GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE COMMUNICAITON WORKSHOP #2: What do people think? Engaging community members in decisions and problem-solving with group deliberation. WELCOME! 1. PLEASE SIGN IN and make a nametag. 2. On the board, tell us WHAT YOU WANT FROM THIS WORKSHOP and TAPE YOUR PHOTO beneath your statement. 3. EXPLORE OUR CUSP ACTIVITIES and grab some snacks.

TODAY WHO ARE WE: Mary Ann Steiner, Lindsey Scherloum, OUR GOALS: Lizzie Anderson, Tom Hoffman. OUR GOALS: To model processes that collect information and create positive relationships in order to generate meaningful community participation. To learn from your experiences and enrich our collective toolbox of engagement strategies. To foster a deeper consideration of redistributing power especially when working with constituents unlike yourself. AGENDA: Photovoice Exercise Why do Community Engagement? Engagement Strategies and Environmentalism Listening BREAK Forum Theater Using These Ideas in Your Work

Photovoice Photovoice is a method of community engagement and participatory action research where photographs are the basis of communicating perspectives that are not always visible. Step 1: Find a stranger, or someone you don’t know well and introduce yourself. Step 2: Take your partner to the image you brought and explain what it means to you. Then consider: Who is communicating here, and what about the circumstances makes it hard or easy to communicate? What assumptions do you bring to the situation about others, and how does that contribute to the challenge or success of engagement? Processes and tools for bringing out individual knowledge building relationships. Boundary objects and processes. Step 3: Stand by your partner’s photograph and introduce them to the group: Name, organization/project A 6 word summary of the challenge or success they illustrated.

Why do Community Engagement WHO? WHAT? WHERE? WHEN? HOW? Consider, acknowledge and address legacy challenges in a community. Have the right people at the right points in the process. Make the process accessible and meaningful. “Participation without redistribution of power is an empty and frustrating process for the powerless.” – (Arnstein, 1969) Work through existing networks and community leaders. Cultivate new community leaders. Invest in training participants. Face to face interactions yield the most genuine input. Go to the (public) place where the people you want to engage are. Have more than a token representation of minority groups so their voices aren’t drowned by perspectives used to having power. Create many entry points for engagement.

Engagement Strategies around Environmentalism Tom Hoffman, Clean Rivers Campaign

Listening Lizzie Anderson MSW

Take a BREAK! Get a snack! Chat it up! The bathrooms are a left out the door, a left at the stairs, down the hall and on your… left. Please be ready to get started again in 15 minutes.

Forum Theater Rules of Forum Theater: Theater of the Oppressed is a series of exercises, games, techniques and drama forms, designed by Augusto Boal to understand social reality, and then be able to change it. Forum Theater is the most commonly used of these exercises. Rules of Forum Theater: First you watch a performance which shows a problem or issue. At the end of the performance discuss the situation and possible solutions for changing the series of events. The performance will then be repeated. At any time an audience member can call out “FREEZE”, and come up on stage to replace a character who wants to change events. The only solutions you can NOT enact are ones of VIOLENCE or MAGIC. If you feel nervous about coming up, it is only natural, but if nobody comes up, then the scene will continue without improving. The facilitator can help support people who feel nervous, and help the audience decide if things are realistic.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR YOUR WORK? On the back of your packets, please take 5 minutes to respond to the questions. What ideas or practices from today resonate the most with your work? What specific projects/or aspects of your project do you see yourself adding these ideas to? What do you still feel uncertain about? On a scale of 1 – 5 how valuable was this workshop to you? What would you change about it? We may run this workshop again, can you think of 2 people who you think would be interested in this content? Please list them. We will then have an opportunity to discuss some of these responses together.

Thank You for coming! Before you leave! Please allow us to photograph your answers for our reporting.