I held a highly successful KTS workshop in Kitsap County, Washington State on Friday 13 February 2009.
Over sixty participants attended.
A video has been made of the workshop.
For information, please contact Rhiannon Fernandez at rfernand@co.kitsap.wa.us or + 1 360 337 7097
Why are community engagement processes failing to engage local people with sustainability issues? And what can we do about it? I took a hard look at current community engagement processes in Canada, Australia and elsewhere. And I found them failing to meet the challenges posed by sustainability in our cities and towns.
My intention was to inspire my audience to use more targeted and tested methods based on leading practice principles that build community confidence and capacity and open the door to true community engagement: methods that help local people understand the dimensions and pitfalls of sustainability and build hope and confidence for the future.
The lecture was co-sponsored by the City of Coquitlam, District of North Vancouver and the SFU City Program.
Kitchen Table Sustainability, was formally launched by Mr Stephen Hynes of Hillside Developments.
Known as “the social developer”, Stephen Hynes is a leading member of Vancouver and British Columbia’s property development community. He says:
“We appear individually powerless to change the great structures that condition our lives. But if we understand their influence we can make local, incremental improvements.”
See www.hillside.ca/
Here is a link to a video of the lecture:
The other day we abandoned the shed to the rats, the python and the floods and drove to the University at the Gold Coast. I was a bit early for my lecture so I enjoyed listening to the students making their presentations about a planning project.
They were sophisticated postgraduate students and very articulate. Great research and fine ideas.
But, oh, the PowerPoints!
In my new book, SpeakOut: a Step-by-step Guide to SpeakOuts and Community Workshops (see www.speakoutplanning.com), released by Earthscan last month, my co-author Wiwik Bunjamin-Mau and I dedicate part of a chapter to this issue because it’s such a massive problem in community engagement.
It’s bad enough in professional forums to have people reading long lists of bullet points or making the audience plow through dense text. But in community meetings, this can be the kiss of death. It can bring an otherwise lively and thoughtful event to a dead stop.
What are we to do to liberate this technology?
It’s very helpful and handy to have the handouts and the various features PowerPoint offers. I’m not debating that. It’s about trying to keep it straightforward and simple and interesting.
And not having every single slide “badged” with a corporate logo and a title that’s endlessly repeated. Blessedly, the features of flying wedges of text have now pretty much disappeared. But the dreary bullet points continue.
I suggest that if you are using PowerPoint, do not override the recommended font size unless you are making the font larger. For example, for a slide with a few major bullet points, PowerPoint suggests 32 point for the text and 44 point for the title.
For one with more detail, the recommended point size for the text is still 28 point.
I also suggest that you keep the number of words to a limit and use the opportunity provided by the software to make handouts for distribution to workshop participants. That way they can read along and make notes for their own use.
There are, fortunately, many excellent books to help ensure that your presentations (and especially those by technical ‘experts’) are appropriate for workshop and meeting audiences and participants.
Presentations for Dummies (2004) by Malcolm Kushner is an excellent start, as is Brilliant Presentation by Richard Hall (2007). Kushner has a particularly valuable section called ‘Avoiding Common Mistakes with PowerPoint’ (pages 235-243).
I have summarised below some important pointers from both of these books:
Dos:
Don’ts:
Please can we start a conversation about this? I need support in my quest to liberate PowerPoint in community settings.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Am I being too harsh here? Is there more to life than the “rules” of presentation?
Please respond!
Sources:
Atkinson, Max (2005). Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Making Speeches & Presentations, Oxfor University Press, Oxford and New York.
Hall, R. (2007) Brilliant Presentation: What the Best Presenters Know, Say and Do, Pearson Education, Harlow, UK
Kushner, M. (2004) ‘Mastering the power of PowerPoint’, in Presentation for Dummies, Wiley, New York
It’s a worry!
I’ve explained before that community engagement — especially with sustainability — is not an easy task.
Many people argue that it is problematic and can actually hurt those it is most intends to benefit.
So let’s just have a quick look at some of the major critcisms. I’d love to hear comments back and maybe we can prepare a good list of responses.
And then figure out how to make better processes happen in our communities.
Please make a comment in the box below or contact me at wendy@sarkissian.com.au
or this email address for Canadians (for whom I seem to be on a Canadian spam list): Wendy.Sarkissian@gmail.com
Thanks!
What do YOU think of this list?
I was speaking about Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation the other day to a group of students and I said that I thought it’d been eclipsed (in the past forty years) by other, better, models. I noticed an embarrassed look on the teacher’s face. Perhaps they had not updated their model?
Well, in South Lanarkshire (which is Glasgow, actually), the Scots have nailed it and come up with a much better model.
