Designing Inclusive Engagement: How Toronto Is Rethinking Public Participation

Collaborative governance—or “co-governance”—offers a model for shifting power to ordinary people and rebuilding their trust in government. Co-governance models break down the boundaries between people inside and outside government, allowing community residents and elected officials to work together to design policy and share decision-making power. Cities around the world are experimenting with new forms of co-governance, from New York City’s participatory budgeting process to Paris’s adoption of a permanent citizens’ assembly. More than a one-off transaction or call for public input, successful models of co-governance empower everyday people to participate in the political process in an ongoing way. Co-governance has the potential to revitalize civic engagement, create more responsive and equitable structures for governing, and build channels for Black, brown, rural, and tribal communities to impact policy-making.

Still, co-governance models are not without challenges. The hierarchical and ineffective nature of our current governing structure is difficult to transform. Effective collaboration between communities and politicians requires building lasting relationships that overcome deep distrust in government. So far, effective models of co-governance tend to be local and community-specific—making it critical that we share stories of success and brainstorm ways to scale.

For this interview, New America’s Hollie Russon Gilman and Sarah Jacob spoke with Daniel Fusca, manager of public consultation in the Parks and Recreation division at the City of Toronto, on how Toronto is implementing its own public input process. To read more of the Political Reform team’s explorations of co-governance in practice, visit our work here.

Can you give us some background on your role and how you got into your current position in government?

My position is Manager of Public Consultation in the Parks and Recreation division at the City of Toronto. I’ve been in this role since September 2019, and I was the first person to hold the position. We started as a team of one, and we’ve since grown to fifteen people, with plans to continue our growth through the end of the year and into the next.

I’m a planner by training and I took my first course on public engagement in the last years of my undergrad at McGill University in Montreal. It ignited an interest in me that never went away. Three or four years later, in 2010, I got my first planning job at a large Canadian design/planning/engineering firm called DIALOG. I learned a lot from my work there, including about how to design an effective process and meaningfully integrate engagement into it so that it actually affects outcomes. We used to create these complicated process diagrams that showed the relationship between outputs from public engagement and technical workflows that still shape how I design processes today. I took a great interest, at the time, in the form our engagement took, and I remember researching different meeting methodologies to incorporate into my processes and advocating for the use of more online engagement tools.

It was that focus on engagement in our project work that led to me getting hired as the stakeholder engagement lead in the Toronto City Planning division in 2013. At that time, I was working under Chief Planner, Jennifer Keesmaat. In that role, I hosted my first civic lottery and helped create the Toronto Planning Review Panel. Rather than focusing on a single issue, as was the case with citizen’s assemblies before then, the review panel tackled all kinds of planning topics over a two-year term. The panel ran for two terms before being put on hold in 2019.

I think the panel lost its momentum in part because both the Chief Planner and I had moved on, and without strong champions, it became hard to sustain. But it had other problems too. For example, its fixed meeting dates and limited agenda time made it difficult for project teams to rely on it as part of their engagement strategies. You couldn’t really count on there being room for your project on a given agenda, which made it tough to integrate into planning processes.

Initially, I was disappointed when the panel was shut down, since staff valued the process and the quality of the feedback was high. But now I recognize that the logistical and other challenges were very real, and I’ve come to learn a lot from them.

These experiences have shaped the way I approached building my team’s practice in Parks and Recreation.

What made you do the lottery process in the beginning?

[Editor’s note: A lottery process is one in which a group of residents are randomly selected to make a decision on behalf of their community.]

To me, at the time, the civic lottery was the most compelling part of the process with the review panel. With over 150 spoken languages and the majority of residents born outside of Canada, Toronto is possibly the most diverse city in the world. Yet who typically shows up to public meetings? More than anyone else, it tends to be people who are white, speak English at home, and are retired. So for me, the civic lottery was a way to bring more diversity into public engagement.

