Request for Proposal (RFP)

Active Facilitation, Intervention, and Safety Trainings for The Metropolitan Area Planning Council

RFP Title: Active Facilitation, Intervention, and Safety Trainings

Description of Purpose of Procurement Need Summary: This Request for Proposal (RFP) is for the procurement of a vendor to assist the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) in building staff learning and capacity to respond to and de-escalate racist and insensitive remarks in public meetings. We seek proposals from qualified training providers that meet the training needs described below.

Estimated Duration of Project: not to exceed 6 months

Estimated Value of Procurement: not to exceed $25,000

Commonwealth Eligible Entity Engaging a Vendor

Eligible Entity Name: Metropolitan Area Planning Council

Type of Eligible Entity: Political Subdivision per MGL c. 40B. §§24 - 29

Eligible Entity Mailing Address: 60 Temple Place, Boston, MA

Contact Name: Ben Faust

E-Mail Address: [email protected]

This Request for Proposal (RFP) does not commit the Metropolitan Area Planning Council to approve a Statement of Work, pay any costs incurred in the preparation of a bidder’s response to this RFP, or to engage for products or services. The issuers of this RFP reserve the right to accept or reject any and all proposals received as a result of this RFP and to contract for some, all, or none of the responding vendors as a result of this RFP. The issuers further reserve the right to negotiate with any or all vendors who respond or cancel this RFP, in part or in its entirety, if it is in the agency's best interest to do so.

The Metropolitan Area Planning Council uses a standard Professional Services Agreement (included as Attachment A to this scope). The consultant is expected to enter into the Professional Services Agreement “as is” and without material alteration.

Procurement Step	Due Date
RFP Posted	03/20/2026
Bidders' Conference	04/09/2026
Bidder Questions Due	04/17/2026
MAPC Responses Submitted	04/22/2026
RFP Responses Due	04/30/2026
Interviews upon invitation with some, any, or none of the vendors	05/26/2026
Vendor selection/Notice of apparent successful bidder if awarded	06/05/2026
Contract Start Date	July 2026

Who we are:

Organizational Background

For more than 60 years, MAPC has served as the regional planning agency for Metropolitan Boston, serving the people who live and work in its 101 cities and towns. MAPC’s work is guided by MetroCommon 2050 (greater Boston’s regional plan adopted in 2021), by our 2025-2030 Strategic Plan, and by the results of our 2024 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Assessment. You can learn more about MAPC at our website: www.mapc.org

Equity at MAPC

Among the values MAPC considers most important is the agency’s commitment to racial equity, both in our organizational culture and operations and in the project work we do throughout the region. MAPC’s Equity Team supports the organization’s key equity goals. The Equity Team, staffed by representatives from all MAPC departments, creates tools, practices, and trainings that center equity in our work.

Context regarding Past and Ongoing Training & Capacity Building Efforts

In 2019, MAPC undertook agencywide racial equity training to encourage staff to reflect on their identity and privilege and how these things impact work relationships and projects/programs/areas of responsibility. Since that time, the Equity team and MAPC staff have organized several different internal events and developed internal resources to center racial equity in our projects. Some examples include a Racial Equity Diversity and Inclusion Statement that we use to communicate our equity commitments to partners, a Racial Equity Glossary that normalizes language across the agency, the Racial Equity Reframe model that gives Project Managers a tool for addressing racial inequities in projects, the Operationalizing Equity Framework that helps departments identify discipline specific historical and current inequities, and Equitable Project Standards which offer an equity-centered approach to project scoping.

Two affinity groups have continued conversations around racial equity at MAPC – the MAPC Staff of Color affinity group (MAPOC) and White Allies affinity group. In 2025, the White Allies group rebranded to be the Racial Equity Community of Practice group, where staff come together to learn and share practices that make their work more racially equitable.

Sampling of recent complementary training efforts

A small group of MAPC staff from across departments participated in a Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE) cohort alongside municipal partners, where they learned about and operationalized racial equity principles and frameworks. This included learning the Affirm, Counter, Transform (ACT) framework.

MAPC Directors have also participated in two ACT trainings with Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH), with plans to engage DPH in additional trainings for 45 more staff (mix of managers and staff at-large) in spring 2026. We hope that the proposal submitted in response to this RFP will complement these trainings.

Training Goals

Overview

MAPC’s leadership tasked the Equity Team with procuring a vendor to provide in person training on active facilitation, intervention, and personal safety for MAPC staff that facilitate public meetings and their colleagues and supervisors. We want the training to give employees the tools and skills they need to disrupt prejudiced and harassing remarks and, whenever possible, counter them with MAPC values and goals. Those tools and skills should support MAPC staff who are targets of racist and insensitive language as well as staff who are bystanders or audience to it. We also seek to train staff and supervisors to support staff who have been affected by the incident. All tools and trainings should pay attention to how an employee’s lived experience (race, gender, sexual identity, abilities, age, etc.) affects their authority and safety.

Rationale for MAPC Training

MAPC staff are committed to incorporating equity in our work, which includes work with the municipalities that we serve. These projects often involve presenting on and facilitating conversations about difficult topics, which often relate to race and discrimination. MAPC staff sometimes work in communities that are not familiar with racial equity concepts or are actively opposed to our equity-centered mission and values. These projects expose staff to subtle microaggressions and coded language and even outright antagonism and prejudice by community members and even project partners. On occasion, MAPC has offered space for staff to reflect on these instances and learn how to better talk about racial equity, but staff lack formal training on when and how to intervene or respond in these situations. MAPC does have a protocol for what staff and supervisors should do after such an incident, but not how a colleague and manager can best support affected staff after the incident.