I can just imagine them, on a frosty Scottish night, putting another log on the fire and dreaming up this elegant model. It’s called “the Wheel of Participation”.
You can download the full 1998 article in the British journal, Planning, by clicking on this link: Davidson Spinning wheel article1998
The authors are local municipal practitioners working to redefine the ‘ladder’ of citizen participation originally proposed by Arnstein by offering an innovative approach to conceptualising the various dimensions of communication and engagement processes. They argue that a correct approach to public engagement could revitalise the planning system. To engage local communities effectively in the planning system, new and innovative approaches are required. The Wheel of Participation helps to minimise ambiguity associated with consultation, including reliance on inappropriate techniques and unclear objectives (see the illustration below).
The Wheel highlights four overarching approaches to community involvement:
The concept is that, with community involvement, a decision would be made as to which quadrant of the Wheel the project belonged. Then the appropriate strategy or strategies would be selected. The Wheel will only work equitably as a model if this pivotal decision is taken collaboratively. Otherwise, in the hands of cautious proponents, all projects could be deemed as ‘information-only’ projects and only limited approaches selected. The various categories of communication and engagement processes identified in the four quadrants of the Wheel are summarised below.
Drawing by Steph Walton
Minimal communication
Council deciding on all matters itself, without community consultation (except when legally required to do so, via the minutes of committee meetings.
Limited information
Telling the public only what you want to tell them, not what the public wants to know.
Good-quality information
Providing information which the community wants and/or needs, e.g., discussion papers/exhibitions for development plans, guidance notes for conservative area development.
Limited consultation
Providing information in a limited manner with the onus often placed on the community to respond, e.g., posters and leaflets.
Customer care
Having a customer-oriented service, e.g., introducing a customer care policy, providing a complaints/comments scheme.
Genuine consultation
Actively discussing issues with communities regarding your ideas before taking action, e.g., liaising with tenants’ groups, customer satisfaction surveys.
Effective advisory body
Inviting communities to draw up proposals for the department to consider.
Partnership
Solving problems in partnership with communities, e.g., a formal partnership.
Limited decentralised decision-making
Allowing communities to make their own decisions on some issues, e.g., management of community halls.
Delegated control
Delegating limited decisions–making powers in a particular process or project, e.g., tenant management organisations and school boards.
Independent control
Council obliged to provide a service but chooses to do so by facilitating community groups and/or other agencies to provide that service on their behalf, e.g., the delivery of care services contracts by the voluntary sector.
Entrusted control
Devolving substantial decision-making powers to communities, e.g., tenant management.
Davidson, S. (1998) ‘Spinning the wheel of empowerment’, Planning, vol 1262, 3 April, pp14–15
I have something to tell you
I guess everyone who’s been a speaker has had an experience like mine. But when it happened I was initially devastated. I’d been asked to speak to an aged care organisation’s conference. I’d written a story about a feisty older woman who was moving about her future community with ease and independence.
The story was part of a consulting project I’d been doing about ageing in the City of Brisbane and I closely identified with the progress of my heroine, whom I described as part-Aboriginal.
You can click on the link below for the whole story: A Vision for Brisbane
The speech was a disaster. Angie, my assistant, was the only one who clapped in an audience of maybe three hundred.
What had gone wrong?
Later, after we visited the conference sponsors’ displays and stalls, we figured it out. I had been talking about community engagement, empowerment and the independence of older people to the wrong people! These, it seemed to me, were the people who traded in dependency. The people who made walkers and special beds to raise you up so the carer does not wreck their back hlepign you back into bed. Admirable folk. But not much into what I was talking about. Or so it seemed to me at the time.
My friend Shelagh, a retired academic, who did the first copy-edit of Kitchen Table Sustainability, lives in high-quality retirement housing in Vancouver. She recently reported that she has been able to give up her walker (at 83) and walk with a cane again. After some months of hydrotherapy.
Expressing my delight, I countered that I had noticed that almost all the people living in her establishment seem to have walkers. I thought perhaps it was the retirement village organisation’s risk-management policy in action?
So, to the topic of this blog: community engagement for older people. People like me and my Baby Boomer friends. And the “Veterans”. Like Shelagh.
There are a few tips in the material that follows. Just click on the link below to download a summary:
Community Engagement with Older People download
It boils down to respect, respect and respect. And not expecting to exploit or foster compliance and dependence.
We Baby Boomers are a stroppy lot, used to getting our way, being the taste-makers and having influence.
We are not likely to be content with the sorts of weak and tokenistic community engagement that often passes for the real thing.
Just ask Shelagh.
