government
Timeline: 10 weeks
Impact: Presented to the Mayor and senior leadership; frameworks adopted by the city

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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

From preliminary research, I've learnt that, across Metro (the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County) 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

Internally, staff struggled with:

siloed engagement efforts

limited capacity to translate technical milestones for public audiences

unclear in scope and expectations

The city needed to answer four key questions:

01 What engagement efforts already exist, and where are the gaps?

02 What kind of engagement is needed now to rebuild trust?

03 How can engagement be inclusive and accessible across diverse communities?

04 How can engagement be coordinated across departments and over time?

Over the course of my 10-week fellowship, I led qualitative research to understand why the project struggled to earn public trust and how engagement efforts were experienced across communities and city departments. This pipeline illustrates how I translated research insights into strategy.

This was not a communications problem.

It was a systems coordination problem.

3/ Research Approach

lived experience → institutional dynamics → strategic synthesis

I used a mixed-methods, systems-oriented research approach, sequencing methods, engaging with stakeholders, and immersing in the user environment.

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.

4/ 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 incremetally overtime

Synthesis of interviews and observations surfaced three recurring tensions.

5/ Outcome

Designing for Trust Over Time

At the conclusion of my research fellowship, I developed three distinct tools to the challenges I identified. These tools were designed for the primary project team, fostered cross-departmental collaboration, and engaged public-facing stakeholders, bridging the gap between strategy, execution, and the public.

Tool #1:
Stakeholder Inventory

Tool for CHYM Project Team

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.

Tool #2:
Engagement Strategy Matrix

Tool for CHYM Project Team, Internal Staff and consultants

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

Tool #3:
Public-facing Communication Toolkit

Tool for Bridging Public Awareness

To model how research insights could translate into resident-facing materials, I developed a prototype communication toolkit using plain language and a clear visual hierarchy.

The current communication is lack of:

Outlet: Too many separate materials
Accessibility: Public & CBO partners miss updates from the website
Clarity: No simple pitch: “How does CHYM help me daily?”
Language: Dense, not easy to skim

translating publicly available data to easy, skimmable information

6/ Impact and Reflection

Rather than delivering a static report, the work produced reusable frameworks designed to support engagement across a 15-year rollout.

Presented findings and frameworks to the Mayor and senior Metro leadership
Engagement Strategy Matrix positioned for adoption across CHYM projects
Research informed how departments coordinate engagement during early implementation phases
Provided a shared language for discussing trust, inclusion, and follow-through