Public Safety in Community Engagement

Free Pilot Offering of New Course – Join Us at No Cost!

Feb 25 and 26, 2025: 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. PST / 12:30 – 3:30 p.m. EST  

Over the last number of years, there has been much work to enhance psychological and cultural safety in engagement events. Practitioners are increasingly taking a trauma informed approach when working with diverse participants and are working to take a participant-centric approach to designing how we engage people. But here’s the thing: physical violence, threats and intimidation are on the rise in community engagement events. There could be lots of reasons for it: increased polarization, us vs them thinking, people feeling more under attack and vulnerable, the toxic drug crisis, coupled with an even larger mental health crisis; the results are that there are no longer any low-stakes engagements. We have seen clients have staff assaulted, threatened, and entire meetings shut down because staff and participant safety couldn’t be guaranteed.  

In our October training survey (thank you to those who took part) respondents noted this. How do I plan for safe events? How do I advocate for the resources I need when people internally don’t want to talk “safety”? My staff don’t want to do public events, how do I “make” them feel safe? At Engage Delaney we firmly believe that safety of staff (we are going to go ahead and include consultants) and participants is non-negotiable. We also have seen firsthand that bad (meaning unsafe) events create a public safety risk, not to mention a reputational risk, and they create trauma. What to do about it? We’ve partnered with a leading Canadian security team to develop a new course: Public Safety in Community Engagement.  

We have partnered with GHT Global, a boutique firm of Canadian and British security-cleared professionals with both intelligence and military backgrounds. Understanding complex, unpredictable and changing environments, they bring the security expertise, and we bring the engagement knowledge.  

This new course (offered virtually over two, three-hour sessions or one-day in-person) is for anyone who has been tasked with planning for in-person engagement. Be it an open house, town hall or other open public meetings, we’ve partnered with GHT to develop a course where participants will: 

• Better understand the public safety risks associated with in-person engagement.  

• Introduce the concept of risks and threats so they can communicate these internally. 

• Increase familiarity with risk assessment and how to integrate safety planning into the broader engagement planning process.  

• Better understand main security considerations when assessing risks for any event, including access control, crowd management, medical and emergency preparedness, data protection, screening procedures, planning, venue analysis and security engagement.  

• Gain insights into practical and applicable strategies and approaches for how to plan for safer engagement opportunities.  

• Build understanding of how to evaluate the safety of one’s engagement events. 

Across four modules of learning, your facilitators will help participants identify, assess, evaluate and mitigate risks to public safety in community engagement.  

Your Facilitators 

Jessica Delaney is a licensed IAP2 trainer, Certified Public Participation Professional (CP3) and a Certified Professional Facilitator. She has trained thousands of professionals across the country in engagement planning and design, facilitation, working through conflict, communications and evaluation. Jessica is an engagement professional who often asks: “who’s in charge of security?” and everyone just looks back at her.  

Tim Hahlweg is a Director at GHT-Global and specializes in security risk mitigation, leadership and capabilities development. Prior to joining GHT Global, Tim worked with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) as an Assistant Deputy Minister charged with overall management of all domestic operations. During his twenty-four-year career with CSIS, Tim held many operational and senior leadership positions both domestically and abroad, including in the areas of Counter Terrorism, Operations Security, Foreign Operations & Liaison and Internal Security.  

The Opportunity 

This is a new course. To the best of our knowledge, there is no other public safety in engagement course being offered in Canada. We think we have it right, but we welcome your partnership and feedback to make it the best it can be. We will be offering the course virtually as a pilot on: 

We are inviting up to 15 participants to join us for this initial pilot. Our request is that you: 

• Commit to attending the full course. 

• Provide feedback both in real time and at the end of the course.