Don’t let anyone tell you differently. Community engagement is a tricky matter.
We need to be flexible and still keep our eyes on the ball. It’s a changing landscape. A bit like navigating white water rapids in a small canoe.
When we add the issues of “sustainability” to the mix, things become more complex.
Here are eighteen good ideas to help keep us afloat in difficult times. They’re based on my practice and reading over the past forty years.
1. Distinguishing between community consultation and communication.
THIS MEANS: Making a clear distinction between the work of public relations, communication and marketing personnel and those undertaking community engagement and not allowing a “PR” approach to dominate the approach of the team.
2. Capacity building: developing community knowledgeability and literacy about complex technical and environmental issues:
THIS MEANS:
Helping local people understand the implications of the discourses about sustainability and growth issues and to relate them to this project
3. Beyond identifiable stakeholders (the “usual suspects”)
THIS MEANS: Reaching much deeper into communities and using a much wider range of approaches than is usually employed with identifiable stakeholder groups. This has significant resource implications.
4. Addressing issues of cultural diversity by actively engaging culturally and linguistically diverse (CaLD) communities
THIS MEANS: Finding ways to target non-English-speaking and other cultural groups and to build bridges between and among cultural groups to open up a community conversation about options. This has significant resource implications in terms of translation and interpretation of all processes. It will be essential that processes employed with non-English speakers not be seen as abbreviated or lesser than processes for English-speaking community members.
5. Tempo
THIS MEANS: Finding ways to maintain community interest and involvement over a long period, perhaps by tying processes to established community events and activities. Whatever processes are used to maintain pace and tempo, they must not smack of “tokenism and must be related to real target dates and deliverables.
6. Link to specific Council community engagement plans/protocols and successful modes of operation
THIS MEANS: A full inspection of each Council’s preferred ways of operating and reference to government protocols.
7. How can we ensure that consultation outcomes are actually fed into the feasibility study process?
THIS MEANS: An integrated design for the feasibility process which clearly indicates when and how community information and opinions will be taken into account to influence decisions at key target dates and deadlines. Feedback loops must be established so that the community can see how their views are being taken into account in the refinement of the approach taken.
8. Representativeness and tracking of community engagement activities and successes
THIS MEANS: Ensuring that participants in community engagement processes are representative of the wider community; developing and using deliberative democracy and other emerging processes that enhance representativeness; regular monitoring of representativeness issues and including ways to increase representativeness.
9. Relationships between and among various advisory groups and the servicing of these groups.
THIS MEANS: Developing clear draft terms of reference for each advisory group, including draft working protocols, assisting groups in refining these terms of reference and protocols and establishing clear reporting and liaison relationships between those groups and the project management, the ongoing community engagement strategy, as well as between those groups.
10. Skills and experience of engagement personnel, including experience with complex projects
THIS MEANS: Ensuring the personnel are selected and/or engaged who have a wide range of relevant successful experience and that senior personnel are employed, so that the community engagement function of a study is not seen as a “poor relation” with little real power to influence outcomes.
11. Evaluation proposals for community engagement:
THIS MEANS: Creation and maintenance of clear evaluation frameworks for the community engagement and precise use of outside evaluators (if engaged). In particular:
12. A wide range of proposed approaches to be used (not simply a few old-fashioned approaches)
THIS MEANS: Community engagement processes should reflect the wide range of available approaches and not be limited to the traditional modes (often limited to public meetings, focus groups and exhibitions). Approaches should be selected for their relevance to the task at hand and the stage of the process, as well as the degree of community empowerment and partnership envisaged. A wide understanding of available methods should be demonstrated.
13. Encouraging the sustainability debate (to counteract NIMBY responses)
THIS MEANS: Actively pursuing community education options so that local people are offered genuine opportunities to explore the implications of automobile dependence for the sustainability agenda and develop an interest in exploring options. This will require a much richer model of community engagement than has been used on some projects.
14. How reports from community engagement personnel will be presented and how qualitative data and the emphasis participants place on issues will be depicted.
THIS MEANS: Employing sophisticated ways of analysing qualitative information so that it does not get treated as inferior to so-called “hard” data from engagement (or other) processes. Including the raw information for all processes so that participants can track how the material they provided was reported.
15. Intergenerational participation: involving children and young people
THIS MEANS:
16. Opportunities for creativity, where local people can become engaged at a deep level.
THIS MEANS:
17. Electronic means of engagement: what methods work best and what methods are feasible for this project?
THIS MEANS: Working with all levels of government and other specialists and advisors to develop appropriate electronic community engagement methods and monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of any selected methods or techniques.
