The City of Medford announced the launch of a Community Outreach Task Force to enhance communication between city officials and residents. The initiative will create a group of neighborhood ambassadors from seven of Medford’s neighborhoods: Haines Square, Hillside, Lawrence Estates, North Medford, South Medford, West Medford and Wellington.
Ambassadors will meet monthly with the Mayor’s Office and Communications Department to share feedback and distribute information.
Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn said the structure is centered on improving two-way communication between residents and City Hall.
“The main goal is communications — [for residents] to receive communications from what they’re hearing in their neighborhoods and then also to deliver information and make sure that we’re using this other avenue to get people information from the city,” she said.
She added that the effort is intended to provide additional opportunities for outreach.
“This is just one extra way to try to hear what is going on in our neighborhoods and also make sure that information and things we’re working on [are] pushed out so everybody in the community is aware,” Lungo-Koehn said.
In a statement to the Daily, City Council President Zac Bears raised concerns with the process behind the task force’s creation.
“The Mayor’s Office did not involve the City Council in the creation of this task force, and the Mayor has not informed us that she intends to include the Council in the process of selecting its members or setting its goals,” he wrote. “Medford residents need and deserve more funding and resources for full-time city staff to conduct effective and robust public engagement and communications outreach about city policies and initiatives.”
Some residents have also questioned whether volunteer ambassadors are the best solution for improving city communication.
“I’d much prefer they hire a fully staffed and paid comms team that releases clear and accessible messaging (NOT just via social media). This critical task is not an unpaid task for volunteers in my opinion,” Jennifer Sullivan, a resident, wrote in a comment in a private Facebook group that the Daily was given permission to use.
Lungo-Koehn says neighborhood ambassadors will be responsible for a variety of duties.
“Monthly meetings, reviewing information coming out of the city, so that they’re able to verbalize it to their neighborhoods, getting to know residents in their neighborhoods, whether it be a coffee hour at a park or meeting up at a coffee shop or giving out popsicles on a summer day, to try to get to know people and get people engaged and involved,” she said.
The city is receiving applications through a form on its website and says applicants should be actively engaged in their communities. Lungo-Koehn said she hopes to see broad representation from across the city’s neighborhoods and that ambassadors will be kept informed about issues affecting their areas.
“They’ll know when important meetings [will take place], especially ones that are going to affect their neighborhood or the business district near their neighborhood, or the safety of our roads or safety for pedestrians and bicyclists and drivers,” she said.
The task force will also operate alongside the city’s roughly a dozen existing liaisons, who focus on multilingual outreach and connecting residents to services.
“I feel that it will be important for the ambassadors through this task force to meet with those connectors and liaisons during one of the monthly meetings, so everybody can get to know each other,” Lungo-Koehn said.
