Community engagement for hyperscale projects

You can’t do community engagement on a deadline. I came across a contract offer recently. It was a community engagement ‘task and finish’ project over 2 months. But community work doesn’t work like that. If you want genuine engagement then you need trust and trust isn’t a task on a Gantt chart. People don’t open up when the timeline says so, they open up when they feel safe. Genuine relationships don’t form during engagement events. They grow in conversations after the meeting has ended, during those ‘water cooler’ moments, at the school gates chats, on the walk back to the car. If your timeline has a fixed slot for “community engagement,” ask different questions: Who already has trust here and are they in the room? Where do people naturally gather and are we showing up there? Are we listening to meet a deadline or to understand what’s really going on? Community engagement isn’t the soft bit before delivery, it is THE work. It’s slow, human, and sometimes uncomfortable. But when people start to trust the process, everything else moves further and faster than any deadline could force. Please repost if you believe others need to hear this. #CommunityDevelopment #CoDesign #Trust

What will data centers mean for electric bills, water use, grid reliability, and the environment? Who benefits, and who carries the risk? At The Brookings Institution, Dr. Nicol Turner Lee asked whether communities and data centers can ever reach agreement. I believe they can, but not by minimizing concerns. We must move beyond fear and noise by giving people clear information and a meaningful role in the decisions that affect them. AI may feel intangible. Its infrastructure is profoundly physical: land, water, power, transmission, fiber, permits, capital, and public trust. The energy challenge is significant. Data centers are adding major electricity demand while the grid faces aging infrastructure, extreme weather, interconnection delays, and growing demand across the economy. Meeting this moment will require more generation, more transmission, better coordination, and serious planning for resource adequacy and energy security. Communities belong in that conversation. Today’s decisions will shape reliability, affordability, environmental outcomes, and economic opportunity for generations. Four points I shared—and would bring into any boardroom: 👉 Trust is infrastructure. Plan, fund, and sustain it with the same discipline as a substation or fiber route. Engagement must begin while communities can still influence decisions. 👉 The permit is not the finish line. People deserve clear answers about power, water, rates, land use, noise, emissions, and environmental impact, and accountability after construction. 👉 Power and fiber make the intelligence economy possible. Without reliable power, there is no compute. Without resilient fiber, that compute cannot reach the businesses, institutions, and people it is meant to serve. 👉 Build the coalition before the capacity. Communities, local officials, utilities, regulators, and environmental advocates belong in the business plan—not simply on the risk register. Telecommunications offers a valuable lesson. Wireless deployment brought difficult debates over zoning and tower siting. But telecom companies also had long-standing community relationships built through presence, service, and dialogue. Those relationships created a foundation for working through disagreement. Thank you to Dr. Nicol Turner Lee and the The Brookings Institution Center for Technology Innovation for convening this important conversation; to Rep. Suhas Subramanyam for grounding it in the experience of Virginia’s 10th District; and to Abre' Conner, Esq.’, Ronald Newman, and Elena Schlossberg for their candor and perspective. The infrastructure of the future will transform industries. Whether it also strengthens communities will depend on who has the opportunity to shape it. #AIInfrastructure #DataCenters #EnergySecurity #CommunityEngagement

A Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) is no longer optional for major data center developments. It's the mechanism that turns a hostile township into a willing partner. But many developers misunderstand the financial mechanics of how a CBA actually works. It's not a generic donation. It's a legally binding contract that dictates who pays for what. Here is how the capital actually flows between the Developer, the Township, and the End User (the Hyperscaler). The Developer is the entity that signs the CBA with the Township. The Developer legally commits to funding specific community benefits. This could be hard infrastructure like expanding a water treatment plant, but it can also be funding new parks, schools, emergency service equipment, or local job training programs. The Township receives these funds directly or has the improvements built on their behalf, mitigating the negative externalities of the project. But the Developer rarely absorbs this cost entirely. Instead, the Developer underwrites the cost of the CBA directly into the project's pro forma. This increased capital expenditure is then passed through to the End User (the Hyperscaler) in the form of a higher purchase price when the developer sells the project outright. The Hyperscaler ultimately pays for the community benefits because they are the ones demanding the massive power and cooling capacity. They are willing to pay this premium because a fully zoned, de-risked site with community alignment is incredibly valuable. The Developer acts as the bridge, structuring the agreement to satisfy the Township, securing the zoning, and then selling the fully entitled site to the End User who needs the capacity. When you approach the zoning board with a fully funded plan to improve their community, the conversation changes completely. You stop being a burden and start being a catalyst for community improvement.

