What We Do

We help government, business, and community leaders craft durable agreements for the built and natural environment.

Our services include public engagement, consensus building, and environmental conflict resolution each informed by upfront assessment assessment and process design. Our sector focus is urban planning, infrastructure design, environmental policy, and organizational strategy and governance.

Our value is highest when project sponsors must engage stakeholders to produce outcomes that are politically legitimate — enabling timely adoption, funding, and implementation.

Our Vision for the Public Realm

Shaping and sustaining the public realm — places, infrastructure, natural resources, public-serving institutions and business, and civic governance — should maximize and distribute benefits equitably and efficiently.

Government and organizations should use the best available science and technical experts, citizen participation, and transparent deliberation to evaluate, refine, and proffer public realm solutions that support this vision.

Our Mission

We help government and community stakeholders find optimal solutions to build and sustain a city healthy city, steward natural resources, and create civic frameworks to sustain an equitable, adaptable, thriving public realm.

Our clients

community-based organizations, developers, institutions, local government, and public agencies — have projects to build, policy to advance, or organizations to move in a new direction. But they all share one goal in common: the need to engage stakeholders to achieve approval, secure funding, and implement successfully.

This is where we step in.

We help clients assess the political landscape and then tailor the right process and create the right context to gather information to inform project design and build public support.

The result: durable agreements on intractable, high-stakes decisions, where clients leave with a better plan and strengthened community goodwill.

Public Realm Focus

We work on plans and projects including physical places. Our policy

• urban and rural places where people live and work recreate and physical infrastructure for transportation, utilities, and land or sea transport;

• facilities and campuses for public or quasi-public serving uses (e.g. churches, schools, hospitals, housing, office buildings);

• natural resources including terrestrial habitat, open space, and recreation spaces (both natural and disturbed), and marine ecosystems and shoreline habitat;

• fisheries, agricultural land, and cultivated forests.

We are equally focused on shaping policy, programs, and organizational strategy for government, institutions, and organizations that affect or manage the public resources:

• community plans, specific plans, general plan updates, and zoning ordinances;

Our Clients

We work with people who are accountable for public outcomes and need processes that hold up under scrutiny. Our clients include city and county governments, special districts and resource agencies, state and federal agencies,

Public-serving institutions (healthcare, education, cultural organizations)

• Mission-driven and real estate development enterprises

• Environmental and community-based nonprofits

Across these settings, we help leaders navigate contentious issues, convene diverse stakeholders, and move complex projects from concept to decision.