The Art of Using Inclusive Community Chats with an Adaptive World Café Approach to Explore the Meaning of Inclusive Communities

Background: Knowledge of place-based communities and the lived experiences of diverse citizens such as disabled people are key to making more inclusive sustainable communities. Yet many voices in public planning and community engagement, such as people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, children and young people, are often not heard. Method: Bringing people together requires an artful approach that amplifies diverse voices and stories while enabling solutions through knowledge exchange. In this article we share the art of designing and doing community chats as an inclusive dialogical method. The community chats used The World Café’s principles and framework adapted with inclusive processes, enabling us to explore the concept of planning inclusive communities and, importantly, solutions for them with community members with and without disabilities. Findings: In this article we firstly critique the current tensions regarding community engagement in public planning and participatory research methods, before outlining our approach. This includes outlining in detail our design approach and applied processes for maximising the participation of diverse people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. We offer critical reflections on our key lessons learnt and the non-negotiables in undertaking community chats. Conclusions: By sharing our thinking, approach and lessons learnt, we offer an inclusive adaptive approach to a popular method—the world café—that can be useful to evoke meaningful and empowering knowledge exchanges with diverse people with disabilities to help progress actions towards making communities more inclusive.