"Urban Camping" - engaging in short timeframes

I come from a community open space and event management background so my story of adaptation is tilted towards this - the story below was working in public land open space management.

Ordinarily our community event engagement and approval process for public land use for a major event involves months of meetings, teleconferences and various stakeholder interactions and engagement tools including surveys, brainstorming and site map drafting - back and forth to reach agreement. We had existing very strict timelines and documentation to support this process.

In this instance a non-for-profit community group had marketed a large event in a suburban capital city and engaged a number of well-known key speakers and traditional owners for the event prior to seeking public land approvals. We as land managers became aware of the event at short notice and there were various sensitivities to take into consideration including media/PR risk due to the nature of the event, existing anti-social behavioural issues in the same area, camping location in an inner city area, safety of infrastructure and use of fire at the event. Over a period of 48 hours my team coordinated and facilitated both face to face meeting and teleconferences with written and video follow ups to engage with the various stakeholders including nearby tenants, local residents and businesses and traditional owner group elders to ensure all parties were aware(albeit at short notice with context provided), informed (so they knew what to expect and exactly what was involved) and engaged with the event plans to see what value they could add and outcomes involving compromises were agreed.

The event occurred safely and peacefully with learnings taken forward to future events in the ways in which to more holistically look at approvals, engage stakeholders at short notice whilst trying to alleviate stress and collaborate for a shared outcome.