National Volunteer Week: April 16th-22nd

You'd think I'd know about National Volunteer Week, the third week of April, but either I didn't know or I forgot.  But there have been a bunch of Associated Press articles in my newsfeed, which clued me in.

-- "Volunteers speak on why they serve and why more people don’t"
-- "Nonprofits scramble for help amid dearth of volunteers"
-- "New to volunteering? A How-To-Guide to find the right fit"
-- "Why are volunteerism rates uneven? Florida, Wyoming explain"
-- "Corporate volunteerism: ‘Not charity. It’s good business'" 

One of the many regrets I have is not getting a PhD in planning.  My intended thesis was around urban planning and civic participation and engagement, because local land use issues are the issue most likely to get people involved in local civic affairs, other than having children and being involved in education issues.

Because of my own journey of involvement in planning, I have always advocated for structuring planning processes in ways that educate participants, build their skills, and obviously, provide opportunities for substantive input and shaping the process.

I think that parks, libraries, sustainable mobility programs, and other civic assets are potential touchpoints for civic engagement and participation.  But that our management processes aren't set up to do that.  And this is increasingly important as our country becomes more polarized, and even outside of this, people are very quick to criticize elected officials and government processes as uniformly corrupt, etc.

But parks agencies and libraries aren't set up to do this purposively. And they don't acknowledge civic engagement as an important element of parks practice in their master plans.

WRT parks, I always use the example of Park Pride, the friends group for Greater Atlanta, and Park People in Canada, which publish a lot of interesting guides on parks as platforms for community and engagement.

National Trails Day (June), National Public Lands Day (September),  and Parks Month (July) are good times to promote civic engagement and volunteerism, as is Earth Day, which is Saturday.

Schools have PTAs, but there isn't the kind of investment in capacity building and technical assistance to make it happen.  

Lots of libraries have friends groups.  The Friends of the Salt Lake City Library, which covers all of the libraries in the city, is particularly good ("Outdoor library book sale as an opportunity for "social bridging"/triangulation").

Filling sandbags at Sugar House Park, Salt Lake City.

This week: How about volunteering in something?  This past week, many people in the Salt Lake Valley have come together to fill sandbags, to ward off the flooding expected from the melting of the record snows.  My neighborhood is crossed by a couple of these creeks, and flooding has been happening already.

The sandbags are used by city and county agencies, and residents who abut creeks and other places likely to flood.

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Citizen engaged planning practice.  (These are just some examples.)  What distinguished the no longer extant Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program is that it was citizen-led.  Using money from TIF bonds, funds were provided to neighborhood groups to work with the school system, parks board, and other agencies.

Neighborhood groups had to come together to come up with and implement a program of community improvements.  The city developed a capacity building and training infrastructure to support it, after they realized the average community group didn't have the capacity to do it on their own.

In DC, a great example is community-initiated urban design improvement planning by the Bloomingdale Civic Association in their Bloomingdale Village Center Project, which stepped in amidst the failure of the DC Office of Planning and Department of Transportation to pursue transformational planning approaches despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on community planning.

In Calgary, where neighborhood recreation centers are run by community organizations, the Federation of Calgary Communities provides technical support and an extensive schedule of training classes for community groups, including having urban planners on staff to assist neighborhoods dealing with difficult problems and new development  ("Community association planning committees a hidden gem?," Calgary Herald)

The Seattle Department of Neighborhoods sponsors a variety of programs where citizens undertake community projects with financial and training support from the city.  Unlike DC's "constituency service" programs by Councilmembers and the Mayor's Office, these initiatives are designed to support DIY self-help efforts driven independently of elected officials.  While out of date in terms of current programs, the book Neighbor Power describes the first couple decades of the program.

Safe Routes to School programs can be a system for civic engagement and neighborhood improvement.  Interestingly, the Tacoma Washington SRTS program adds "Engagement" to the traditional 5/6 E's framework for bike and pedestrian planning.  

Nationally, the Safe Routes to School Partnership is the primary resource.

