The Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW) is committed to openness, transparency, and accountability to the resort community, and encourages residents and businesses to get informed, participate in community events, and share ideas and feedback.
RMOW Engagement Purpose Statement: We seek to strengthen community connection and resilience by hosting conversations that matter, and draw on Whistler’s collective know-how to help inform decisions that consider the past, present and future.
Our Six Engagement Design Principles
These design principles are used by staff to develop our engagement approach and support our daily interactions with our community. We expect these principles to evolve as we try new things and learn from our experience and community feedback.
Host and connect
- We extend invitations and see ourselves as hosts, and connectors of people and ideas.
- We set aside strict formality and unchanging methods of engagement.
Listen with curiosity
- We prioritize “pulling in information”, respecting collective experience and know how, dialogue and asking good questions.
- We set aside judgement and being right.
Bravery and belief
- We have the courage to try new things and believe that most people are well intentioned.
- We set aside avoidance.
Create choice and agency
- We give citizens choice on when and how they want to participate and ensure they know how their feedback informs the decision-making process.
- We set aside a “one size fits all” approach.
Actively seek a diversity of input
- We work with community partners to bring diverse voices into our process early and host them safely.
- We set aside relying on just the people who show up.
Use the right size of process, with the right people at the right time
- We follow the IAP2 core values and use time and resources wisely to collaborate and plan.
- We set aside feeding into a cycle of hope and then cynicism by mismatching the process to the decision at hand.
Developing the Engagement Design Principles
Our definition of community engagement extends beyond seeking input into decision-making to embed this approach into our everyday work, and in every interaction we have with our community.
Council set our connection with the community front and centre as one of its four top priorities in the 2023-2026 Strategic Plan. The document calls for more connection with the community, and calls upon municipal staff to be innovative in our engagement approach and practices.
We have these six Engagement Guiding Principles to focus our attention on high-impact connections and to draw our citizens together for conversations that influence change.
Council
Council adopted the 2023–2026 Strategic Plan with four priority areas: Housing, Climate Action, Community Engagement and Smart Tourism. Key focuses for engagement are to innovate on engagement channels and increase opportunities, to improve information sharing about our processes and decisions, to support the new General Manager of Community Engagement and Cultural Services’ work connecting with the community, and to conduct a committee review and improvements.
View the September 2023 Community Engagement and Cultural Services update to Council report and presentation.
Communications Policy
The Council Communications Policy in the RMOW Council Governance Manual designates the Mayor, CAO and Public Information Officer (Communications manager or staff) as the principal spokespersons for the municipality, and outlines requirements for public consultation and participation.