18. Reaching and engaging hard-to-reach groups and individuals.
THIS MEANS: Developing specific approaches to target hard-to-reach and marginalised groups (older people, people with a disability, Indigenous people, young people, members of CaLD communities, isolated and/or rural residents….) and monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of those approaches.
I met my mentor, Clare Cooper Marcus in 1973. So we’ve been friends and colleagues for over 35 years. She and her husband, Stephen, were visiting Australia from California. “You’d like my wife,” Stephen remarked.
Stephen was right: I liked his wife. Finding a shared interest in almost everything from spirituality to medium-density housing, we formed a friendship that endures today.
I’m the one who decided that Clare was my mentor. It doesn’t detract from “friend”, in my view. It just deepens it.
Sometimes I feel that Clare is my “tester”. Now a retired professor, she discovers something, explores all its dimensions, tells me about it and how to “do” it and then I follow along, somewhat shyly and perhaps reluctantly, in her footsteps.
In the late seventies, when I spent a couple of years teaching at her university in Berkeley, we’d launch forth on our famous “site visits” (mostly for fun but ostensibly as research for our book, Housing as if People Mattered, University of California, 1986), complete with a full kit: thermoses of tea, china cups, cloth napkins and homemade biscuits. Morning tea was as essential ritual. We’d camp in a dingy courtyard of a public housing estate or an equally depressing open space in a new gated community, unpack our treasures and share our repast.
Clare’s “Space Cookies” a chocolate-and-oatmeal shortbread delicacy, were a great incentive for me to trudge with her through boring housing estates and display villages with (what we deemed to be deceptive) three-quarter-sized furniture. We were rarely polite to those we found responsible for some of the abominations of that housing form we discovered between 1973 and the present day. (I look forward to another round of “site visits” in September this year when I visit Clare.)
In my new book, co-authored with Dianna Hurford and Christine Wenman, Creative Community Planning: Transformative Practices for Working at the Edge (Earthscan, 2010), I say this:
The blessings that the courageous and poetic Clare Cooper Marcus continues to bring to my life are chronicled in many places in this book. We’ve been friends since 1973. We wrote a book together, Housing as if People Mattered, in 1986 and it’s still in print! I can attribute most of my journeying in creative and spiritual realms to her spirited encouragement.
Although I was never, formally, Clare’s student, I am that student. And I bow deeply in gratitude to my mentor.
English-born Clare’s lived in the same house in Berkeley for thirty-five years. Her kitchen is a marvel of “house as a mirror of the self”, as is her bountiful garden. I’ve memorialized both in a story called “The Warm Kitchen”, which you can download from this link: The Warm Kitchen
One of the things Clare taught me is about guided visualisation, a topic I’ll explore in future blogs. I learned what this process can be and how a rich and deeply moving engagement with the past or the future is vastly different from the boring and “rational” so-called “visioning” approaches used by most planners and engagement practitioners. Clare’s work on the “Environmental Autobiography” is legendary and a must-read for design students and those in environment-behaviour research.
Some of us are blessed with family. Others have wonderful friends. I belong to the second category. The family I have is great but there’s not many of them and most live far away.
A wise friend once told me when I was feeling lonely for “family” that “spirit is thicker than blood”.
Clare Marcus is not my blood relation.
But after 36 years of friendship, her spirit is in my blood.
Clare on her birthday, 2009
Some reading:
Marcus, C.C. (1978) ‘Remembrance of landscapes past,’ Landscape vol 22, no 3, pp34–43
http://iurd.berkeley.edu/catalog/Reprint_Titles/Remembrances_Landscapes_Past
Marcus, C.C. (1979) Environmental Autobiography, Working Paper 301, January, Institute for Urban and Regional Development, University of California, Berkeley http://iurd.berkeley.edu/catalog/Working_Paper_Titles/Environmental_Autobiography
Marcus, C.C. (2006) House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home, second edition, Nicolas-Hayes, Inc, Lake Worth, Florida
http://www.amazon.com/House-As-Mirror-Self-Exploring/dp/0892541245
Marcus, C.C. and Sarkissian, W. (1966) Housing as if People Mattered: Illustrated Site-Design Guidelines for Medium-Density Family Housing, University of California, Berkeley
http://www.amazon.com/Housing-People-Mattered-Medium-Density-Development/dp/0520063309
Sarkissian, Wendy, “The Warm Kitchen”. Downloadable from this link: The Warm Kitchen
We’ve had the man from the Country Fire Service around to look over the property.
“Don’t plant any more trees,” he said. “Don’t you know how dangerous it is to live uphill from a gully?”
No more trees.
A hard ask when it’s so hot in the summer.
