Community Engagement Proposal

Methodology: Qualitative Interviews

• 4 hour-long interviews were completed with CoA Department Staff to better understand best practices and strategies for: 1) community engagement, 2) equity-focused planning, and 3) climate-resilience in the built environment

• Interview script is as follows: 

Interview questions: 

• What should be the role of community engagement in the development of a planning process? 

• Please share some effective strategies for community engagement

  • Follow-ups: 

    • Are there any strategies that your department hasn’t been able to implement in the past, or that you’re excited about implementing for the future? 

    • What are your thoughts on paying community members for their involvement in community engagement initiatives?

• How does equity inform your/your department’s work? 

  • What kind of equity work does your department consider (i.e. social equity, racial equity, etc) 

• What issues/concerns come up for you in thinking about equity as it relates to climate change resilience and transit, specifically in Austin?

• What opportunities do you see regarding the built environment as it relates to an equitable approach to climate resilience (or something beyond resilience)?

  • Follow-ups:

    • What role could your department have in addressing these infrastructural gaps or needs? 

    • How would you foresee this intersecting with transit infrastructure? 

• What “smart” technologies are you aware of being used in your department?

  • How could you imagine these or other technologies to better serve climate resilience-aligned goals? What gaps might technology fill or what solutions may it offer?

Interview Analysis: Emergent Themes

1) Community Engagement Best Practices

2) Equity in Planning

3) Planning for Resilience

How are we [as staff] becoming community organizers within the city? I think that kind of model actually gets to the heart of what people are needing” -- Participant 2

Best practices:

• Community-driven/need and desire-driven planning

• Paid partnerships with trusted community organizations

• Compensation: $25/hr for community members, $5K minigrants for community organizations (suggested amounts from WPD)

• Meet people where they're at: laundromats, bus stops, flea markets, etc, multilingual signage and educational materials/staff

• Racial equity focus

Theme 2: Equity and Planning

“When I think about the built environment, one of the things I feel like I’ve been seeing in the city is where we focus more on that [the built environment] rather than its impact on communities, and in some ways this can be very performative. [In planning] I miss the human connection and impact of what we’re doing to change people’s lives when it relates to equity” -- Participant 2

“With an equity approach, in order to get representative involvement, you’re going to need more effort towards engaging people who have more barriers to access, and who may lack trust in government/institutions” -- Participant 3

"If we're going to go about this in a way that's respectful and not extractive, then people need to be compensated for their time and their knowledge" -- Participant 3

Best Practices:

• Racial equity focus and intersectional lens: "In line with the race-centered work from the Equity Office, we want to get to a point where race is not a predictor of quality of life outcomes"

• Compensation

• Internal and external equity focus

• Stakeholder groups of "people that have historically been left out of engagement processes": BIPOC, disabled, unhoused, youth, elderly, etc.

• Need to consider the ecology of infrastructure: "What's really concerning is APD sweeps encampments every time people leave -- people have to choose between risking their lives and losing everything" -- Participant 4

• "“One of the things I’ve really been hearing from certain community groups…was that for a lot of communities of color, and like ones that are really marginalized in the sense of being working class, have issues with policing” -- Participant 2

Theme 3: Design for Resilience

"Extreme climate impacts are overlaid on to the existing inequities that we have in terms of geographic distribution, like where people who have less resources and less access to privilege already live" -- Participant 2 

"We're not building bus routes to think about how people are gonna get out when their house is in danger of flooding or how people who are experiencing homelessness are gonna get to a warming shelter during a freezing event or anything like that. But it could serve those purposes, and it may need to, because of who does not have a car." -- Participant 2 

Climate Impacts and Concerns:

• Unhoused individuals at the forefront of climate disaster and day-to-day climate impacts

  • "every time it rains, whether it pours or drizzles, everything could get destroyed" -- Participant 4

  • "bus stops are one of the few places that people can actually be and not get as hassled when they're experiencing homelessness." -- Participant 3

  • ways to consider resilience: public document storage (Austin Public Library or otherwise), laundromat cards, free transit, education and climate information at bus stops, charging opportunities a must

  • mini-hubs could serve as central points for meeting and re-routing to warming/cooling shelters during emergencies

Other suggestions for smart resilience hub infrastructure:

• Green stormwater infrastructure: green roofing, rainwater capture, rain gardens/pollinator gardens and filtration systems

• Solar infrastructure

• Improved coverage during rain events

• Charging stations and WiFi

• Improved accessibility reflecting needs of disabled individuals

• Considering spaciousness: personal space as amenity, particularly in light of COVID-19 and projected impacts of climate change on disease

• COVID-19 air filters

• Bulletin boards with mental health assistance resources

• Increasing bike storage space on buses for multi-modal transit users

Community Engagement Plan Proposal based on Analysis: