New York City’s Public Engagement Unit Is Enhancing Civic Engagement by Going Directly to Its Residents

Collaborative governance—or “co-governance”—offers a model for shifting power to ordinary people and re-building 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 Citizen 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, successful 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.

In this series, we share stories of co-governance in practice. For this interview, New America’s Hollie Russon Gilman and Lizbeth Lucero spoke with Adrienne Lever, the executive director of New York City’s Public Engagement Unit (PEU). The PEU connects low-income New Yorkers to key city services, including housing, transportation, and health care. Adrienne has served as director of the Public Engagement Unit since June 2021. Prior to serving as director, she served as PEU’s senior advisor for strategic capacity building. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation about PEU’s model, whether it could be replicated in other cities and townships, and major takeaways from their work at the city-level.

How are you building civic power and voice during this moment, particularly within communities impacted by systemic disparities?

From my background in organizing and campaigning, something I consistently heard from folks on the ground was: “Government does nothing for me, so why should I vote? Why should I participate?” It can be very hard to motivate people to want to make their voices heard when they don't see the government acting on their behalf.

Here at the PEU, we want to reframe the government's responsibility to its citizens. Rather than sitting and waiting for people to come to bureaucracy to get the help that they need, the PEU proactively goes out into communities to meet New Yorkers where they are—whether that’s on their phones through text messages, at their doors, or at community events–to identify those who are in need and connect them to services. In going out proactively into the community and building those relationships, we are saying: “The government is here not just to answer your call when you have a crisis, but to help prevent the crisis before it actually happens.”

That creates both a bond and a conversation. We not only talk clients through what benefits are available to them but also provide long-term case management to assist them in every step of the process to obtain those benefits. This way they see there's somebody on their side to be helpful and present, even in a huge city like New York, where the complex multi-agency bureaucracy can be particularly difficult to navigate.

Building those relationships is key to building civic power because it changes the way people feel about government, which in turn makes citizens more likely to want to participate. When we send surveys or go out and ask people for feedback to help inform policy, they're more likely to respond because they have built a relationship with us and see that we care. To do our work, we use innovative technology and organizing tools that come from campaigns and grassroots movements in a way that scales and doesn’t sacrifice the personal human touch.

We have four amazing teams: a Tenant Support Unit, Housing Support Unit, and Special Project Unit, as well as GetCoveredNYC which deals with health care. Our Tenant Support Unit proactively reaches out to support tenants on a wide array of issues—from landlord harassment, rent arrears, and repair negligence, to forced lockouts or forced eviction. Leveraging existing city data, we identify tenants, go out into their communities, knock on doors, find those who need help, connect them to resources, and provide case management. We also take incoming calls from tenants on our Tenant Helpline, which has handled over 100,000 calls from tenants across the city since 2019. GetCoveredNYC uses similar tactics to talk to people about health insurance, and connect people who are uninsured with certified enrollers. The Housing Support Unit builds relationships with landlords, brokers, shelter providers, and other organizations to rent vacant units to voucher recipients.

Lastly, the Special Projects Unit handles everything else we get called in for as the city’s outreach experts. Whenever there is an emergency response need, a new mayoral initiative, or a benefit that's undersubscribed, we often step in to help fill that gap. We work with other agencies often as the need arises, but sometimes, our team will also proactively suggest new outreach projects that can support our agency partners.

Right now, we're reaching out to low-income New Yorkers about the Fair Fares Program, which reduces transit fares by half. We are working with agency partners to contact a targeted list of New Yorkers, who are subscribed to other benefits that indicate they would be eligible for Fair Fares and help them enroll in the program—another example of how PEU is cutting through complex processes to make the bureaucracy more responsive.

Recently, the Department of Aging also asked us for support with outreach to a population of 8,000 seniors who were receiving recovery meals during the pandemic. As soon as this meal program ended, we reached out to those 8,000 seniors to connect them to resources, making sure that nobody who had signed up for the program and continued to need support was left out.

Who, if any, are the trusted intermediaries in and around the community that you work with on these initiatives and how do you identify and support leaders in the community?

I think there are really two sides to it. Obviously, we work with nonprofit and community-based organizations all the time. As the city, we absolutely recognize the importance of trusted messengers in communities, especially when it comes to long-term case management and tenant organizing. And yet, I think that sometimes we, as government, relinquish our responsibility to actively rebuild that trust by putting all of that responsibility on trusted messengers. The city shouldn't have to always rely on an outside partner to inform and help communities with the benefits being offered. It’s important to balance leveraging existing, established networks of trusted messengers, with building trust directly between residents and the city—through face-to-face conversations, through in-depth sessions with support specialists—so that more people are able to change their minds about what government is and can do for them.

We ensure that we’re being really inclusive of our nonprofit partners in conversations, while also trying to break the narrative that people have to go to non-governmental organizations when seeking personalized support.

