My name is Cheryl-lee Madden: creating positive engagement with diverse Vancouver communities.
As your interdisciplinary community demographer, my advocacy ensures your community group’s opinions, ideas, and points of view are not only heard and understood but have a civic-level impact—especially amidst competing voices and opinions. I am passionate about women—who were disproportionately affected within the retail food services and have experienced a greater degree of job loss—who now face unemployment post-pandemic. To this end, I advocate for labour force gender equality and believe the spatial mismatch hypothesis will shed a light on who is returning to the downtown central business district. We can create critical social infrastructure to ensure women are not being permanently left behind.
To achieve these GOALS, the MMC “thinking outside the box” focus-group approach will ensure that collaborative consultative engagement works for you in all demographics and skill level sets. See examples of me in action working for you. See my CV.
As your community consultant, I ensure that this partnership building includes positive-outcome illustration appealing to the rich diversity of Vancouver communities.
Community partnership building involves creating healing, post-colonial space-time reclamation in collaboration with the Black community (in cartographic Afrofuturism visualization, for example), listening to Indigenous People, people of colour, the elderly, newcomers, refugees, and other diverse groups by filing reports that voice their concerns within City Hall—where it matters most!
MMC aims to establish and maintain collaborative working relationships with the Chinatown Historic Area Planning Committee; the Civic Asset Naming Committee; the False Creek South Planning Advisory Group; First Shaughnessy (that has a focus on preserving the special character of this heritage conservation area); the Gastown Historic Area Planning Committee; the Hogan’s Alley Society (HAS); and the Northeast False Creek Joint Working Group (NEFC). My passionate direction will create the equitable outcomes your community desires.
At a higher level, my Team Lead engagement involves working with all stakeholders of considerable experience providing advice to senior managers.
This work connects closely with Vancouver City Hall internal and external organizations, such as the Vancouver Park Board, Vancouver Public Library, Vancouver School Board, Vancouver Fire and Rescue, Community Centre Associations, Greater Vancouver Neighbourhood Associations, Council Committees, and other key stakeholders.
I advocate by using Eight Principles of Equitable Public Engagement:*
- Inviting participation authenticity and accountable engagement process
- Planning early and proactively
- Establishing respectful relationships with Indigenous Peoples
- Engaging with the internal diversity of a community
- Working in reciprocal relationships with communities
- Tailoring engagement plans to the context
- Committing to ongoing learning and improvement
- Advancing systemic equity
My work involves scoping projects for inclusion and accessibility, which entails exploring participant identities and lived experiences and addressing barriers to accessibility.
My collaborative consultative engagement involves a response to the increasing pressure that Vancouver is facing to address many converging and complex challenges, such as equity, climate change, and the health and well-being of its residents.
For example, one question community groups could ask is, “How might we deliver a healthy city for all seniors, by putting together innovative ideas during focus groups and workshops that support them in solving their issues?”