Back then, we were undertaking a review of the division’s engagement approach in a process we called Growing Conversations. Some people in the community were pushing us to look at New York City’s neighborhood-level local planning bodies (called community boards), and we thought that model was really interesting. One thing we didn’t like about them was that their members are appointed. That raised concerns for us around representation and impartiality, and the chief planner was particularly interested in how we could broaden participation to hear from more of a cross-section of Toronto’s incredible diversity.

As we were doing research, I came across the concept of the civic lottery and the work of MASS LBP, a Canadian firm that has championed deliberative processes for decades, and that’s really where the idea started. We realized we couldn’t replicate what New York does in every ward, as we just didn’t have the resources, but we could create a single panel using a civic lottery process. That way, we’d at least have one place where staff could engage with a truly diverse cross section of Toronto’s residents. And so, we created the Toronto Planning Review Panel with a civic lottery at the center of that process.

How else did you adapt the approach from New York City to fit the legislative and planning context in Toronto?

While we would have loved to create more geographically focused panels, like what New York has, we had to be realistic. We had to ask ourselves: What can we actually achieve right now?

We approached it almost as a proof of concept. Let’s try this, see if it works, and if it does, maybe we can apply it in different ways moving forward.

Toronto has a very different planning and legislative framework compared to New York. The way their community boards function wouldn’t translate directly into the Toronto context. But the core idea—a group of residents advising on planning initiatives—was the piece we took inspiration from.

We adapted that idea in Toronto by creating the Planning Review Panel. But here’s part of why it didn’t fully work: Toronto has a range of planning initiatives, and there are legislated requirements for public engagement in those processes. But the Planning Review Panel wasn’t part of that legal framework. It wasn’t a mandated step.

So we positioned it more as an opportunity. We’d say to staff, “Here’s a chance to get broader input from a more diverse group of people, and to make better planning decisions as a result.” But participation was voluntary. There was no requirement for projects to go to the panel.

That’s where the challenge came in. Because it wasn’t required, it was often seen as “extra work.” Teams also had to figure out how to align their timelines with the panel’s schedule and fit this process into their existing workflows. It was never frictionless—there was always some logistical difficulty involved. This was one of the biggest drawbacks of the approach we took.

What other lessons did you learn from your experience working on the Toronto Planning Review Panel that impact how you approach your work today?

At first, the civic lottery was all we used when I started building my practice in Parks and Recreation. We weren’t doing much that was intentionally deliberative, if I’m being honest. The meetings were conversational, but we didn’t design them specifically to foster deeper engagement. I started to notice that the outcomes weren’t as strong as with the Toronto Planning Review Panel, and attendance and investment levels weren’t as high.

So lately, we’ve been trying to bring in more of what I learned from the panel. For example, learning from how MASS LBP did things, we’ve started introducing orientation meetings focused on getting to know each other and establishing shared values. To keep things engaging, we’ve added more deliberative techniques and embodied exercises, and we’re aiming for clearer, more tangible outcomes at each meeting.

In the past, we’d often leave meetings saying, “Thanks for the feedback,” and then go off to develop something behind the scenes. Now, we want to leave meetings with a concrete outcome—something we’ve built together, which is an important principle of deliberative processes.

How do you approach designing a process that meets the needs of the people that you work with?

We start by asking ourselves two questions: What kind of engagement does this project require? And who are we designing for, and what will they need to participate meaningfully?

To answer the first question, we look at the scope and objectives of the project, what is open for influence, and how complex the problem is. Based on that analysis, we assign the project a level of engagement based on the International Association of Public Participations’ spectrum of public participation, which gives us some direction in terms of how the process should be designed and how much engagement is appropriate. The framework helps define the expected outcomes of each engagement phase so that both our colleagues and process participants have clarity about what we’re engaging in.

To answer the second question, we look at demographic, psychographic, and other data about the community to better understand it and its needs; we have discussions with the local city councillor; and sometimes (for projects with higher levels of engagement) we do stakeholder and rightsholder interviews to better understand the resident/stakeholder/rightsholder landscape. Then we design our process to respond to all of that.

