Small groups then convened for world café-style discussions in order to share lessons learned, innovations, challenges, and best practices in the following topic areas within public engagement: early engagement; underserved/underrepresented communities; developing strategic relations with federal, state, local, and tribal governments; wilderness; assessments and BASI; timber suitability; species of conservation concern; and monitoring.

#### 3.1.1 Public Engagement Breakout Group on Early Engagement

##### Lessons learned and best practices

Lessons learned and emergent best practices included the importance of meeting the public in their own communities as early as possible to begin to establish working relationships, build trust, educate the public about forest planning, and learn about public preferences for engagement before the process begins. Participants noted that establishing relationships with community leaders helped create trust and increase public ownership of the plan. The group also agreed on the necessity of using a variety of media platforms, such as webinars and websites, to ensure that interested individuals can participate remotely. The group agreed that it is important to help the public understand what planning does and does not involve upfront and establish sideboards. This can include explaining to the public that travel management and project-specific issues will be excluded from the land management plan. Participants also noted that regular conference calls with regional offices to discuss lessons learned and share innovations are particularly helpful in order to help diffuse information across the agency and create more efficient planning processes.

##### Innovations

The Prescott National Forest encouraged early engagement by allowing communities to create vision statements that described their desired conditions of the forest and their vision for the forest for the next 15-20 years. This approach garnered strong interest from the public, and Forest Service staff felt this resulted in greater community commitment to following the process of plan revision. The Santa Fe National Forest also hired a collaboration specialist to help focus efforts on public engagement and used public events, such as farmer’s markets and county fairs, as outreach opportunities to educate the public about plan revision and expand mailing lists. Other innovations discussed by planning team members included using participatory geographic mapping to learn how communities relate to the landscape and weekly email updates to the public about the plan revision process and what is coming next.

##### Challenges

Attendees stated that there is a long-term need to track socio-geographic information in order to best understand community needs. Language translation was also identified as a challenge, and one planning team member cited the National Guard as being a helpful in this regard.

#### 3.1.2 Public Engagement Breakout Group on Underserved/Underrepresented Communities

##### Lessons learned and best practices

The 2012 planning rule encourages national forests to engage underserved and underrepresented communities including youth, minority, and low-income populations in the planning process. Lessons learned and emerging best practices in this area included finding community leaders within these groups and using co-hosted meetings to encourage further involvement by these populations. The group also agreed that using local schools is a particularly important strategy to