Re+ Community Panel – King County Solid Waste Division
Community Advisory Group
Re+ is a King County Solid Waste Division (SWD) initiative to reduce waste going to the landfill. Our team created a 10-person community panel made up of members with a passion for environmental justice, equity, and social justice, and lived experience as frontline community members.
Through the recruitment and onboarding process, we prioritized transparency, dialogue, and building trust.
Our outreach recognized that there is already strength and expertise in the community, and we framed the panel as an opportunity for community members to channel that strength into action. Following these principles, we gathered over 50 applications from community members interested in the panel.
The panel first gathered in March 2022, and has had monthly bilingual meetings (in English and Spanish) ever since.
We began by establishing group agreements, which have evolved into a panel charter that outlines how we hold space together. Agreements include cultivating an anti-racist, anticolonial, intersectional lens and practice, holding space for healing and restoration, and coming as we are. By upholding these agreements, panel members consistently report through a post-meeting survey that they feel comfortable, welcome, and heard in meetings.
Our team works with subject matter experts on different waste prevention strategies to identify what key questions their programs need to answer to ensure they are conducted in ways that benefit the community and advance equity.
We help subject matter experts understand what information they need to share and how to frame it for panel members to participate in meaningful discussion, and we design facilitated activities that elicit the input subject matter experts need. Our team designed a process to capture actionable recommendations from panel input and ensure subject matter experts consider it and communicate outcomes with the panel. To date, the panel has generated over 80 actionable recommendations for over 10 waste prevention programs.
