Then I experience my own neighbours resisting the changes that dual occupancy (or accessory units) might bring to their subdivision of half-acre lots.

And then, finally, a wealthy developer with a large site asking why we needed to bother with community engagement at all — when there are (apparently) no activists or “greenies” in this (a large country town) community and there are no frogs or anything that could be considered endangered.

Or that anyone would get in a lather about or go to the press about…

In a (somewhat) small voice I was muttering to myself about an “engaged citizenry” being a value in its own right.

Who would do community engagement for a living?

I would.

I keep at it, trying to help where I can, accepting that to some I am a “mercenary”, or the hired gun of the developers who are paving over paradise.

And to others, I am a hopeless, naive optimist who does not understand the “bottom line”.

All these personae.

The same me.

The best part of this very challenging period was an unexpected phone call last night from an old friend — a prominent developer — encouraging me and bolstering my spirits. We’ve been friends for nearly thirty years. He had the same thing to say about his profession, recounting a conversation over lunch last week with a fellow developer: who could be a developer?

Vale Arne Naess

Last year we mourned the death of the great Norwegian environmental philosopher, Arne Naess, father of Deep Ecology and the first Chairman of Greenpeace Norway when it was founded in 1988.

See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/15/obituary-arne-naess

I was blessed to have heard him speak on two occasions: once in Melbourne and once in Killarney, Ireland.

The frontier is long

Naess, who was 96  when he died in January, 2009, reminded us that “the frontier is long”.

The community engagement frontier is long, too. There’s a place for all of us working for reform and seeking to empower communities.

Naess’s birthday was the day before mine. He was my hero.

I want to be working for reform when I am 96, too.

I may not have the wealth of the greedy developer with his cynical and opportunistic views of community engagement.

Hopefully, my ethical self will be alive.

And hopefully, I will still be having provocative weeks like the last few — to remind me what my life is for.

And why, like Arne,  I am here on Earth!

Last December, I attended a one-day training workshop about “Planning to Engage Your Community Online”  conducted by the Australian firm, Bang the Table.

See: http://corporate.bangthetable.com/upload/filename/116/PDF-Brisbane.pdf

See also:
www.bangthetable.com

www.budgetallocator.com

www.onlinecommunityconsultation.com

What a treat that was for me!

One of the weaknesses of my work has been a reluctance to engage with electronic democracy and online consultation with the sort of furious enthusiasm that characterised the work of my firm, Sarkissian Associates Planners, and many talented colleagues I have worked with over the years.

Bang the Table specializes in providing web-based community engagement platforms for local, state and national governments mostly in Australia, but also in New Zealand and Canada.

What I learned

What I learned was that the approaches used by Bang the Table can make my own engagement processes livelier and friendlier. They can make them more approachable to many, including younger generations without in any way trivializing the content. I learned the benefits and weaknesses of a whole range of options, including blogs, forums, social networking (Facebook), wikis, and microblogs (Twitter) and a wide range of suggestions for incorporating images and video into the engagement discussions.

My engagement universe expanded. Exploded.

And, after three co-authored books in two years with a total of thirteen authors, I discovered, somewhat sadly, the benefits of document-sharing systems. As authors, we managed quite well communicating from Sweden, Canada, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Honolulu and France, not to mention Brisbane and me here in the bush, but it could have been much easier, my new friends explained to me. Much easier.

Ah well, there are new books to write and new engagement processes to undertake…

Brilliance, care and sensitivity

So when I saw a cartoon recently in the Sydney Morning Herald vilifying Bang the Table, I remembered the brilliance, care and sensitivity their Directors showed in their well-designed and well-managed training session.

As I listened to the Directors, Matt Crozier and Crispin Butteriss, I realised that my attempts to bring creativity into community engagement were being parallelled by these innovative practitioners who live in a sort of parallel universe.

Our approaches are complementary, not competitive. Our unique insights, innovations and techniques can work together to enhance the work of the other.

