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

See:
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 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…

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.

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.

The Guest Bedroom

We’ve been living in our shed for three and a half years. House under construction for two and a half…

And on Friday the windows arrived for the guest bedroom in our house-under-construction project. It has walls, doors, a roof, a floor and almost windows.

Tomorrow morning at 9 am Ken is coming to help Karl install them.

I’ve been reflecting about how much this means to me. It’s so marvellous here these sparking winter days. It’s absolutely freezing at night as we huddle around a fire on the deck in our Mexican chiminea. Then it’s up to 30 during the day.

Many blessings

I’m blessed to be  living in a rural paradise, awakened by the raucous laughter of a dozen kookaburras in a nearby tree. Spending late winter afternoons watching a family of five wallabies relaxing and eating the new grass shoots on the lawn.

I WANT TO SHARE THIS. But it’s not much of an offering to urban people who have baths and toilets and kitchens when I say I can offer a tent or a rat-infested shed. A wash under the hose. And a composting toilet 50 metres down the road at the community centre.

A lovely prospect

But the prospect of putting a bouquet of  fresh flowers in a vase in the guest bedroom,  hanging ironed curtains on the new screened louvered windows, setting out a few good books on the bedside table, a candle, incense… that is such a delightful imagining.  It brings a great yearning to my heart. Many dear friends have visited us in our chaotic circumstances. We’ve trudged them around the muddy building site, stumbling over piles of timber and peering into unfinished rooms, gesturing where rooms could be, how the roof could go…

“I couldn’t live like this.”

One, appalled, could only say, “I couldn’t live like this.”  The others have hugged us and offered all means of encouragement. Very great encouragement. Everyone marvels at the beauty of the place.

Tonight I was sharing my enthusiasm for the guest bedroom by phone with Leonie, twelve thousand miles away. Maybe she’ll come to visit after Christmas. We might have the box gutter sorted out by then. I reassured her that her room is rat- and python-proof, fully mossie-proof. It has a great view of the escarpment. Great ventilation. A private verandah. It’s very quiet. We even plan to have key locks on the guest bedroom doors so that guests can leave valuables and not be worried by our relaxed rural attitude to security.

So, one more sleep to an almost-ready guest bedroom. One more step toward the hospitality I dream of.

Feels like Christmas Eve.

Sad postscript the next day: windows too big for the spaces. Builders Picinc Day in NSW so could not sort it out. Much disappointment. (Watch this space…)

A day later: ordered new windows. We’d apparently violated some window-measuring protocol. Our fault. But they fit in the living room. Still, it’s not the same.

Ken did a great job of brushcutting instead…

Sept. 7th: The windows are in. At last! It’s gorgeous. It’s ready for guests. Cosy and homey. Not exactly “finished” but filled with love.

Up a ladder and too tired to pay the account

So imagine me on the day that a credit card account was due for payment trying to convince Karl – up a ladder for hours mending the roof – to pay it online as only he knows how. Understandably, he chose bed after an exhausting day and the account was late.

In the morning – at 9 am – he paid it. I then rang the bank to ask for a remission of the late fee. I proudly answered all the identification questions: my childhood pet, great aunt’s maiden name, Karl’s favourite brand of German sauerkraut… Anne, from Tasmania, seemed sensible enough.

Then came the question I could not answer: what recent charges have you made on this card? The earlier statements were with my bookkeeper, who lives in a local community whose road access was flooded out by what the locals came to call “the chasm”.

Airlifted tofu

(As a side note, it was humorous to hear that all the tofu in Lismore was bought up by the emergency services and airlifted by helicopter to the cut-off alternative community members!)

Anyway, I could not remember my purchases. It never occurred to me that they would be, of course, on the statement I was ringing about. Anne didn’t think of that either.

The upshot was that I was deemed not to be me and therefore had my credit card access cancelled.

“I AM me! Truly, I am. Ask me anything else? Ring me back on any of the numbers you have on file,” I cried, then remembering that the floods had cut the home line.

“Ring me back. Email me! Anything! I’m in a tiny village. Don’t make me go into that terrible bank again with those appalling people who send me away, telling me I have to make an appointment to collect my credit card. I have sworn never to go into that bank. Never.”

On my desk is the morning paper with their latest advertisement: “We’re for…  [all good, sensible, community and local things].” I’m encouraged to believe that they are the bank I can bank on. They are for me. Hah!