Training Goals

MAPC wants staff to leave these trainings with the following skills:

Primary

Staff can react to insensitive and racist comments and actions safely.

Staff can turn insensitive and racist comments into learning and growth opportunities for those in attendance when it’s safe to do so.

Staff who experience insensitive and racist comments and actions understand how to get support from their supervisors.

Supervisors can support staff impacted by insensitive and derogatory comments.

Secondary

Staff can recognize signs that participants are likely to express racist or insensitive remarks and can intervene before it happens

Staff know how to support colleagues impacted by insensitive and derogatory comments

“Train the Trainers” so that MAPC attendees can provide this training to MAPC staff in the future.

Scope

Training Development and Expectations

Overview

MAPC recognizes and wants the training to communicate that there is no one right way to respond to insensitive and derogatory comments and actions. Staff, especially staff of color, are not obligated to react in a way that might make them feel threatened.

MAPC defers to the trainer in regards to the frequency and length of the sessions necessary to achieve our goals as long as it’s within the proposed budget. The training would be conducted in person at MAPC’s offices, in its main conference room (max 50 people), with the potential use of smaller nearby meeting rooms if necessary.

Expectations

Discuss how the proposed trainings will fit into MAPC’s equity planning and make recommendations on future and follow up trainings.
Trainers incorporate real-world scenarios and roleplaying, informed by MAPC’s work experience and project portfolio, so that staff have the chance to practice these skills in preparation for experiencing them in the field.
Provide in-person trainings.
Trainers provide digital or hard copy materials including a language bank with ready-to-use phrases and scripts, a resource guide for staff and supervisors, and short scenario examples.
Trainers account for, and make plans to avoid, the possibility of retraumatizing previously harmed individuals.
Record the session and create clips for continuous use in employee onboarding and to support continuing education.

Who to Train on What Topic

Consultants train staff who commonly organize, facilitate, and attend external meetings on the following priorities:

How to prepare for meetings, including how to anticipate possible problematic viewpoints;
How to identify racist and insensitive language in the moment;
When to intervene and how;
How to turn comments into learning moments for the audience;
When to exit a situation and how;
What to do after you’ve exited the conversation or when the conversation ends.\

Consultants lead supervisors of staff who commonly organize, facilitate, and attend external meetings on the following priorities:

How to support a staff member who is doing community engagement;
How to help your staff consider potentially harmful considerations in the scoping and planning of public events;
How to support a staff person who has experienced racist or derogatory remarks.

Responding to this Request

Submission

Please send submissions, including all attachments to <[email protected]> with “[Facilitation RFP] Company Name” in the subject line.

Required Documents

Proposers to this RFP must provide all the documentation described in this section. There are three main components to the submission:

Qualifications
Proposal narrative
Budget and Price Proposal
Examples of a public sector training plan of a similar size and scope
Exceptions, if any, to the existing Professional Services Agreement.
References
Contact information

Qualifications

Description of the proposed team for the project, their qualifications, and the resumes of each proposed individual. Representative resumes will not be reviewed. Experience with government agencies of similar size and scope is preferred. Not to exceed two pages.

Proposal Narrative

A concise and specific description of your proposal that answers all the questions set out below. The narrative provided will be the core component of the evaluation conducted by the MAPC Selection Committee. The proposal should not exceed five pages. Marketing materials will not be reviewed.

Please describe how you would meet the agency’s goals for racial equity training and customize the training to reflect the agency’s characteristics and mission;
Please describe the outcomes that the training would provide to MAPC staff and what steps your organization would usually recommend for follow up on the training, including any further activities, resources and programming the trainer(s) would provide after the trainings themselves; and
Please provide an outline for the training you would provide – describing the content for each topic, how long it would take, and how it would be conducted;
Please provide a timeline or schedule estimating when elements or phases of work described in the proposal will take place and be completed, including the involvement of key stakeholder groups (Equity team, MAPC Executive Leadership, etc.). The timeline should indicate where and when in the process key milestones and decision points are anticipated. This includes approvals that will be required by the agency leadership team.
Please describe how you would tailor the proposed training for the mix of staff identified in the scope;
For the proposed training session(s), please include information about the personnel you would expect to provide the trainings, including their biographies, resumes and relevant training experience.
Please also submit any relevant materials your organization has used to provide other similar trainings in the past. These materials do not have to be comprehensive but should serve as an example of the materials used at past such trainings.

Budget

The budget should cover all aspects of the project including a total cost, estimate for each deliverable / training session of the scope of work as well as a table that shows the anticipated project team by name, title, anticipated number of hours working on the project, and each individual’s hourly rate.

Examples of Relevant Experience

Please provide at least two examples of a public sector training plan of a similar size and scope that was facilitated by one or more members of the proposed team within 3 years (preferred) to 5 years (acceptable). Not to exceed one page total.

List of Exceptions

List any exceptions, if necessary, to the existing Professional Services Agreement.

References

Proposers must provide the following contact information for a minimum of 2 references that have received training services from the vendor within the last 3 years. A minimum of 1 of these references must have been active within the 12 months prior to the release of this request for proposals.

Customer Name
Years as a customer
Contact Person and their Email

Bidders’ Conference

Evaluation Criteria

Proposals will be evaluated based on the following:

Understanding of the project
Clarity and feasibility of the proposed approach
Relevant experience of key personnel, including with public sector entities
Quality of past examples of work and references
Interviews, if applicable, will be evaluated and incorporated into the final evaluation. Interviews will be conducted remotely. The project manager and relevant team members identified in a bid must attend interviews if conducted. Interviews would be a scored event.