“If this were in place, what would it do for you?”

Last night I attended the 4th (and final) workshop that is part of Evanston’s Environmental Equity Investigation (EEI). (See past post about EEI: The limitation of relying on a single style of community meetings)

I’m thinking about this event in terms of lessons to be learned for future community engagement activities. In all, the final workshop was a successful event. About 40 people attended, and all were engaged in the main activity: Poster-board discussions that were designed to provide feedback to the consulting team on their near-final work to define policies and practices to improve environmental equity.

Synthesizing a lot of citizen input and feedback over numerous events and meetings and converting what was heard into potential policies and practices to guide city programs and actions is challenging work. And the work that I saw was thoughtful. You could see the throughline to issues and feedback that was generated in past meetings.

The main activity of the evening involved having participants rotate through four sets of poster boards, organized by the priority areas of environmental equity work that have emerged over the project: Housing, City Services, Open Spaces and Transportation. Each poster listed 10-12 draft actions that could be recommended to the city. Participants were asked to put sticky dots on ideas that they perceived as high priority and use post-it notes to add anything that might be missing.

The challenge I saw in this approach is that it assumes people can imagine how policies and practices might work. That they can connect the dots between “if this were in place, then it would do this for me.”

That can be a big ask.

Here’s an example from the City Services poster. “Align environmental sustainability efforts with local workforce development to encourage people to enter ‘green’ careers.”

My first thought is…wait, what? That’s not already being done? So yes, we should do that.

But then I put on my I’m-just-a-guy-living-in-a-neighborhood hat and wonder: So, if this were in place, what might be different for me? I can imagine all sorts of stuff. But I know I’m also making a lot of assumptions about what this kind of program might do and how it might work its way to my needs or desires. And my needs or desires are not the same as those in the target environmental equity neighborhoods.

“What might be different” could fall along at least two paths:

• I really need a better paying job or career, and would be attracted to green workforce development opportunities.
• I’m a property owner and need help sorting through green/sustainable options for my home or building (energy, heating/cooling, etc.) from knowledgable providers.

Those are two very different needs. Each of which might be influenced by green workforce development.

My question is: In a community engagement/feedback session, how might we move closer to real folks’ worlds and discover how their needs might shape the priorities of a policy idea, rather than ask for feedback on the policy idea?

The thinking goes like this:

• You have a good potential policy or practice idea.
• Assume that the idea is in place.
• Who might be affected by it? What do we need to discover about their needs and priorities?
• Only then do you design questions (or simulations or survey choices) which allow you to engage in more discovery about those needs.

As I walked around the poster session, I also tried to listen in and observe other folks. A few were really taking time to read and, to me, understand the proposed ideas. I asked one of the facilitators about the kinds of questions they were getting; there were a lot of “what do you mean by that?” or “how would that work?”

At the City Services board, another participate lit up when they saw this item: “Expand the use of rain barrels in the Focus Areas [target neighborhoods] to mitigate stormwater and flooding for already overburdened neighborhoods. Consider providing free rain barrel installation and education to residents in those areas.”

This was a practice that was clear. She could easily see what it would do for her.

“I put buckets around my home to capture rain,” she said. Real rain barrels would be an upgrade.

What was clear is that there was a lot of variation in how the policies and practices were defined. For some, it was easy to see the results at the neighborhood/individual level. Some, like the workforce development policy, had more distance between the policy and a recognizable outcome for folks.

It just makes me think about how to organize sessions like this in a different way. Maybe sometimes you make the policy invisible and do discovery about potential outcomes that result from the policy. You (the facilitator) know what the policy is and you can connect the dots between the policy and some need or desire you discover from folks. But what folks in the session engage with is one or more things that might be potential outcomes of that policy.

Another option is to engage folks in defining what the policy might mean. Here’s an example.

One policy idea was to “Designate the identified Focus Areas as ‘Green Zones’ to prioritize climate or environmental sustainability investment those areas.”

I really like this idea, in part because I can easily imagine how the city can be held accountable for its work in this area. And I can imagine how you might craft ways to co-create green-zone investment with the community (Participatory budgeting, for example).

But for disovery work, at this point in the process, I kept thinking about how I might engage the meeting participants in giving insight into how they would think about green investment, and what their initial priorities might be. Or how they might want to be involved in the decision making process.

One approach might be to set up the following scenario and questions:

Your neighborhood is in a designated green zone. It is a priority for city and private projects to support a healthier, more sustainable environment. You are part of a community advisory group working with the city to decide budget priorities for 2026.

• What investment priorities would you recommend that impact you as an individual homeowner or renter?
• What investment priorities would you recommend that impact your neighborhood?
• Sign up to learn more about being part of an advisory group. Add your name here.
• Who else might we wish to contact about being on an advisory group (individual or group)?

The first two questions get at an open-ended exploration of what “green investment” means to folks. Priorities might change if the policy were actually in place, through dialogue and knowledge-sharing, but it would be really enlightening to discover what is top-of-mind, and how do people describe it today.

The second two questions are part of a toolkit I’ve used in the past (hat tip to Teresa Torres here). It’s a small ask – give us your name if you are interested in being part of an advisory group – but it does require people to take an action, rather than say what actions they might take. It’s not foolproof, but getting folks to literally sign up for more info is better than just asking “would you join an advisory group?”

All of this comes from the mindset of looking beyond the policy or practice idea and trying to get at the needs and desires of folks impacted by the idea. If this were in place, what would it do for you?

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The photographs which accompany these posts are taken by me, and show different settings and views of Evanston (where I live). It is a visual reminder that this is the most important setting for belonging and contributing to community: our neighborhoods, our cities.