Deep carpet sobbing

I am crying now. Deep carpet sobbing.

I ask to speak to her supervisor.

The supervisor, also from Tasmania, takes the same hard line. She does not say my name because, of course, I am not me.

I am not me

I am not me. I have to drive 75 kms. round trip to Lismore. I have been cut off.

I explained again, sobbing, that I was me, that the account was paid, that all I wanted was a little compassion (the neighbouring community got helicopter loads of tofu, for God’s sake!).

I closed the account and moved things to another bank .

Which bank?

(Which bank? That bank!)

There a compassionate and generous officer sorted out my affairs and made me and Karl cups of tea.

Complaint addressed

In the end, someone from “complaints” rang from the first bank and apologised.

But when I asked here whether State Government policies on natural disasters had any impact on how banks operate, the woman said she did not know. She thought probably yes.

Disasters come in many forms. For us, blessedly spared, this one just brought us a lot of mess and the loss of some treasured mementoes.

And a new bank. With real people.

I was visiting a city friend recently.

We have no oven in our shed in the bush, so the sight of someone preparing to bake was deeply satisfying.

“What are you baking?” I asked Bill, as he patted the lumpy, brown blobs. Knowing he was a vegetarian, I was prepared for lentil burgers.

“Chocolate chip cookies,” he replied, hand-shaping the blobs on the baking sheet.

“Those aren’t chocolate chip cookies”

“Those aren’t chocolate chip cookies, Bill,” I offered. “Where I come from, we never make them that way.”

‘I’ve done my research and this is how they were originally made,’ he retorted, slamming the oven door.

I explained what a cookie was. He said he knew all about cookies.

“Bill,” I implored, “if we were talking about chapattis, you’d be interested in my opinion. It’d be ethnic food and you’d be fascinated if I explained the tricks of making them ‘properly’, authentically. I am sure of that. You’d be so respectful of me as a migrant, with my distinctive culture and cuisine. It’s because they’re American and I’m Canadian that you figure they are not important to me.”

He kept his back to me, intent on his dishwashing.

North Americans are not really ‘migrants’ in this country

Retreating to my room, I remembered what I’d known for decades. North Americans are not really ‘migrants’ in this country. I was about to celebrate 40 years of living in Australia. That very week. Forty years!

I could imagine what Bill was thinking: chocolate chip cookies are just part of a global market conspiracy. They are not any one culture’s food. They are certainly not anyone’s ‘cuisine’. A ‘generic’ thing that you make. Or make from a packet. Or buy in a shop.

I remembered learning to bake Toll House cookies as a child, in home economics. I sort of didn’t have a mother (least not one who could cook), so I had to learn to cook at school.They were ‘invented’ in the 1930s by an American cook and the idea took off like a rocket.

Hamilton Junior High School

I learned how to prepare them properly, in the home ec. lab at school, wearing the starched apron I’d made in sewing class. That was in the 1950s at Hamilton Junior High School.

For soft drop copies, all ingredients had to be at room temperature; cream the butter and sugar. Add the sifted dry ingredients. Drop from a spoon using another spoon to guide the dough onto the cookie sheet. Cook only till chewy.

Never crisp

Never crisp.

Before the cookie fiasco, Bill and I were discussing my research into cultural diversity.

Blessedly, the cooking goddess delivered me from any further relationship with the mounds.

Bill rushed out to his yoga class and forgot to turn off the oven.

The charred black mounds went into the compost.

And I took a trip into the city for some Mrs. Fields.

After we finish the roof and get the floors down, and build a toilet and get a shower happening… then I will have a kitchen and an oven.

It’s been 3 1/2 years since we had those luxuries.

And the first thing to come out of that oven will be my old favourites.

Here’s the original Toll House recipe: http://www.verybestbaking.com/recipes/detail.aspx?ID=18476

What They Should Look Like

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.

Living with Tessie

Then I had a couple of months living with Tessie. What a change that was! A brilliant and bubbly Phillipina women who worked in the insurance industry as a senior manager. She was searching for an apartment and had a gaggle of female friends who worked in the real estate industry. Tessie was, herself, a qualified realtor.

So our conversations over dinner and glasses of wine always turned to the design of apartments. She and her friends knew everything about what was on offer in Vancouver and the weaknesses of different developers’ designs. Tessie said that lack of interior storage was a widespread problem.

