Stakeholder Engagement

Six Tips for Effective Dialogue
By Deborah Fleischer, featured on Triple Pundit

Stakeholder engagement is a process of reaching out to a range of constituents who are interested in or impacted by your business or project, including employees, investors, suppliers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), consumers, neighbors, governmental agencies, and thought-leaders.

Alex McIntosh, Director of Corporate Citizenship at Nestle Waters, considers the lack of a stakeholder engagement strategy “is like launching a new product without doing any market research...Stakeholder engagement is an important, essential element in good citizenship and good business strategy. You need to know what issues are most important to the people that are most relevant to your business.”

This is true of environmental project and program management as well.

The six tips for effective dialogue are:
1. Be strategic about whom to talk to (ideal stakeholders have decision-making power, influence, and a willingness to engage)
2. Connect to the larger world (sometimes those you don’t see eye-to-eye with can be great allies when there are large issues that you can’t fix alone)
3. Focus on solutions (design the process to lead to action and solutions)
4. Build an internal culture (educate your internal team and build expectations internally on how stakeholder engagement can help)
5. Don’t make commitments you cannot keep (be sure to look at the big picture and consider realistic timeframes before making commitments)
6. Look both upstream and downstream (include a broad range of voices in your outreach)

Read the complete article here: http://www.triplepundit.com/pages/stakeholder-engagement-six-tips-for-effe.php

A Conversation with your Neighbor: Daphne Muse

On March 25, 2009, Northgate was fortunate to have a conversation with Daphne Muse about social justice and the meaning of community.

Ms. Muse shared her views on the environmental infrastructure of social justice, pointing out that we cannot continue to fertilize social justice with toxic soil, water it with rising sea levels, or sustain it with polluted air. "It is incumbent upon us to provide a truly sustainable infrastructure, in order for us to cultivate social justice in our everyday lives." We shared ideas and inspirations about how to get involved in your neighborhood, how to learn about historical ecology from your neighbors, how to share technical information with non-technical folks, and the importance of taking pride in your community.

Ms. Muse considers Oakland an unpolished jewel in the crown with elements of beauty that rival the splendor of Italian villages where she's spent time.

Daphne Muse has served as the director of the Women’s Leadership Institute (WLI) at Mills College since 2004. There she works with Student Fellows to provide co-curricular programming and projects that enrich learning, inquiry and scholarship while supporting local, national, and global activism focusing on women and women's rights. In May 2008, she graduated the first cohort of WLI Roundtable Fellows. Conducting cutting-edge work in media, gender studies and environmentalism, those Fellows are now positioning themselves to make remarkable inroads across the country and around the globe.

Ms. Muse is the author of four books and more than 300 feature articles, essays, reviews, and commentaries for major newspapers, academic journals and online zines. Her work has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Black Scholar, San Jose Mercury News, and the Washington Post, and has been aired on NPR, Radio One, and Pacifica. In 2008, Muse was nominated for a National Women's Book Association Award and also nominated by President Janet L. Holmgren for a Civic Ventures Purpose Prize. She has been a guest speaker and served on panels at Google, the McNair Scholars Conference, Case Western Reserve University, UC Berkeley, and Rutgers University.

For twenty years, Muse served as president of the Fruitvale San Antonio Community Association in and conjunction with that role developed the Annual Halloween Book Giveaway. For more than 25 years, Muse gave away new children's books, some of them autographed by award-winning authors including Gwendolyn Brooks, Thatcher Hurd, and Virginia Hamilton, to children in the community and sometimes their parents, too.

Thank you, Daphne, for taking the time out of your busy schedule to have what we hope will be the first of many conversations with us!