The Aquarium That Changed Ben’s Thinking

Ben’s entry point into community-driven development came from a research question he was pursuing in college, roughly 25 to 28 years ago: why do similar projects produce such different results?

He was looking at two waterfront redevelopment projects from the 1980s and 90s — one in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and one in Camden, New Jersey. Both cities were heavily industrial waterfront communities trying to reinvent themselves. Both built aquariums. Both invested nine figures of public money. Chattanooga’s aquarium became a landmark success; Camden’s was a failure by almost every measure: attendance, educational benefit, economic catalysis.

The difference wasn’t the aquarium. It was the process.

“The Tennessee project had a years-long community engagement process where before they even decided they were going to build an aquarium, they started talking to really diverse groups of residents — really trying to bring in as many stakeholders as possible.”

In Chattanooga, the aquarium wasn’t a silver bullet solution dropped on a community. It emerged from a collaborative process involving residents, business leaders, and government — co-designed so thoroughly that the community showed up because they felt they owned it. In Camden, the project was decided and delivered. The community was consulted, not involved.

That distinction — between consultation as a box to tick and engagement as a genuine partnership-building process — became the foundation of Ben’s entire practice.

What Community Engagement Actually Looks Like

Ben is precise about what real engagement involves — and it’s not the big public meeting where 60 people sit in a room feeling competitive about who’s going to get funding.

Step one is understanding before engaging. Before sitting down with anyone, Agora Partners does a quantitative read of demographics: household size, multi-generational family structures, cultural backgrounds. Not to profile communities, but to understand where people are coming from before a first conversation.

Step two is small, candid conversations. Individual meetings or small group sessions first — asking about memories, asking about favourite experiences, asking what could be improved. Not what do you want the space to do, but: what’s your best memory from living here?

“We get much better insight into what their real emotional connection is to a space, how important a place is to them, and deeper into what those perceptions actually mean.”

Why does a community view an area negatively? Is it a legacy of crime? Physical deterioration? Something happening a block away? Without those specific, story-driven conversations, you can’t know — and a solution built on assumptions about what the problem is will produce another Camden.

Step three is curation. Once Ben’s team understands the specific strengths, interests, and capacities of different community stakeholders, they start pairing them deliberately. The organisation that’s excellent at community communications gets matched with the organisation that has a technical skill worth teaching. Combine them and you have a workshop that fills. Bring only the technical skill organisation and nobody shows up.

Step four is the full room. By the time everyone is gathered together, they’re not competitors — they’re collaborators. They’ve already been working in parallel toward shared goals. Ideas build on each other instead of cancelling each other out.

And then — and this is the part that distinguishes Agora Partners from most consultancies — the process doesn’t end.

“This type of community-driven engagement does not stop when design is over. It should continue in perpetuity.”

Social Resilience Is Climate Resilience

One of the most important moments in this episode comes when Ben connects community engagement to climate adaptation — not abstractly, but through lived examples.

During COVID, the spaces that were already considered community gathering points became essential infrastructure almost overnight: vaccination sites, resource distribution hubs, information centres. The communities that already had strong relationships with those spaces — that knew where to go and felt safe going there — were measurably better served.

The same pattern plays out after extreme weather. Ben describes working in Houston following a hurricane, where a community centre that was already deeply embedded in neighbourhood life became the information hub for people who had no power and couldn’t get official communications.

“Creating these systems and this infrastructure around engagement and communication is very, very valuable from a practical standpoint as storms only get worse.”

This is what Ben calls the social resilience dimension of climate resilience. Not just building seawalls or upgrading drainage — building the community relationships and governance structures that mean people know where to go, trust what they’re told, and can collectively respond when conditions deteriorate. Churches, community centres, markets, parks: these are not amenities. They are emergency infrastructure.

The COVID period also revealed something at the policy level: public spaces were briefly recognised as essential, not optional. Ben is candid that at the grassroots level, that recognition has held. At the institutional level — among government agencies — it has been uneven. The bigger the institution, the harder it is to sustain.

The Market Research Argument for Investors

Ben makes a sophisticated argument for why community engagement is not a cost to developers and investors — it’s the best market research they will ever access.

Institutional investors with a five-to-ten-year time horizon need to know whether people are going to show up, whether tenants are going to lease, whether a space is going to be used. A big-three consulting firm’s quantitative study tells them what the demographics look like on paper. A genuine, years-long community engagement process tells them what people actually want, what they’ll actually use, and what concerns could generate opposition that derails a project.