Welcome to my kitchen table

They’d be welcome at my kitchen table any time.

And I am convinced that together we can help to achieve kitchen table sustainability in our different – and complementary – ways.

A few months ago, I was lucky enough to have to write a short piece on evaluation for a consulting report. I reviewed what I had in my library, did a quick Internet search and decided it was time to bone up on the latest. So I took myself off for two blissful days in the university library in Lismore. It was vacation time and I had the “evaluation” section all of the library to myself. The whole floor, in fact.

I loved what I read in recent publications, many in the esteemed Sage series. Wise old practitioners warning newcomers. Traps for young players. Helpful hints. Political and strategic advice. Not what I had expected, actually…

As I read, I remembered my own (often painful) forays into formal evaluation, especially the large post-occupancy evaluation (POE) of public housing in Minto, Sydney in 1983  (see  Minto POE questionnaire 1983  for the 1983 POE questionnaire).

And an equally challenging but very different study of False Creek North in Vancouver in 2007 and 2008.

I realised that evaluation is a highly political and sensitive realm. Often messengers get shot.

Do we have to get shot?

You can download my notes from my reading and other sources by clicking on this link: Evaluation of Community Engagement Processes

And there’s lots of information, methodologies and findings about the False Creek North study in this website as well.  See:

http://kitchentablesustainability.com/housing-density-and-sustainability-what-works-and-what-doesnt-work/

Hopefully, by keeping abreast of the excellent advice available nowadays, none of us will have to face the firing squad for trying to evaluate programs, projects or policies. Or community engagement.

I’d welcome your comments and suggestions.

I’m getting the feeling that our communities are being engulfed in a wave of “sustainability fatigue”.

“Don’t talk to me any more about climate change,” a friend says over coffee in the Village. She cradles her coffee and mumbles, “I’ve had a gutful of all that pessimistic talk!”

Two small Aboriginal children are playing in the courtyard of the Rainbow Cafe. I look past them to the mountains, the landscape, our home… 

 Deep breath. I turn back to my friend.

“I mean it, Wendy,” she groans. “A gutful!”

Breathe again and think… I’m worried that her response will translate into wider community overwhelm, frustration, even apathy.

We cannot afford to have that happen!

So why is community engagement central to achieving sustainabilty — and the other way around? We write about this quite a bit in Chapter 3 of KTS. Here’s a short summary:

First good reason

First are ethical and practical reasons: in a democratic society, those whose livelihoods, environments and lives are at stake should be engaged and involved in decisions that directly affect them. Community-initiated projects and processes empower people to take action in local community development. Canadian planning academic and practitioner, Peter Boothroyd, recently reminded Nancy, his student, ‘To participate is to be human’.

Second good reason

Second, community engagement provides opportunities for developing a holistic sense of sustainability, where people make decisions using local wisdom, values, information and knowledge.

Third good reason

Third, community engagement contributes to the efficiency of a project or program. Targeting local needs and preferences always saves time and money.

Fourth good reason

Fourth, by addressing local social and cultural needs, community engagement processes can help develop micro-scale policy approaches that fit the community and its particular resources, skill sets and preferred approaches.

Fifth good reason

And finally, community engagement helps to build local accountability. (1)

Perhaps these arguments will be helpful when you are encouraging communities to engage with sustainability.

And sustainability practitioners to engage with communities.

I am sure there are lots of other good reasons.

Please tell me your ideas. I welcome your comments.

Reference:

(1) Sarkissian, W., Cook, A. and Walsh, K. (1997) ‘Core Practices of Community Participation in Practice’, in Community Participation in Practice: A Practical Guide, Murdoch University, Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy, Perth, pp. 33-82.

Rather I want to make a point: there’s more to community workshops than a conversation at tables, participants scribbling down a few ideas and facilitators writing down a few points on some large sheets of paper.

Going over old ground

In our local workshop, a group of community members and some professional advisors sat around for three hours going over old ground.

