Trusted Ground: Kearns & West as the Bridge Between Projects and Communities

Group Members

Lucas d'Alva Duchrow

Clients

Kearns & West

Description

Trusted Ground explores how strategic communication can make facilitation work more visible, understandable, and publicly legible. Working with Kearns & West, this capstone project focuses on the challenge that much of the firm’s most important work happens behind the scenes: designing processes, facilitating difficult conversations, supporting public engagement, and helping stakeholders move from competing priorities towards agreement and action. Kearns & West describes itself as a collaboration and strategic communications firm founded in 1984, with experience across governance, facilitation, infrastructure planning, economic development, agriculture, and ecosystems, and with work that brings together agencies, industry, Tribes, and communities through transparent, inclusive engagement.

The goal is not just to explain what Kearns & West does, but to show why this kind of work matters. In environmental, infrastructure, and natural resource settings, collaborative processes are often essential to building trust, surfacing community priorities, and helping projects move forward without overlooking the people most affected. At the same time, because this work is process-driven rather than product-driven, its value is not always easy for outside audiences to see. This project responds to that gap by creating a small set of public-facing deliverables that highlight Kearns & West’s role in a clear, positive, and reusable way.

The final output will centre on three connected deliverables: a concise two-page fact sheet, a digital poster, and a LinkedIn-ready storytelling package utilizing a slide carousel integration. Together, these materials are intended to strengthen Kearns & West’s public presence, support future outreach and business development, and serve as templates the firm can build on.