I am working with a community where the city has decided to overhaul a long neglected park. Folks in the community are either excited or pissed off. The angry ones have immediately assumed that this is all moving forward without checking with and incorporating neighbors into the planning.
"We know what parts of the park people use and what part they don't"
"The baseball diamond and BBQs should never have been put near the neighbors fences, but nobody asked 20 years ago and a new master plan without our experience won't make the park better."
"How are you going to make it fun for kids again and keep the gangs and taggers out?"
The assumption that the city and its paid experts would design, plan and rebuild the park. The assumption is based on a long pattern in this particular community.
At a large community meeting where a number of city initiatives were announced, including the funding for the park master plan and construction, city officials assured skeptical residents that this news was hot off the press and their plan was to use a community planning process, including a large charette event that creative landscape architecture firm had offered to facilitate. Some were encouraged, some didn't buy it.
Months later the park staff in charge was still trying to figure out how to do "community outreach" so that enough community members would participate in the charette to make it effective. They had meetings and identified community groups to contact, but they had not left the office. Literally. The hired landscape architect was a little more creative and started using the internet to get to know the neighborhood and found out that teens in the area had created a google-map with video links and a comic book with recommendations for a number of public places in the city, including the park. The youth had done this as part of a project to tell elected officials how to make the town more youth friendly. Most of the councilmembers were familiar with the project, few of the city staff new about it.
So, the architect emails the park staff and asks who these teens are that are already rethinking the park. Park staff emails other city staff, some of who were aware of the teen group and its work. Some even sat on the group's advisory committee.
Now the teens are being trained to co-facilitate break out tables with the landscape architects and planners at the charette next month!
Two lessons here:
1. Youth are resources -- whether the rest of us bother to ask or use them as resources is on us.
2. While local government can sometimes be a connector of community resources that are unaware of each other, the community can also be a connector of resources and people within local government who have been blocked from knowing each other's assets by the de facto silo-ization of the institution.
updated by @ron-dwyer-voss: 10/25/16 02:06:45PM