We think of process design as being about creating the architecture of participation. That means setting up the scaffolding in terms of tools, timelines, and supports that ensure people can participate in a way that is authentic and valuable to them, but also that their participation results in inputs that can shape projects in meaningful ways.

A major element of that scaffolding is what we call the Community Design Framework—a flexible structure that guides how we design engagement across all capital projects, providing consistency across projects while still allowing for flexibility to tailor approaches to each community’s needs. [There’s] consistency in the sense that it clearly defines the role of the public within a given project, specifically in terms of the outcomes we expect from engagement per project phase [and] flexibility in the sense that the approach to achieving those outcomes can be tailored to the specific needs of the project and the community. For some communities, that might mean trauma-informed facilitation. For others, it might mean pairing deliberative panels with storytelling or art-based engagement. It can mean incorporating ceremony into engagement with First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities, or serving ethnic foods to make people feel more at home.

How are you utilizing technology to enhance both the process and accessibility?

Currently, we are experimenting with how AI can enhance the meeting outcomes. It’s something we’ve just recently begun doing. The idea is to use AI to achieve more concrete outcomes in real time. The goal is to reduce the bias we inevitably introduce as humans when interpreting feedback.

We want to demystify that process and be more transparent about it. As I mentioned, achieving outcomes in real time is a key objective. Up to this point, we’ve used AI behind the scenes to help generate outputs, but we’ve recently begun doing it in the meeting itself to synthesize the group’s ideas and turn it into an end-product that can be further polished by the group, like a vision statement or series of guiding principles. This is definitely still a work-in-progress, like so much of what we do, and we are still playing around with different prompts and ways of approaching it, but we are cautiously optimistic by the results we’ve seen so far.

Where we use technology much more is outside the meeting. To gather that broader input, we use tools like Social Pinpoint and ThoughtExchange. Social Pinpoint is a social mapping tool that lets people comment directly on maps or plans. ThoughtExchange is more like a survey tool, but it allows us to ask open-ended questions. People respond with short, bite-sized comments, and then they’re shown other participants’ responses, which they can rate. This allows us to understand not just individual opinions, but also how the community responds to each other’s feedback. It also allows people to digest and learn from the feedback of their neighbors, which is important in a collaborative process.

And of course, we use more standard tools like surveys as well, and all of that input becomes part of what we bring into the deliberative body’s work. So yes, there is technology involved, but it mostly supports the process, and it’s not necessarily integrated into the assembly sessions themselves in a major way. But there are lots of technology solutions out there that make scaling this kind of work easier, so maybe one day we’ll start exploring those tools too.

How have you navigated pushback, and who have been your non-traditional allies in establishing this process?

I think one important thing is that it’s taken us some time to get where we are. Over the years, we’ve become a trusted team within the Parks and Recreation division. People generally see us as experts in what we do, and they trust our approach. That said, we do still need to do some internal work to build understanding and buy-in for both our deliberative and participatory methods.

Right now, one of the shifts we’re trying to make is around how we think about community decision-making. For example, I’ve started to question the term “community advisory committee”—I’m not sure “advisory” fully captures the value we’re trying to create. There can be hesitancy, sometimes, about letting residents go beyond simply providing feedback. But we’ve seen that when the right structures are in place, communities can meaningfully shape elements like vision statements or design principles—within clear parameters that respect feasibility and policy.

We’re working to build that internal capacity through training, through engaging in meetings outside our team, and by consistently communicating the intention behind our approach. And slowly, more and more of our colleagues are buying into it. So much so that we sometimes have to pull them back a bit when we don’t think a process demands the level of engagement that they envision.

Engagement with elected officials is also an important part of our work. Councillors play a key role in shaping how engagement is received and understood, and we see them as partners in helping communities participate meaningfully. At times, questions come up about who is at the table, especially when we use civic lotteries designed to over-represent certain groups. We understand where those questions come from—councillors know their communities well and want to make sure all perspectives are reflected. That’s why we’re doing more proactive communication up front: to explain how these processes work, why they’re designed the way they are, and what they’re intended to achieve.