I thought: what if the consultants had summarised all that “old ground” (previous plans and policies) and given us an updated summary to work from.

“Nobody else complained”

Subsequent conversations with one of the facilitators yielded the comment that “nobody else complained.” Omigod! How often do we hear that in community engagement? Yet we well know that “not complaining” does not equate with “satisfaction”.

That conversation reminded me of another local conversation a couple of months ago, this time with a municipal officer, who said that their “peer review” of their draft community engagement policy had confirmed that “children and young people are not our customers.” I had smoke coming out of my ears after THAT conversation.

(re)visioning Footscray

That got me thinking about my friend, co-author and colleague, Andrea Cook of Red Road Consulting in Melbourne (see: www.redroad.com.au). Andrea went over old ground, all right,  for the (re)visioning of Footscray in Maribyrnong, Melbourne in 2004.

See: http://www.maribyrnong.vic.gov.au/Files/Final_Executive_Summary_Revisioning_Footscray.pdf

We called the Footscray planning and community engagement process ”(re)visioning” for a particular reason.

The participants at the Footscray stakeholders’ workshop in 2004 were gobsmacked by the amount of tedious and thorough background work Andrea had done before she met with them.

“We are not going over old ground,” she exclaimed. With a hundred local people, I sat patiently through a good hour of detailed PowerPoint summary of over a dozen planning publications. Everyone was completely satisfied that the consultants were up-to-date.

Then we moved on. With everyone satisfied that their earlier contributions had been acknowledged.

Here’s the PowerPoint presentation Andrea used in the workshop: Footscray Vision Consolidation Presentation 27-08-04 

So many ways…

I am not proposing a “one-size-fits-all” solution to this borning workshop problem. There are so many ways to run an effective workshop, even a small, humble one. It need not be complex.

Prioritise your issues!

At one point, we were asked in the workshop to “prioritise our issues”. We had lists — each of us — that were jumbles of issues, concerns, policies, initiatives… and we were asked to collectively prioritise them.

How hard was that?

Actually, quite hard. We had no tools, no props, no help… Our attempts were unsystematic, apples sorted with pears, hierarchies ignored… a real mess… No weighting, no real content analysis was possible…

A sticky wall or some sticky dots would get us out of this sticky situation

I kept thinking that a few sticky dots — or better still, some Post-its and a sticky wall – would have made the whole thing a dream. They are not an expensive option. You can buy sticky walls as a kit online from leading Australian community engagement consultants.

See: www.twyfords.com.au/twyfords/Twyfords-our-store.html

Using some props would have made it much more fun, less frustrating, less boring, and much easier for the consultants to analyse the outcomes. And to analyse them using our community weightings and categories — without the intervening bias of the researchers.

Why don’t we use these simple tools?

Why don’t we use these simple tools, these practical props? They are not expensive, they require no “equipment” (or not much, anyway) and they are so much more fun that endless, formless, unsophisticated brainstorming and discussion sessions.

I’d be interested to hear your responses.

Visioning or brainstorming?

My other concern with my local workshop was that we were supposed to be “visioning” but hardly a “visionary” or creative word was heard.

I’ve written two chapters on community visioning in my forthcoming book, Creative Community Planning (with Dianna Hurford and Christine Wenman). It was helpful (if dispiriting) to be reminded that this sort of non-visionary “visioning” still occurs. This is a big topic on which I will write more later.

So I need to ask, where are our “facilitators” getting their training? Who is helping them learn about what’s available?

Asking two simple questions:

I’d ask: Can these practitioners be encouraged to act out of real care for communities? Real care might be asking two simple questions:

“What’s the very best we can do here in this community?”

 and

 “How can we give something back to this community?”

There’s so much help out there to guide facilitators. So many hundreds of published and online manuals of methods and techniques. So many simple and creative tools that communities love.

“Oh dear, here come the butcher’s paper and the felt pens.”

