Relationships, Capacity, and Trust: Youth Engagement Lessons Learned and Tools for OakDOT

This report presents lessons learned and tools for engaging youth in transportation planning in Oakland, California. Youth are disenfranchised from the transportation planning process, although their mobility is more affected than adults’ mobility by the quality of transportation networks, and, as a result, they have unique expertise that is valuable to transportation planning. In addition to giving planners access to youth expertise, engaging with youth presents an opportunity for the Oakland Department of Transportation (OakDOT) to build mutually beneficial relationships, civic capacity, and trust between city government and the next generation. The report is in three parts. First, I analyze observations of an in-person community design workshop and several online engagement methods for a transportation planning project in a disinvested neighborhood. I find that the methods observed, when employed on their own, are incongruous with OakDOT’s goals to build trust and a shared mobility agenda among Oakland’s communities because they don’t foster an impactful dialogue about transportation and related neighborhood concerns. Second, I distill key findings from seven semi-structured interviews with practitioners of youth civic engagement and two focus groups with a youth transportation advisory board and a civic youth commission. I summarize 12 key findings in four categories: universally applicable learnings, engaging youth in school curriculum, working with community partners, and youth advisory boards and commissions. Third, I develop two youth engagement tools to be incorporated into OakDOT’s standard operating procedure for community outreach: a matrix of 12 youth engagement strategies, and a template for planning youth engagement strategies.