Public Safety in Community Engagement

Course Description

Over the last number of years, there has been significant progress in advancing psychological and cultural safety in engagement. Practitioners are increasingly taking trauma-informed approaches and designing participant-centered processes that reflect the needs of diverse communities.

But here’s the reality: physical violence, threats, and intimidation are on the rise in community engagement spaces.

There are many contributing factors: growing polarization, “us vs. them” dynamics, increased feelings of vulnerability, and the ongoing toxic drug and mental health crises. The result? There are no longer any truly low-stakes engagements. We are seeing staff face harassment and assault, threats being made, and entire meetings shut down due to safety concerns.

At Engage Delaney, we believe the safety of both staff and participants is non-negotiable.

Unsafe engagement processes don’t just impact a single event; they create broader public safety risks, damage trust, and can cause lasting trauma. Safety doesn’t happen by accident. It requires awareness, preparation, and intentional design.

This course draws on both Engage Delaney’s extensive experience supporting complex, high-stakes engagement processes across Canada and one of Canada’s leading safety and security specialists. It equips practitioners with practical tools, strategies, and frameworks to anticipate risks, respond effectively, and design engagement processes that are safe, resilient, and inclusive.

Learning Outcomes

This online course is for anyone who has been tasked with planning for in-person engagement, be it an open house, townhall or other open public meetings. By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• 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.

Who Should Attend

Any professional who is responsible for planning community engagement events. This might include in-house professionals or consultants in a variety of fields who regularly bring people together for dialogue. Consider: do I plan open houses, townhalls, workshops or other public forums where we bring people together? If the answer is yes, this course is for you.

Your Facilitator

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.

Duration

Online: 6 hours (2 days X 3 hours)