In his final article for The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Drew Lindsay penned a fascinating and insightful article about how several foundations are seeking to tie relocation of their headquarters to broader objectives of community health, vitality, and economic mobility.   Lindsay uses the Cleveland Foundation's efforts as a point of departure. But he also discusses efforts at The California Endowment, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the The Pittsburgh Foundation and the Greater Milwaukee Foundation. He also directs attention to Kresge’s relocation planning.   Three things stand out to me:   First, the programming within the public-facing floors of these foundations is imaginative and bold, including “third spaces” where community members can feel at home, safe, and engaged.   The California Endowment’s Los Angeles office has long been a community gathering spot, with public access both inside its meeting facilities and on its gardens and grounds. The Cleveland Foundation has dedicated half of its ground floor to a café, a neighborhood regranting organization, an art gallery, a dance studio, and other creative arts activities. The Greater Milwaukee Community Foundation has relocated from downtown to a renovated former department store on the northside, where the first floor will become a hub of community activity, including a café, a blood donation center, an early childhood center, and a workforce nonprofit. The Pittsburgh Foundation has dedicated the first floor of its new headquarters to community use.   Second, foundations aren’t limiting their investments to their headquarters buildings but instead are investing in neighborhood-based infrastructure.   The Cleveland Foundation has created an entrepreneurial (“collaboration”) center that includes a jazz club and a brewery, the Cleveland Art Institute Interactive Media Lab, a private firm investing in small businesses, a diabetes clinic, and other uses. The California Endowment will break ground next year on a mixed-use development including affordable housing as well as a community kitchen and space for community organizations providing health, job, and other forms of counseling.   Third, each of the featured foundations has elevated the importance of making its headquarters available for larger public convenings.   Perhaps the earliest example is the Kauffman Foundation, which created 40,000 square foot conference center (a third of its building) in Kansas City, MO for grantees and others working in its priority areas of education and entrepreneurialism. The California Endowment makes its conference centers in three locations available for public use at no charge.   These are philanthropies that are trying to live into what it means to be place-based organizations. We at Kresge are on a path that we hope may give even deeper meaning to that aspiration.   https://lnkd.in/gGmSMVyV

Social license isn’t granted by a permit; it’s earned from the community and sustained by the actions of project developers. I recently listened to the latest Latitude Media "Open Circuit" podcast featuring host Stephen Lacey in conversation with Christian Belady, the architect of Microsoft’s hyperscale infrastructure strategy and the creator of the PUE metric (and its water and carbon equivalents). This conversation is both necessary and insightful and worth a listen for anyone working in data infrastructure. Belady frames the shift perfectly: for the last decade, data centers were welcome guests, but that changed as the industry scaled. His advice is clear: listen first, design second. When neighbors raise concerns about water, noise, grid strain, or traffic, those aren’t risks to be managed with press releases. They’re inputs that should shape the site plan, buffer zones, cooling architecture, energy sourcing, and phasing from day one. Community Benefit Agreements shouldn’t be bolted on at the finish line; they should be co-designed early, tying measurable local outcomes directly to project success. While speed to compute is a clear goal for the industry, taking the time to listen, engage, demonstrate respect, and then take action in project planning and development may be the best accelerant. Measure twice, cut once... https://lnkd.in/e-99hkUa

We really need community architects to sort out this engagement spaghetti. Does this look familiar to m(any) of you? It's a heavily adjusted map of a past client's approach to engaging various audiences. It's a plethora of different people in different departments engaging the same audiences to achieve a variety of goals. And it's a total chaotic mess of overlapping roles and responsibilities. Organisations also deploy a wide variety of different approaches. → Some on-brand, some deliberately off-brand (authentic!). → Some are personable, others are scalable. → Some measured, others unmeasured. → Some gather and incorporate data, others just go with a gut. → Some are led by experienced professionals, others by junior staffers. We need community architects to put in place: 1. An overarching strategy covering engagement approach, goals, and measurement. 2. A governance plan for standard, shared, definitions, eliminating overlapping responsibilities, and an approved technological framework. 3. An improvement framework for codifying best practices, how best to engage different audiences, how to mature and grow the communities. 4. Stakeholder engagement processes, which cover a roadshow deck, proactive communication of value, and shaping internal messages. 5. A clear overarching measurement framework for tracking results vs. effort, a clean dataset, and dashboards for presenting the data, etc. As an organisation’s community efforts mature, so does the need for coordination between different efforts to avoid creating a technical and social spaghetti of overlapping interests and conflicting goals. 

