To successfully accomplish our mission, EPA needs active participation from the public. Effectively engaging communities means we will need to make information easy to understand; find diverse ways to reach the public (both electronically and via traditional means); find creative ways to hear their needs and suggestions; and work with partners, stakeholders and other federal agencies to make informed decisions and find the best solutions.
Because of our reliance on the public, we determined that we would have more impact by defining and launching a broad Community Engagement initiative as our Flagship, with targeted projects and activities across the Agency. Community Engagement includes a broad spectrum of activities intended to promote a greater understanding of, participation in, and contribution by individuals regarding the environmental issues that affect or interest them most.
To implement our Flagship initiative, we selected three projects and associated activities - each designed to involve the public and/or a particular segment of the population in greater depth than in the past. The three projects include:
- Expanding the Environmental Conversation with Communities
- Expanding Public Awareness and Involvement in the Development of Rules and Regulations
- EPA Mobile Applications (apps) to Empower Citizens Environmental Decisions
Collectively, the projects and supporting activities support all five of our mission-focused strategic goals, and all three of our cross-goal strategies.
Individually, each project and supporting activity varies in how we engage the public. We will gather best practices and lessons learned to benefit the Agency and potentially other Federal agencies. And we will evaluate existing policies and standard practices, and potentially develop new ones, as we implement the Flagship to foster an open culture throughout EPA. For each project, we provide the following information:
- How the project supports one or more of the three open government principles.
- How agency operations will be improved/benefits across the Agency.
- How we will identify affected and interested parties, engage them and maintain a dialogue.
- Identification of any external partners.
- How we will measure improvements to openness principles.
- Steps we will take to sustain the initiative and build in improvements
View progress reports for the Open Government Flagship Initiative: Community Engagement below.
You may need a PDF reader to view some of the files on this page. See EPA’s About PDF page to learn more.