We’re doing what we can.
When there’s smoke on the horizon, as there was earlier this week, I get to remembering how frightening fire can be in the bush. All my neighbours know this, of course. And my “fire” experience has to do with a very different bioregion: the Top End of northern Australia.
Everything is different there from this subtropical paradise: dramatic thunderstorms, fierce winds, endless periods of rain and dry in strongly defined seasons. The Aboriginal people say there are six: Yegge, Wurrgeng, Gurrung, Gunumeleng, Gudjewg and Banggerreng.
My first bushfire was in August 1991. In Humpty Doo.
I can still smell the fear of it.
I remember the dramatic differences in the “before” and “after” landscape.
Before and after the Fire, 1991
And I still sense in my body my own terrified response:
In the middle distance I spotted dark smoke rising above a wall of orange. The horizon, formerly hidden by a rich woodland understorey, trees and shrubs, now expanded for acres, revealing the scarred landform’s idiosyncrasies: stream banks, hillocks and depressions. Scattered across this moonscape were burning and smoking stumps, charred skeletons of acacia, woolly butt, kapok bushes, ironwood, carallia, billy goat plums, some without leaves or branches. Only the tallest retained a thin green canopy crowning their blackened branches.
The black, twisted stumps of leafless cycad ferns like amputated limbs. Large birds I’d never seen before spiralled overhead, wheeling and diving on insects and small animals seeking refuge at the fire’s margins.
And the sound of it: the tearing and thudding of huge trees crashing into the earth.
I feel like my life is about to be burned down. With me inside.
That day a hundred acres of neighbours’ bush burns a quarter-mile from my house. Cause unknown. Spot fires burn everywhere, as far as I can see.
Spot fires burn in my heart, burning all my raw places, burning away my shell, exposing vulnerable new places.
Flames are spreading with every breath, spreading throughout my being.
Our neighbour to the west, Trevor, has just planted twenty new shrubs to give us a bit of privacy from each other.
Neighbour Lis, a horticulturalist, bought the plants and Karl helped Trevor with the mulching. I hope they won’t be a problem because we really need to shade the western wall of our new house.
Like Robert Frost, we believe that “good fences make good neighbours”. In this case, trees, rather than fences.
So we try to be prudent and meet our other needs. It’s always this way for us new ones on the block: a sort of awkward, inexperienced, balance … a searching for some sort of equanimity in this rural place …
I try to be reasonable. But I know I’m not reasonable when I smell gum trees burning.
I was too close to that once and it really frightened me.
You can download the full (true) story of ”Watching the Fire” by clicking here: Sarkissian Watching the Fire 2009
This week, when the storms came and the rats and python got into the shed, I had to do some quick work to rescue my scrapbooks. I was unprepared for the emotional impact.
But the urgent task became a meditation and yielded a great blessing.
My father’s American Green Card (such a valuable treasure for a Canadian!). His Maui driver’s license with his photograph dated 1973. Yellowed newspaper obituary clippings about my great-grandfather, the charismatic Armenian preacher, Rev. Harootune Sarkissian, describing what could only be called a “triumphant death”, surrounded by family, singing Armenian hymns. He was in Connecticut, aged 96. I remember visiting his grave.
Then I discovered the letter from my former partner.
It was only a few lines and printed in pencil. I remembered the circumstances. I was standing at the table sorting papers and had to sit down as sweet memories washed over me.
It was a mutual decision to part after eight years and we were both grieving for what we had lost. We engaged a Sydney therapist for four sessions to say our goodbyes.
This tiny scrap of paper was my partner’s letter to me, written as a child would write to a dear friend who was moving away. Printed in his non-dominant hand. That’s what the therapist instructed us to do.
The letter said we’d soon be parting and he would miss me greatly. He asked me to remember the good times we had and closed with an expression of love. I’d printed a similar letter to him, I recalled, tears now streaming down my cheeks.
Yes, I remember the good times and I missed them — and him.
I bless the friendship we have shared since those painful sessions. I count him as a dear friend. In over twenty years, I doubt we’ve said one harsh word to each other. In fact, the therapy sessions were so powerful and effective that, other than a small altercation about lending the car, we never argued or disagreed. From places deep in our broken hearts, we told each other what was important – what needed to be said.
We sang songs to each other and each gave the other a small gift.
Our therapist showed us great kindness and compassion. He even cried with us, perhaps for his own losses…
I carefully folded and packed away the tiny letter, more cherished than photo albums and other treasures.
A plea from the heart for love to be validated and remembered.
My heart opening a simple — and undeniable — recognition of that reality.
An unexpected blessing in the midst of chaos.