It might seem like a small thing..

How right she was! It might seem like a small thing but people moving to inner city apartments from houses in the suburbs always have problems with storage! Seasonal items (like fans and blankets, space heaters, blankets and quilts) take up a lot of space. (I know because I’ve spent the day sorting just those items in our new storage room as winter tightens its grip on our mountain locale.)

Bulky items

Residents also need places to store bicycles, exercise equipment, toys, ski equipment, golf clubs and all the paraphernalia that goes with a home office. That new printer may be compact but it still needs somewhere to sit. And that paper needs to be stored somewhere. Those tax files you need to keep for at least five years… I could go on.

And the modern Vancouver kitchen has lots of gadgets that need to be packed away: bread makers, blenders, grills, toaster ovens. Not all of them can stay on the counter top.

So the humble storage question was asked in our POE study and responded to with strong comments by apartment residents. Tessie was right. Her friends knew what they were talking about. In-suite storage certainly WAS a problem.

Window privacy

Floor-to-ceiling windows are all the rage in Vancouver apartments. But what about the things that have to be  stored under the BED? Ikea makes those nifty boxes for just that purpose. But do we want the whole neighbourhood to see what’s stored there?

Bedroom Privacy?

After a long search, Tessie found a new apartment with adequate storage and the other amenities she sought. And I had to move again.  And this time it was to the location of my dreams: Southwest False Creek. But that’s another story.

For more information

For detailed information about the False Creek North post-occupancy study, just go to another part of this website: http://kitchentablesustainability.com/housing-density-and-sustainability-what-works-and-what-doesnt-work/

This story was prepared in response to the Durham University Colloquium/Workshop, FAITH & SPIRITUALITY IN THE CITY: Towards a Post-Secular Urbanism?, in March, 2007. The event was convened by Philip Sheldrake. As far as I know, no report has been made of that event.

It forms chapter 14 of my forthcoming book (with Dianna Hurford and Christine Wenman), Creative Community Planning: Transformative Engagement Practices for Working at the Edge (London, Earthscan, 2010).

So . . . here we are and there we were . . . once upon a time . . . or below a time, or under a time or beside a time. It doesn’t really matter — in a place far and not so far from here . . . in a time long ago . . . and not so long ago . . . our grandmother was calling us —to hear a story. 

Gran’s story, as my story, was about the time of the Great Turning. My grandmother’s Nana was living in a large city like this one and she saw and heard all these things herself. And these changes were not just happening in the cities, though they started and spread from the cities to multitudes of communities all over the Earth.

The first time I heard this story, us children were sitting with my Gran around the campfire in a little community garden just like this one full of pea shoots and berry bushes. Old as the hills, my Gran leaned forward with that look I loved in her tanned, lined face. And she whispered the same words I say to you now. These things I am about to tell you…

My children. What a time it was!

In those days, people in the cities had lost touch with the living Earth and all the important things. Things like their place in the local and global community and even the inner scared parts of themselves. It sounds ridiculous, after all of us here and those before us have been through, but that’s how it was in those days. Cities were contradictory and confusing places, with really rich people and really poor people. Many people felt isolated, though they lived right next door to someone.

People were really separated from the land, too. They depended for their lives on the living Earth around them but gave nothing back. They had forgotten that the Earth was alive or where they came from or who and what they were connected to. They were frightened by the Earth Changes and many of them refused to believe they were happening. It took the Time of the Great Storms to convince some of them.

My Nan told me that part of the Great Turning was about bringing sacredness back to the city. Do you know what that word means? It’s a word they didn’t use enough in the Old Times but if you listen closely to my story, perhaps it will make more sense to you. To make that happen, the people did not have to learn anything new; they just had to learn how to remember. Like you remembering the story I am telling you right now — and passing it on to your children and grandchildren.

In the Old Times, cities were centres of advanced scientific, technical and intellectual development. They were also places where individuals, rather than the community, flourished. People who were concerned about that problem were writing books and articles about the ‘good city’. They wrote about the kinds of things: social justice, community identity, emancipation, the commons and the common good, justice and fairness, rules and responsibilities. Some put forward lists of the conditions that would support human flourishing, with ideas about housing, health care, creativity, work and social supports.

