I think this is the billion-dollar question, and you’re opening up a can of worms by asking this. The City, Kane, and OneWake will all say “yes” to that.
Your answer, though, may depend on how you think of why they answered that way:
What the City and Kane Realty does
The City and Kane use meetings with specific stakeholder groups, surveys, and town hall-style events. In these places, citizens go to project leaders so they can be heard.
They’re more open and publicly announced. But it assumes that citizens have the time and means to show up to these places, if they know about it at all.
People in poverty and disadvantaged backgrounds are often called “hard-to-reach groups” in this context, meaning their voices do not get heard in those events and surveys.
What OneWake does
Another (harder) option is for project personnel to go to the community through door-to-door canvasing and pop-up events. Unlike Kane, OneWake has been actively reaching out to people where they already are. They mentioned reaching out to several hundred local residents in Rochester Heights in this way in their inaugural meeting, and it looks like they’re holding a training session to teach more people how to do this on Monday.
This approach means OneWake doesn’t have to hope and guess about whether their messages were heard. But this also means they might not be transparent about who they talked to or how they got their results. Could they be asking for opinions in ways that are biasing people and skewing results? And how do we know they also didn’t cherry-pick their data?
They could be more open about their methods so we can answer these questions, but I haven’t seen anything like that on their website or Facebook.
Personally, I think the City, Kane, and OneWake have done a great job at getting certain opinions from certain disadvantaged people at certain times. But none of them give the full picture, and the “best” way to do that is still an active topic of research.
There’s a thread specifically about how surveys suck, if you’d like to talk more about this!