Advisory Group Facilitation+ Stakeholder Alignment
Aligning 35+ Organizational and Community Leaders Around a Shared Decarbonization and Resilience Strategy
Nashville Office of the Mayor | EPA Community Change Grant Initiative
The Challenge
A major federal funding opportunity created the potential for significant investment in community decarbonization, resilience, and infrastructure. More than 35 nonprofit executives, community leaders, sustainability practitioners, and other stakeholders came together to identify projects that could be advanced in partnership with the Mayor’s Office.
The opportunity was significant, but so was the complexity. Participants brought different constituencies, areas of expertise, existing initiatives, and perspectives on community priorities. With a compressed grant timeline, the advisory group needed more than a series of meetings. It needed a structured process capable of turning extensive stakeholder knowledge and a broad range of ideas into project concepts the group could collectively advance.
The Complexity
The work required bringing institutional priorities, organizational expertise, and community knowledge into the same decision-making process while creating meaningful opportunities for participants to influence the direction.
Participation also evolved throughout the engagement. New voices entered the conversation, additional priorities surfaced, and stakeholders varied in how and when they could participate. As potential project directions developed, the process needed to accommodate new considerations without losing the community-informed foundation or momentum already established.
Maintaining trust, meaningful participation, and forward movement while working toward a shared direction was critical.
Our Approach
Greater Than Equal co-led and designed a five-week advisory group facilitation process that gave participants a clear path from understanding community priorities to identifying, developing, and prioritizing potential decarbonization and resilience projects.
Each session was structured around a specific purpose and outcome. GTE continually reinforced where the advisory group was in the process, what progress had been made, what needed to happen next, and how each conversation contributed to the larger objective.
Rather than beginning with predetermined solutions, the process centered community perspectives and existing neighborhood priorities alongside organizational and technical expertise. Facilitated dialogue, individual reflection, small-group work, ideation, clustering, prioritization, and targeted project-development sessions helped participants move from a broad range of opportunities toward viable project concepts.
GTE also continually invited participants to identify voices and expertise that could strengthen the process. As additional stakeholders joined, they were able to contribute meaningfully without requiring the larger group to restart its work.
Throughout the engagement, facilitation went beyond completing an agenda. GTE surfaced perspectives that might otherwise have remained unspoken, connected ideas across stakeholders, translated individual contributions into collective insight, and helped participants see how their expertise could contribute to a shared strategy.
Navigating Competing Priorities
As the process evolved, additional priorities and potential project directions emerged from across the stakeholder ecosystem.
Rather than treating new considerations and existing ideas as competing directions, GTE created space to examine where they intersected and how they could strengthen the larger strategy.
GTE worked across stakeholder perspectives to integrate new considerations while preserving the community-informed approach already established. This allowed the advisory group to continue moving forward without positioning institutional priorities, organizational interests, and community perspectives in opposition to one another.
Additional working sessions gave participants opportunities to explore specific concepts in greater depth, contribute specialized expertise, and shape how potential projects could be developed.
Maintaining Engagement and Momentum
With more than 35 busy organizational and community leaders participating across several weeks, keeping people engaged required both structure and flexibility.
Each session was supported by clear objectives, agendas, hybrid participation options, meeting recordings, resources, key decisions, next steps, and structured follow-up communications. Participants could quickly understand what had happened, where the process stood, and what was coming next.
This made it possible for stakeholders to miss a session and re-enter the process without losing the larger thread, while allowing new participants and perspectives to be incorporated as the work evolved.
Just as importantly, participants could see that the process was moving somewhere: each meeting built on the previous conversation and advanced the advisory group toward a defined outcome.
The Outcome
Over five weeks, more than 35 organizational and community leaders moved from a broad range of existing initiatives, ideas, and priorities to three collaboratively developed project concepts shaped through the collective expertise of the advisory group.
Among those concepts was a community resilience hub strategy. The Mayor’s Office subsequently identified a hub-and-spoke resilience model as the direction it intended to pursue for the funding opportunity.
The process also created value beyond the immediate project recommendations. Participating organizations expressed interest in continuing to convene, share resources, and explore future opportunities for collaboration, demonstrating the potential for the advisory group to serve as a foundation for continued cross-organizational work.
35+ leaders. Five weeks. Three shared project concepts. One collaborative path forward.