Every proposal I've reviewed promises "community participation in monitoring." Almost none deliver it. The language is everywhere. "Beneficiaries will be actively involved in the M&E process." "Community feedback will inform program adaptation." "Participatory approaches will ensure accountability to affected populations." Then implementation starts. And here's what actually happens: The M&E team designs the tools. The M&E team defines the indicators. The M&E team collects the data. Communities answer the questions they're given. The results go to the donor. At no point did a community member influence what was measured, how it was interpreted, or what changed because of it. After 20 years in this field, I've come to an uncomfortable conclusion: most participatory M&E in development is participation in name only. Here are 5 signs your participatory M&E is actually extractive: 1️⃣ Communities provide data but never see the results. If the findings travel upward to the donor but never travel back to the people who provided them, that's extraction. 2️⃣ The indicators were set before any community consultation. If communities are asked to provide data against definitions they had no role in shaping, they're data sources, not participants. 3️⃣ No program decision has changed because of community input. Participation without influence is theater. If community feedback sits in an annex and never reaches a decision-maker, the process serves the report, not the people. 4️⃣ The same questions are asked quarter after quarter with no visible response. Communities are perceptive. When they see that nothing changes despite their input, participation fatigue sets in. Attendance drops. Trust erodes. 5️⃣ There's no budget line for feedback to communities. Translation, accessible summaries, community meetings to share findings, if these aren't budgeted, participation was never the real intention. Here's what programs that do it well look like: ✅ They share findings with communities within 30 days. ✅ They track which decisions changed because of community feedback. ✅ They let communities define what "success" means in their context. ✅ And they treat downward accountability as seriously as upward reporting. Participatory M&E was designed to shift power. In most programs, it hasn't shifted anything except the workload onto communities who give their time and get nothing back. Most M&E systems are accountable upward to donors. Very few are accountable downward to communities. Something needs to be changed. Does community feedback actually influence decisions in your program? #MonitoringAndEvaluation #MEL #ParticipatoryME #Accountability #InternationalDevelopment #CommunityEngagement #AdaptiveManagement

Bring Your Own Capacity (BYOC) for data centers may finally be getting the attention it deserves. It’s encouraging to see more voices highlighting the role distributed energy resources (DERs) can play in meeting the enormous power needs of the AI era. Ari Matusiak at Rewiring America has been working on it. Jigar Shah and Stephen Lacey just dropped an episode about it on the Open Circuit podcast. Others have also been talking about it. The idea is simple but powerful: Hyperscalers can “bring” capacity by helping deploy DERs in the communities where they build. Imagine a data-center developer offering households solar, storage, or heat pumps as part of a community benefit plan. Those distributed resources reduce local load and provide flexible capacity — which can count toward the data center’s power and flexibility needs. That creates a rare triple win: • Governors and communities benefit because real people see lower energy bills. • Hyperscalers benefit because it reduces NIMBY friction while creating a flexible capacity cushion. • Utilities and regulators benefit because DERs help address the affordability challenge on the grid. In other words: AI infrastructure helping finance the electrification of American homes. I’m eager to see the first major data-center announcement that actually includes BYOC through DER deployment. When that happens, it could become a blueprint for how we build the next generation of digital infrastructure — with communities, not just around them.

Every day, I wake up to another story about how community opposition is stalling data center projects. Danielle Decatur, vice president of community engagement at developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure, has been laser-focused on this issue for as long as I can remember (first at Microsoft, and now in her current role), and she shared some of her best practices during my mainstage interview with her at the recent #TrellisImpact. Two of my takeaways from our talk: - Better transparency is not optional: The practice of requiring public officials to sign non-disclosure agreements isn't sustainable. Stop doing it! The hunger for more information is not lost on the big three (Amazon Google and Microsoft), who have gotten a whole lot more willing to reveal the water and electricity consumption at specific sites. (Check out their latest reports, all out within the last two weeks.) The same transparency is needed at blueprint phase. - Moratoriums on data center development aren't necessarily a bad thing: It's like pushing pause on the remote control to pull yourself out of the drama of the moment. Cloverleaf uses them as an opportunity to talk to communities without the clocking ticking; which provide guidance for what might win people over in the future. "I mean, it helps when you have instructions, right?" Danielle said during our conversation. You can watch the interview right at the start of this keynote video series: https://lnkd.in/erxqsr7f Trellis Group