Ultimately, these are public service–led processes, and that comes with a responsibility to uphold fairness, transparency, and clarity of purpose. We always welcome input from councillors, but we also work to maintain the integrity of the process itself—so that community members can trust it, and so that we can deliver outcomes that are credible and grounded.

Toronto is so diverse —there's such a variety of languages and cultures. How do you navigate that level of diversity within the assembly process?

Language diversity is one of Toronto’s greatest strengths—and also one of the biggest challenges when it comes to deliberative processes. Right now, we ask participants to speak English to take part in the panel process, largely due to resource constraints. In Toronto, we have bylaws that require us to provide interpreters if someone specifically requests one. Similarly, if a certain threshold of residents speak a particular language, we are required to translate certain materials.

We haven’t yet tried to run an assembly with people who don’t speak English. That’s something we might explore in the future, but we’re taking things one step at a time. That said, we have designed assemblies that focus on specific communities within broader populations—such as Black or Indigenous communities—where there's a clear need for focused, representative input. In those cases, the goal isn’t demographic diversity per se, but depth, trust-building, and a space where shared cultural experience can shape the conversation. These have often led to rich insights and powerful design outcomes.

But there are other things we can do to both navigate and celebrate diversity within the assembly process. As I’ve said earlier, we always feed participants in our community advisory meetings, and when possible, we try to do that through a local vendor that can provide ethnic food relevant to local communities. We’ve also had meetings where we’ve incorporated performances or Indigenous ceremonies—things that make people feel at home and welcome.

Another way we navigate diversity is by tapping into what connects us. One method we’ve found powerful is a model-building exercise where participants create a small model of a memory, typically a favorite childhood park memory. As they share their stories, themes emerge—love of nature, time with family, the joy of shared meals. These moments uncover the universal values we all bring into the room and help create the foundation for trust, creativity, and collaboration.

With the implementation of any new process, there are always unexpected aspects. What have been some of the surprises?

The real surprise for me came during my time running the Toronto Planning Review Panel. I didn’t anticipate the feedback to be so positive and so constructive. What really stood out was how different the dynamic becomes when you remove the element of self-interest. When someone participates in a process because they’ve been selected—rather than self-selected—it seems to fundamentally change the tone of the conversation.

I think that’s also what tends to surprise most of my colleagues when they participate in or observe these processes. They’re struck by how collaborative and respectful the discussions are, even when we’re dealing with difficult or contentious issues. It’s not combative—it’s productive. That same sense of surprise shows up in feedback from participants too, who often tell us these are the best public meetings they’ve ever attended.

There’s a kind of magic to this type of process that sets it apart from the standard public engagement models. One thing we’ve been experimenting with lately is how to build on that foundation—how to deepen connection, increase creativity, and make the experience more participatory. That’s where some of our more embodied facilitation methods come in.

One of the most unexpectedly powerful tools we’ve been using lately is the model- building activity I mentioned earlier. We call it a “found objects” model-building activity, but it’s inspired by an approach developed by James Rojas and John Kamp in California called “Place It!” We dump a big pile of random objects onto a table, and everyone is asked to “mine” the table for materials, take it back to their table, and build a model of a memory, usually something like a favorite park experience. After that, participants share their memories, and we identify common themes together. I was surprised by just how effective this activity is. It opens people up emotionally and creatively, builds empathy across difference, and creates common ground. And just as importantly, it brings a sense of play into the process.

Do you have any closing thoughts you’d like to share?

All of this work is ongoing. We’re still learning, still adapting, and still asking hard questions about what public participation can and should look like in a city as complex and diverse as Toronto. But what keeps me going is the belief that good process can lead to better decisions—and that when people feel truly seen and heard, they show up in remarkable ways.