“We try to frame the community engagement process as the best market research you’re ever going to have access to. It creates a lot more insight than purely quantitative analysis.”

He’s also honest about the current landscape: AI and data centres are absorbing enormous amounts of institutional capital, and community development projects are competing for attention with investments that offer cleaner return profiles and shorter timelines. The engagement work is increasingly valued by the people executing projects — the developers, the project managers, the NGO partners — but hasn’t yet become a primary driver of investment decisions at the capital allocation level.

The perception issue is real: many conventional developers associate deep engagement with uncertainty, slower schedules, and loss of control. Ben’s counter is direct — if you’re intentional about engagement from the outset and design it sequentially, it doesn’t slow the project. It reduces the risk of the project being rejected, underused, or opposed after completion. Those are the uncertainties that actually cost money.

Where Resistance Actually Lives: The Public Sector Problem

One of the episode’s most clarifying observations is Ben’s assessment of where resistance to engagement is most entrenched — and it’s not where most people would guess.

The private sector has shifted substantially over 23 years. Developers now understand the financial value of what Ben calls “organic” authenticity — spaces that feel genuinely rooted in a specific community rather than imported from a developer’s playbook. That understanding drives demand for the kind of community engagement Agora Partners provides.

The public sector is a different story.

“I find more resistance on the public sector side when they have never done it before.”

His sharpest observation is regional: in the Southern United States, where the legacy of Jim Crow and exclusionary governance is still recent and present, government agencies have a much harder time with genuine engagement. The history of being excluded from government processes is not abstract for many communities in these regions — it’s living memory. The trust deficit is structural, not just perceptual.

In the West Coast, Northeast, and Canada, engagement is more often treated as standard practice. In the South and parts of the Midwest, it’s still a negotiation.

This is why third-party organisations like Agora Partners matter beyond just facilitation — they serve as trust intermediaries between communities that have reasons not to trust government processes and institutions trying to rebuild those relationships.

Governance as the Long Game

The final piece of Ben’s framework is governance — the structure that makes community involvement permanent rather than episodic.

The goal of the engagement process isn’t just to inform a project’s design. It’s to build the organisations, relationships, and communication channels that will steward that project over its full life. Often that means creating a new community-based nonprofit with a defined scope, a diverse board, and multiple funding streams — including some earned income from its activities within the development.

“Governance structure needs to evolve. The people on day one may not be the same people involved five or 10 years in the future.”

This governance layer also functions as a partial hedge against political change. When a new mayor is elected or a state government shifts, the community-based governance infrastructure that was built around a project creates continuity that purely government-managed spaces can’t achieve. The community owns a stake in it — and that ownership is not contingent on who wins the next election.

Key Takeaways from S05E03

🏙️ Community engagement is not a box to tick — it is the foundation of whether a project succeeds or fails. Chattanooga vs. Camden proves it with nine-figure public investments.

📣 Start small, then curate — individual and small-group conversations first, then deliberately pair stakeholders with complementary strengths, then bring everyone together. The order matters.

🌊 Social resilience is climate resilience — community spaces are emergency infrastructure. The relationships built around them determine how a neighbourhood responds when storms, pandemics, or power outages hit.

💰 Frame engagement as market research — for investors with long time horizons, deep community insight reduces the risks that actually cost money: opposition, underuse, and community rejection.

🏛️ Public sector resistance is underestimated — particularly in regions with histories of exclusionary governance. Third-party engagement specialists serve as trust intermediaries where government-led processes have a credibility deficit.

⚖️ Build governance, not just design — the engagement process should create permanent community-based governance structures that outlast any single administration and give communities a real stake in long-term stewardship.

Final Thoughts

Ben Donsky has spent 23 years working on the gap between what developers and governments say they want for communities and what they actually build. His practice is built on a deceptively simple insight: when you involve communities deeply and authentically, they show up. When you don’t, they don’t — and no amount of architectural quality or public investment can compensate for a space that nobody uses because nobody was asked if they wanted it.

The Chattanooga aquarium isn’t just a story about public space design. It’s a story about the relationship between legitimacy and success. A project that communities feel they own is a project communities sustain. A project delivered to a community — however well-designed, however well-funded — is a project that communities watch from a distance.

As cities face the compounding pressures of climate adaptation, housing crisis, and political volatility, the infrastructure that will matter most won’t be the infrastructure made of concrete and steel. It will be the infrastructure made of relationships, trust, and genuine participation.

“Community engagement and community-involved governance — it’s not only the right thing to do, it’s also how you balance commercial viability with the long-term social and environmental value of these projects.”