Your Active New West Public Engagement

  • Location

    New Westminster, BC

Aquatic facilities are vital to a vibrant community. More often than not, the age of a building may start the conversation about replacement or renovation but changes in the community are a much greater motivation for action. By starting with a survey and public engagement process, we helped to create a shared vision for the future of community recreation in New Westminster.

Your Active New West public engagement resulted in more than 3,000 people participating in an online survey, workshops and open house events. Almost 2,000 people completed the online survey, making it the highest City of New Westminster survey response to date.

Design Challenge

We were engaged to plan, lead and facilitate a public engagement process with members of the community and over 20 stakeholder groups regarding the renewal of the Canada Games Pool and the Centennial Community Centre. This engagement was supported by a custom project identity to give the process a consistent and professional look and feel.

Client

The City of New Westminster sought to gather the usage, needs and opinions of the public relating to these facilities. The public engagement process was also an opportunity to educate the public and to generate excitement and momentum around a future vision for community recreation in New Westminster.

Our Response

We partnered with recognized pollster Insights West to deliver a statistically valid survey which polled residents on a range of issues related to these facilities. We worked with Insights to design a survey which delivered both quantitative and qualitative feedback, and gained over 1,800 survey responses. Additionally, our facilitators led structured workshops to allow for meaningful conversation and feedback from over 20 various stakeholder organizations.

Finally, we designed a custom pop-up booth utilizing the project branding and encouraged citizens at various public festivals and events to engage with feedback generated from the survey and stakeholder discussions.

Design Process

hcma has been innovative, responsive to the City’s needs, good communicators, and timely with their work. The quality of their written and graphic design work is very good and their team members, who have been involved in facilitating an extensive and wide variety of community meetings over a very compressed time period, have been excellent.

Dean Gibson, Director, New Westminster Parks Culture & Recreation