It used to be said, “Uh, oh, here come the plans!” about community engagement.

Now, it’s “Oh dear, here come the butcher’s paper and the felt pens.”

There has got to be more to community engagement – and visioning – than that!

Nimbin in Festival Mode

This week, I’ve been reflecting on the responses I’ve received to my recent blog post about Mary Ann Hiserman, my friend in Berkeley who was a wheelchair user and activist for people with disability. I’ve been thinking about the actual experience of being “locked out” of an environment. And comparing it to being “locked out” of community engagement processes.

Mary Ann had a challenging life but I am confident that she would not have considered herself “disabled”. I believe that was largely because of her courage but also partly because of the culture of Berkeley and northern California in the 1970s. With its mild climate, California has always been an attractive place to live for people with mobility impairments. It’s much easier, year-round, managing in a wheelchair, with a cane or walker than it is in the snow of the Midwest or the eastern United States.

Separate is not equal

As our communities age and more of us live longer and with disability, we will finally have to accept what Mary Ann taught me in the seventies: separate is not equal.  As with accessibility, so with engagement.

Two principles can guide our engagement policies, planning and design.

Mainstreaming

The first principle is mainstreaming. This means that if I am travelling anywhere with Mary Ann, I do not continue through the front entrance while she has to go via the freight elevator or a back entrance.

A shocking example of the lack of mainstreaming is prize-winning, Canadian-born architect Frank Gehry’s much-lauded Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

See: http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es/?idioma=en

Getting into the Guggenheim

As you approach the building, set in a sparking sea of light-coloured treeless plaza (very hard for older eyes to adapt to this high level of glare), you face a daunting array of steps down to the building’s lower-level “front door”.

Entry stairs, Bilbao, 2007

And an equal number to the building’s lower level riverside walk.

Stairs to riverside plaza, Bilbao, 2007

 If you cannot manage steps, a hard-to-find interior elevator awaits you. But you have to ask where it is. It’s clearly the “second-best” entrance.

Not for all people

When I questioned the Museum staff about this separation, one said, “Take it up with Mr Gehry.” I said that in my country and Mr Gehry’s, this sort of approach would be illegal, given federal government accessibility policies and regulations. The Spanish museum guide had nothing more to say.

I believe it’s a serious problem, socially and from equity perspective, however, as it makes the person who cannot navigate the steps “less than” an able-bodied person.

Continuous Accessibility

The second principle is continuous accessibility. This means that a person with mobility impairment (or any disability, for that matter) should be able to enter, use and exit a place or a facility with minimum amount of inconvenience. To get around with ease and without confusion. It’s all very well to be able to go to a so-called “accessible” restaurant, but if the restrooms or the bar are inaccessible it hardy makes for a good night out.

Community engagement and disability

Over the years, I’ve found that our engagement processes often ignore the needs of people with disability. Yet we forget that a high proportion of the population has a disability at any given time — even if it is a broken foot or temporary vision impairment. Making processes — and the places where they occur – accessible to as wide a group as possible is an important equity consideration in any engagement exercise. It’s also a way of demonstrating commitment to listening to everyone’s voices.

There are no hard and fast rules and many people prefer one-to-one discussions. We need to seek context-specific advice from advocacy groups.

It is critical that, in approaching the issue of how to make engagement processes accessible to people with disability, we do not imagine that all people with disability are those with visible disabilities (such as wheelchair users). Understanding the complexity of disability, in the first place, can help us as practitioners to be less blind to “invisible” disability and therefore target our engagement processes more effectively.

Short summary of engagement suggestions

The suggestions in this short summary may be of help to you. Click here: Community Engagement People with Disability

Comments welcome!