Starkville in Motion is an advocacy group in Mississippi that used "walking and biking to school" as a way to engage the community on improving pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure more generally, which is a point made by the Washington State guidebook, School Walk and Bike Routes: A Guide for Planning and Improving Walk and Bike to School Options for Students, that infrastructure improvements for children walking and biking to school also benefit neighborhoods and builds support for the program.

Pedestrian advocacy organizations like Feet First in Seattle have provided a great deal of support to Walk to School efforts.  

Models for technical assistance and capacity development

• Decades ago, there was an organization called the Nonprofit Support Center, which provided training in a number of cities, including DC.
• Dallas Public Library has an Urban Information Center with special information and publications on urban issues.
• The Massachusetts Citizen Planner Training Collaborative is a statewide training program for members of planning and zoning boards, but this concept can be extended to civic engagement more generally 
• The 1970-1980s Citizen Involvement Training Project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst produced training materials and workshops (not unlike the ABCD Institute
• The Project for Public Spaces produced a workbook, now in a second edition, called How to Turn A Place Around, which they also offered as a workshop.  It's a great model for urban design focused workshops for neighborhoods that can also be used as civic engagement training.
• The Asset Based Community Development Institute, now at DePaul University, is focused on supporting the development of ground up citizen capacity and projects
• Community Design Centers were a 1960s and 1970s initiative to provide urban design assistance to neighborhoods.  Funded by HUD, and typically based at universities, many communities still are served by such programs, as well as urban design studio programs for architecture and planning schools.
• The Chicago Bungalow Association is a great example of a historic preservation initiative focused on stabilizing neighborhoods through historic preservation.
• Park Pride, the city- and county-wide park support organization in Atlanta, sponsors an annual conference for park professionals and advocates (they need to do more to get park advocates to participate), which is a great way to communicate best practices and build the knowledge-base of the park community.  They also have a small grant program for friends of parks groups.

Instead of contracting with consultants like most planning departments, Salt Lake City has developed a "civic engagement unit" that works across all city agencies for public projects (transportation and planning mostly, but other agencies too.  But there isn't a capacity building and training program to build citizen capacity like conferences, workshops, and trainings.  

Civic engagement in Savannah in the 1980s-1990s (no longer operational)

After finding that top-down community improvement programs weren't successful in terms of retaining and attracting residents, in the late 1980s, Savannah began developing an approach to community improvement that complemented city improvement and nuisance abatement programs by engaging citizens as "designers of neighborhood programs and producers of community change," assisted by financing, capacity building and technical support from the city government.  

It's comparable to the point Rolf Goetze makes in Building Neighborhood Confidence, that the point of government assistance in revitalization isn't to foster dependence, but to provide the spark and help to get the community back to the point where it is (re)investing in itself.  

This is the reverse of how many city governments approach community improvement, and what Savannah did is described in detail in Leading by Stepping Back: A Guide for City Officials on Building Neighborhood Capacity, published in 1999. 

Ward Halls/Democracy House.  In "Outline for a proposed Ward-focused (DC) Councilmember campaign platform and agenda," calling it "Democracy House," I suggested that ward offices be created (not unlike ward/precinct halls in cities "back in the day") and that as part of the function, space and resources be provided to community groups involved in ward-specific activities.  Ward Democracy Houses should also include at least one annual "community organization fair" which could also serve as a volunteer recruitment event.

Funds for small projects.  A fund for small projects should be created for each ward, and the Participatory Budgeting process should be used to allocate funds ("An update on Participatory Budgeting practice in New York City," 2018).

Some cities already do this.

Savannah's "Grants for Blocks" program was aimed at micro projects, providing micro grants ($500 was the maximum, today it would be about $1,000, with inflation), supporting house and community improvements without a great deal of bureaucracy.

Each year a "Neighborhood Convention" unveiled the projects to the community.

London has a similar grants program for sustainable mobility improvements.

Salt Lake has a small grants program too, mostly targeting lower income areas.  But there are also funding opportunities for arts projects and events.  The amounts are maybe too small, especially with inflation, but that the programs exist is pretty amazing.

And a big funding tranche for capital improvement projects ("Salt Lake City Capital Improvement Program process allows for citizen initiated projects").  Not quite 10% of the projects each year are citizen initiated.  (I wrote an application for a study on improving park restrooms.  It's likely to be approved.)