Sadly, they also got bogged down in their own words. They succumbed to despair and apathy. They told stories about cities riddled with anxiety and depression, full of people who were disconnected and excluded. It made some people feel fearful, guilty or hopeless about the problems in their own communities. Everyone was saying such bad things about the cities but my Nana felt that the cities could make a big difference — if people just looked at them in a different way.

People wanted their public spaces, their everyday public spaces, to be magical, beautiful, comfortable and creative places. Small, special places were essential to people’s everyday lives. They had special rituals attached to them. One of the new creative types described a process that he called ‘eco-revelatory design’: ways of making the life of a place manifest in the city. People could really understand what he said.

There was no time for delay at the time of the Great Turning, which was what they called that time when the Great Storms came and the people had finally lost their faith in the ways things were ‘supposed to be’ in the Old Times. In those days, there was a great yearning among people to be whole and to reconnect with everything that had been lost. This story is about how people went from being isolated from each other and the Earth, to reconnecting.

At that time, people grew to relearn skills they had forgotten: listening with the ears of others, even listening with their hearts. The chattering mind grew quieter so that the heart and spirit could flourish. Balance was really what was required. More and more people began questioning what was real and looking more carefully at what was already in their cities. They held lively and boisterous public meetings that overflowed local halls, school gymnasiums and all the online social networks. People were speaking their hearts.

Although it took a longer time for the universities to welcome the new ideas, planning students started learning about concepts like ‘right livelihood’ and ‘skilful means’ and about ‘working from the heart’ on practical and intelligent solutions to the most urgent challenges facing the cities and the Earth. New courses, some even on subjects like ‘heart politics’ were proposed. Local people started coming into university classrooms to help teach these important topics. Some of the more influential contributors challenged the students and their teachers to be part of the changes, not to resist them. They implored city planners to become actively engaged social change workers and told them that ‘teachers’ and ‘lessons’ were everywhere in the world. They argued that their planning work should express their interconnectedness.

And you can imagine … before long, the cities began to look different. And to feel different. More like what we have today. People came out of their houses and met in cafés and parks and held meetings and social events and gatherings to organise themselves to work together. As people spent more time with people they saw as different from their ‘own kind’, some of the tensions between different groups released.

The Indigenous people and the poets assumed new creative leadership roles in all city planning projects. Before too long, city-building processes began to change. Architects began to embrace spiritual principles that were becoming popular before the Turning, breathing new life into buildings and giving them what they called The Quality without a Name. People began to talk about ‘the timeless way of building’ and architects and builders became much more respected members of the community.

The wider community of all ages became deeply involved in the process of city imagining, city dreaming and city building. Visioning, they called it. Or creative visualization. In workshops in the community centres, people would sit together and decide how the cities should be planned. Their voices sounded like Tibetan bells: so many different languages, softly spoken at the same time. People dreaming together about their cities. The adults and children listened with their eyes closed.

There were great outpourings of love and reverence, as people flocked to public meetings, events and ceremonies to work out ways to save and repair and protect the Earth so it could be passed on to the future generations. There were gatherings and activities everywhere: vegetation and food planting events and days devoted just to collecting and saving seeds and others where people built small shade structures and benches so that they could sit alone or together in the parks. Other people made paths so you could stroll though these places and then sit and just reflect on things. In these places, they sensed spiritual inspiration, in feelings of peace, oneness and connectedness and a sense of freedom, reverence and humility. Gradually, people came to understand the restorative qualities of Nature — that it could restore mind, body and spirit.

There were places in the city that already had significance to people and, with the help of the planners and the artists, their stories were woven into the wider community story. The environment of stories changed, as well as the physical environment. People started talking differently about things like stigma and failure. They found brighter words to fit their new optimism. They talked about imagining, flourishing, strengthening, resilience, reclaiming and community partnerships.

Probably the most marvellous thing that happened during the Great Turning was that the distinctions between the separate and defended territories of the formal religions and alternative (often older) wisdom traditions began to melt away. It was not necessary to have one definition of ‘spiritual’. People spoke about spiritual ecology and spiritual geography. My Nan remembers that talk of the creative spirit was present and easily evoked in these new and rediscovered city places. Places that held special sacredness.