When you get right down to it, barriers are barriers, however they appear. I’d welcome comments from those more expert than I am so that we can improve all our engagement processes for all people. ]]> http://kitchentablesustainability.com/community-engagement-with-people-with-disability/feed/ 2 http://kitchentablesustainability.com/helping-sally-at-dinner-what-to-do-at-the-dinner-table-when-sustainability-comes-up/ http://kitchentablesustainability.com/helping-sally-at-dinner-what-to-do-at-the-dinner-table-when-sustainability-comes-up/#comments Sun, 05 Jul 2009 09:49:09 +0000 Wendy http://kitchentablesustainability.com/?p=1021 I spent the afternoon with the Will of the People people in Byron Bay, talking about Kitchen Table Sustainability. What a wise and special group they are! This was our first monthly workshop on the principles of the book.

See: http://www.willofthepeopleproject.net/oms/oms.php?&loc=gov1bb

We spent some time discussing the values and opinions of  “our communities” and I realised (again) that my community is far from a “geographical” one. My friends are all over the world and some of them I have known for sixty years!

That got me thinking about a dinner party in Vancouver not so long ago….

Four old friends having dinner and reminiscing in the comfort of Marion’s spacious home. We’re talking about the environmental crisis facing the Earth, and my concerns about flying across the Pacific Ocean from Australia for my teaching job in Vancouver. I’m certainly worried about the environmental impacts of all that travel and yet I really want to make a difference. Teaching in Vancouver and lecturing in North America, Hawaii and Europe are all ways I feel I can make a difference to the way we build sustainable communities

Sally, our hostess, comes to the table with a tray of steaming vegetables. She puts down her tray and addresses the whole of the dinner party in a high-pitched tone that indicates she’s agitated.

“I can’t understand what all this is about. How do they even know that planting all those trees is going to make a difference? How can we trust that the tree planting services that you’re talking about where you put your carbon or whatever you call it — really do plant trees anyway? Maybe they just take the money and run away!”

After she returns to the kitchen and then she comes back with the lamb, I say, “I’ve found somebody I trust and my carbon offsets are going to the organisation in Brisbane that trains environmental activists. The woman who co-runs the organisation, Samantha LaRocca, worked in my office, lives on the smell of an oily rag, and would never do anything unethical. I am positive of that. So, Sally, if you want to do something about all that traveling back and forth to Europe with your grandchildren, why don’t you investigate and try to find an organisation that you trust that you can make your contributions to?”

“I just don’t trust anybody,” Sally calls back from the kitchen where she’s tackling the gravy. “It’s all too hard and anyway, I’m not really convinced about any of this global climate change stuff.

Is the mint sauce on the table?”

I’d be interested to hear if others  of you have experiences like this when “sustainability” comes up at the dinner table.

What to say?

What to do?

How not to be rude and keep true to your values…?

When I discussed this with Steph Vajda, my co-author, he reminded me that sustainability’s complexity and scope pose an unprecedented challenge and it touches all aspects of our lives.

What to do at the dinner table when sustainability comes up?

For market details, see: http://www.byron-bay.com/markets/

For the local weather, see: http://www.byron-bay.com/weather/index.html

At the workshop each month we will work on one of the six components of the KTS  “EATING” menu.

“Education” is up first.

The first session was attended by about 20 enthusiastic and articulate local people. What great ideas they had!

We discussed the community education and capacity-building components of “Education” and explored how an engaged citizenry can learn about sustainability issues and take action on matters of importance to local and global sustainability.

Here are some notes about the first workshop: KTS Educating for Sustainability

And here is a summary of “Education for Sustainability” points: KTS Education 14 Points

For more information, see:                                     

http://www.willofthepeopleproject.net/oms/oms.php?&loc=gov1bb

The second workshop was held at 12 noon on Sunday 2 August.

Here’s Chapter 6, the reading for the August 2nd workshop: KTS ch6

The third workshop will be  held on Sunday, September 6th. The topic is “Trust”.

This workshop will be attended by me but community-run and initiated.

Here’s the chapter for the September session: Kitchen Table Sustainability chapter 7 Trust 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:

http://www.sfu.ca/city/city_pgm_video024.htm