Sponsored: Creating Policy for IMPACT – CalMatters

Community engagement is often better in theory than in practice. In many cases, it looks like a hastily planned town hall or public comment period tacked on at the end of a meeting. While these efforts may satisfy procedural requirements, they offer little in the way of meaningful input or dialogue. Residents are invited after the important decisions have already been made. Or meetings are scheduled at times when people are working, can be difficult to get to without a car, are only available in English, or are otherwise inaccessible, excluding many residents. The result is predictable: communities withdraw, viewing governments’ efforts at civic participation as enforcement rather than cooperation.

Ideally, engagement treats community members as partners: providing a clearly articulated engagement goal, establishing feedback loops, and using proactive methods to gather information from broadly representative stakeholder groups.

To foster a truly collaborative civic partnership that is directly integrated into the policy process, UC Berkeley’s Opportunity Lab developed the IMPACT model: an evidence-based framework to help government organizations address public issues in collaboration with community partners.

The six-step IMPACT framework (Initiate, mobilize, plan, act, catalyze and test) is designed to systematically guide this work, ensuring that crucial questions and considerations are addressed from the outset. Government leaders initiate the process by clarifying goals, timelines and constraints. Community partners are then mobilized, engaging local experts, organizations and leaders who can bring different perspectives to the table.

Together, this collaborative planning team aligns method with mission: whether through citizen assembly, digital voting, a deliberative design process, or some other engagement structure. The plan is then put into action. The insights from the engagement are synthesized and catalyzed into concrete, actionable recommendations. Finally, solutions are tested, iterated, and tested again.

This model has already been used to foster meaningful engagement to impact policy in California. From September 2024 to March 2025, for example, the UC Berkeley Possibility Lab brought the IMPACT model into partnership with the State of California Strategic Growth Council (SGC) and Governor’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation (LCI). In their pursuit of civic engagement, SGC and LCI wanted to find ways to improve collaboration between California land use and environmental leaders at various levels of government, as well as with tribal governments and community organizations.

LCI and SGC addressed a range of challenges in Initiate phase, including mistrust of the state, participation fatigue and a lack of clarity about how the state can partner with local and regional actors.

Read more about how to INITIALIZE the IMPACT model

Using the IMPACT model, the planning team chose to design, implement and evaluate nine deliberative democracy events. These all-day “Catalyst Conventions“, the first of which have already been hosted in the San Diego, Los Angeles and Bay Area regions, aimed at achieving three key goals: state craft recommendations, regional craft recommendations, and establishing and strengthening working relationships. The remaining planned regional events will take place in 2025 and 2026.

Watch a short video about Catalyst meetings

The structure of each Catalyst convening included the use of in-person deliberative methods (semi-structured focus groups), online surveying (Mentimeter) and digital collective dialogue (Pol.is). Together, participants in each convocation used these methods to develop and prioritize both regional and state recommendations.

See the preliminary results of the meetings in San Diego, Los Angeles, Bay Area

Deliberative democracy was chosen as the structure for these events because it best aligned with both the anticipated engagement challenges and the project goals that emerged during the initiation phase.

Deliberative democracy is one of the main tools included in the toolbox of the IMPACT model. Although it can take many forms, it is usually defined as a structured way in which people come together to learn about, think about, and discuss critical issues and then work together to recommend solutions. Research provides evidence that deliberative democracy processes can achieve consensus on difficult political issues, foster a greater willingness to listen to and engage with people who hold opposing views, and increase positive feelings toward individuals of diverse political backgrounds.

Read about the Catalyst convening and the LCI/SCG partnership

Over the next year, Possibility Lab will continue to work with LCI and SGC to refine and iterate the structure of these gatherings, analyze and communicate results with early stage gathering participants and planners, and develop implementation and evaluation plans to move from recommendations to reforms. Ultimately, the priority recommendations will inform state policy actions on climate, land use, and energy.

This project is just one of a series of large-scale projects happening in California state government that aim to improve collaborative civic engagement at scale. At the core of the IMPACT model is finding new ways for state and local governments to meaningfully engage with residents—understanding their needs, leveraging their expertise, and helping to activate their participation to address our most pressing policy challenges.

To learn more, visit the UC Berkeley Possibility Lab’s IMPACT site