How do you engage with residents who have been systematically left out of policy-making decisions? For instance, there’s a huge undocumented population in New York, how do you build trust with individuals who fear government officials and do not trust government agencies?

This is also sort of twofold because undocumented communities are a really important population and also the least likely to trust government. I think, more than with any other population, we really rely on very close partnerships with organizations on the ground who are in communities and can work with clients to support them through the process. So if somebody is unwilling to give us their information, we have experts and community leaders we can transfer them to for additional help.

While we never track whether a client is or is not undocumented, anecdotally I can also say that we have found that people are thrilled to get the help from PEU directly. We get a lot of positive responses from clients who might not be willing to go to the city themselves at first, but who are more than willing to work with PEU when we reach out proactively, especially after we begin to build relationships and trust with them at their doorsteps.

We have been showcasing some of our clients’ stories, with their permission and consent. One of our staff members spoke at a press event with Mayor Eric Adams recently, to talk about her work with a woman who is an undocumented immigrant recently diagnosed with cancer. Tania, our GetCoveredNYC specialist, connected this client to a health care access program called NYC Care, which she is now using to afford her cancer treatments. It’s important to share these stories, and the experiences of staff like Tania, who build deep relationships with their clients to build trust and ensure that people are receiving the services that they need.

It helps that we also have the most incredible and diverse staff, who come from the communities of the constituents that we're working to serve. We have every single age, personality, race, color, ethnicity, you name it. Many of our staff are immigrants as well. We always make a point of translating our materials into at least 10 languages, upwards of 25 languages. We showcase the languages spoken on our team as much as possible, sharing photos and videos of our staff on social media so that New Yorkers are really able to see themselves reflected in our staff.

Are there any lessons from New York’s model that can be replicated in other parts of the county?

I think other cities absolutely can do this, if they think strategically about how to build a team and how to do outreach.

In some ways, our work is harder because we're such a massive city. How are we actually supposed to reach all of these New Yorkers? Leveraging tactics to scale our work quickly, like peer-to-peer text messaging, is helpful but challenging in a major city like New York. A single staffer can send 200,000 text messages within an afternoon, but following with personalized responses up still takes a lot of staff time.

Bringing in campaign skills has been so transformative in how we do our work, because we think a lot about how to strategically target community members and maximize our impact. That being said, a small amount of outreach can go a long way because stories get shared, people learn about the work that we’re doing, we build relationships of trust within the community, and we ultimately build a strong reputation where people can authentically reach out for support.

Hiring is also critical. We hire and train people who have worked as bartenders or in other kinds of customer service, as community organizers and social workers, all of whom are extremely talented and are excited to build strong relationships with people. Being more inclusive in the hiring process means rethinking the expectation that you have to have a specific kind of degree or type of experience to do this work. We consider many different skill sets, which allows us to build an incredible, passionate, and sustainable team.

How do you authentically engage with residents and encourage them to participate in government?

I think part of our job is to share what we learn from the work that we do, being boots on the ground, to help the city inform policy. Earlier, I mentioned the Tenant Helpline, which took calls from tenants all over the city who were facing eviction and a variety of other housing issues. Our helpline provides a huge repository of information that tells us a lot about what’s happening in the city. Among those 100,000 calls we have received, we are able to get details from our housing specialists who handle the cases. We are able to notice patterns and ask questions like, “Why haven't we received as many calls from X, Y, and Z neighborhoods?” We then reach out to those especially vulnerable zip codes that aren't calling the helpline as frequently to figure out why they're not calling and how to engage with them.

We shared a lot of our findings with the city’s new chief housing officer, who put a lot of the feedback into the housing plan this year. So we've seen, especially with this administration, a real desire to learn from what's happening on the ground and develop a strategic and flexible policy that is responsive to what's actually happening, versus what they think should happen.

What are some of the challenges or limitations of engaging with residents across the city?

Our tactics change based on the population you're targeting. If we're trying to reach out to the city's homeless population, we won’t be as effective in outreach through door-knocking or making phone calls because they may not have access to phones and may not have an address. That’s why we do a lot of tabling in communities. This summer, we have over 100 City University of New York (CUNY) interns who are part of what we've called the CUNY Benefits Corps. They table all over the city and canvass neighborhoods, using a tool called Access NYC to do quick benefits eligibility screenings for New Yorkers. The information our interns gather comes back to our staff, who then make follow-up calls to provide additional information and support. We also work with non-profit partners on the ground, especially to engage with more difficult-to-reach populations.

We have to continue to be innovative, flexible, and creative—no single strategy is the solution when it comes to reaching out to a city’s vulnerable populations. And we may have a different answer to your question in a year from now than we do today, because we may think of something brilliant that we aren't currently doing—and I hope that does happen, because that would mean we're trying new things and continuing to learn and grow.

We would like to thank Lindsay Zafir, Mark Schmitt, Maresa Strano, Jessica Tang, and Grace Levin for their incredibly helpful comments and editing support. This would not have been possible without them.