In the newly sacred places in the cities, groups of children and teenagers often gathered and played. They loved the vitality and aliveness of those places and preferred the wilder places. The adults slowly grew to accept that this was natural and tried not to be fearful when the children went there. These places were initially the undeveloped lots and places that had been flooded or bombed or damaged in other ways by earthquakes and cyclones. Many of these places, though spoiled, were once again yielding to the forces of Nature. Colonising plants rambled over old structures and pushed through the cracks in the old concrete below; colourful insects hid in humusy undergrowth or buzzed in the sharp hot stillness of desertified lands. And in the riverbeds there were fossils to find — and rocks of extraordinary shape and colour. This was the ecotone, the edgeplace of healing between the old way and the new.

All of these wild spaces were alive, but for many, the favourite wild places were the natural wooded areas left alone by development. The children gathered in these newly consecrated places and were at the forefront of the community activities to renew them. With so many children playing in places that were natural and wild, consecrated to the work of community building and spiritual development, a new breed of young people emerged. They came to love Nature with a great fierceness. These spiritual warriors gave birth to new children, who — as children and adults — reaffirmed the sacred place of Nature in the city and worked to preserve all aspects of the living Earth.

And so, today we have everywhere precious natural places — deeply nourishing and spiritual places — that were saved and cherished and handed down by those courageous people at the time of the Great Turning. In their quest for spiritual nourishment, they rediscovered something vitally important.

 Everyday spirituality they called it.

 Some just called it love.1

Sources:

Alexander, C. (2005) The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Four volumes, Taylor and Francis, London

Alexander, C. (1979) The Timeless Way of Building, Oxford, New York

Callenbach, E. (1975) Ecotopia: the Notebooks and Reports of William Weston, Heyday Books, Berkeley, California

Hester, R. T. (2006) Design for Ecological Democracy, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Korten, D. C. (2006) The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco

Le Guin, U.K. (2001) Always Coming Home, University of California Press, Berkeley, California

Macy, J. and Young Brown, M. (1998) Coming back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, our World, New Society, Gabriola Island, B.C., Canada

Peavey, F. (2000) Heart Politics Revisited, Pluto Press, Sydney

Piercy, M. (1976) Woman on the Edge of Time, Knopf, New York

Starhawk (1993) The Fifth Sacred Thing, Bantam, New York

Today the Gypsy and I were sorting hardware. Nails and screws. It’s been a rough week in community engagement and I had to do something else than listen to bureaucrats and aggrieved residents.

I had to get my hands dirty. Get grounded.

Living on a building site generates a massive amount of mess. It’s hard to manage from day to day, particularly with few dry places to store things. Today we were sorting roofing screws from other screws from nails and clamps and tools of all descriptions. Rusted saws (it’s humid here), worn-out paint brushes. Dead paint tins. Odd unidentifiable objects.

Very therapeutic.

Gypsy’s work bench

I have attempted to clean up the Gypsy’s work bench a number of times in the last sixteen years with little success. He’s always tinkering. Genuinely of Romany blood (probably about one-third), he’s a tinker by nature and genetic disposition. There is nothing he cannot fix. We discovered that the solar garden lights you buy at the hardware store have a life of about three months and then they start to decline into fickleness, eccentricity, dementia and finally death…

But the Gypsy keeps at them. Resuscitating them. His table is littered with carcases of globes and pickets as he revivifies them one by one. He recharges their yellow batteries and cleans their connections with my nail file. The he gently sets them back to glow along the gravel path.

There are knives to be sharpened and electrical equipment to be repaired. And when the rain took out the phone, endless tinkering with a huge range of cords and adapters to make the phones work again.

Birkenstocks glued back together

I grew up in a household where everything was broken. So I love this quality in the Gypsy. He’s glued my favourite Birkenstock sandals back together so many times they were mostly glue. He’s taken to collapsing Ikea furniture with an artisan’s disdain and made it stand upright again. He’s built, maintained and endlessly repaired our tarpaulin “hootchie” where we lived for the first few years.

Old skills

HIs are the old skills. Resilient skills. Like mending and sewing. Knitting. Chopping firewood. Canning peaches. Putting up jams.

Skills we need for the Great Turning: persistence, repair, restoration and loving care.

From my office, I can hear the sounds of kindling being chopped. My chilled limbs predicting another fire in the chiminea. 

I am blessed to be the beneficiary of these old skills.

Blessed to be with the Gypsy.

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