Community Experience (ComX)
Designing how neighborhoods and groups experience systems together
This is entry 7 of 10 in the Experience Tapestry™—a series on how public systems shape trust through experience—featured in our Civic Glossary.
What Community Experience means
Community experience (ComX) is about how groups—neighborhoods, cultural communities, coalitions—experience public systems collectively.
Unlike resident experience (RX), which focuses on individuals, ComX asks: What is the shared story of how communities interact with government and public services?
ComX captures the narratives, reputations, and memories communities carry about public systems, which often persist across generations.
Community experience (ComX) is about the shared stories people carry about government—stories that last across generations.
Why ComX matters in public systems
When ComX is positive, communities feel belonging and solidarity. When it’s negative, distrust can persist for decades.
Government services rarely affect only individuals. They shape—and are shaped by—community dynamics.
When ComX is negative, entire communities may distrust or disengage from institutions, even if individual services improve. This can deepen inequities, as historically marginalized groups avoid or resist public systems.
When ComX is positive, communities experience belonging and solidarity. Services feel not only usable but fair, and collective trust in public institutions grows.
What makes ComX impactful
Representation: services that acknowledge and respect cultural identities.
Transparency: decisions and processes that communities can see and understand.
Consistency: experiences that align across services, agencies, and levels of government.
Shared voice: structured ways for communities to participate in shaping policy and services.
Historical awareness: acknowledging past harms and addressing them in present practice.
ComX is about more than access—it’s about collective dignity.
Participation and research in ComX
Understanding ComX requires working with communities, not just individuals. Practices include:
Community-based participatory research (CBPR) that treats residents as partners in inquiry.
Collective design workshops where groups envision services together.
Storytelling and narrative research to understand how communities frame their experiences with government.
Feedback loops that share results back to communities in accessible ways.
Participation at the community level surfaces dynamics that individual surveys can’t capture.
Policy connections for ComX
Initiatives like Justice40 show how governments are beginning to treat community-level experience as a measurable priority.
The Justice40 Initiative requires federal programs to ensure that at least 40% of benefits from certain investments reach disadvantaged communities.
Many cities are piloting community engagement frameworks to measure and improve ComX (e.g., Boston’s Resilient Communities initiatives).
Internationally, participatory governance models (e.g., participatory budgeting in Brazil, Spain, and U.S. cities) demonstrate how community input transforms service outcomes.
Connections to other experiences
ComX builds on Resident Experience (RX), scaling it to the collective level.
ComX influences Civic Experience (CivX), since community trust or distrust shapes how groups participate in democracy.
ComX links to Environmental Experience (EnX), as environmental impacts often affect whole communities at once.
Public Servants’ lens on ComX
Community experience highlights that government doesn’t serve abstract individuals—it serves people in context.
Communities remember how they’re treated, and those memories shape collective trust and participation. Designing for ComX means honoring history, amplifying voice, and ensuring services build dignity at scale.
Community Experience (ComX) is one strand of the Experience Tapestry™—a series on how public systems shape trust through experience—featured in our Civic Glossary. Explore the next entry on Life Journey Experience (LJX) to see how public services can be designed around life’s milestones and transitions.
Improve community experience together
Public Servants works with agencies and nonprofits to understand and improve community experience. Contact us to learn how we can support participatory research and design at the community level.
