Announcing the Launch of the Community Engagement Survey!
And I could use your help spreading the word.
I took a few months off from writing this summer to focus on family, life, and other work — but don’t worry! Starting next month, your regularly monthly dose of The Answer is Community’s awesomeness will resume. In the meantime, I have some special announcements.
Announcing the Launch of the Community Engagement Survey!
What community engagement practices are most common? How do practitioners decide which ones to use? What barriers or opportunities are there for doing more “community building” within “community engagement” work?
These are some questions I hope to answer with my Survey on the State of Community Engagement Practice.
My goal is to garner unique insights into the current practice of community engagement. And with those insights in hand, identify the opportunities to evolve our practices to meet the challenges of our current social era. In other words, community engagement that is not just soliciting input into a decision-making process, but also bridging identity groups and cultivating place-based belonging and connection.
But I need your help.
First, please take the survey!
Second, please share this with anyone or any networks who might be interested in taking the survey.
The intended audience is anyone who works with communities: landscape architects, planners, architect, consultants, government or nonprofit program managers, policy makers, community organizers, and more! A promotional graphic for your posting can be found here.
Oh, and there’s a prize! I will randomly select a few lucky survey participants to receive a free book from Island Press Books, a non-profit book publisher with amazing books on the built and natural environments.
I’m Speaking at ASLA, Thanks to you!
Thank you to everyone who responded to my August bat-signal for the #ASLA Gamechanger voting. I garnered enough “likes” to my pitch to make the cut! So I’ll be making a 7-minute presentation at the American Society of Landscape Architects Annual Conference in Minneapolis in late October.
The theme this year is about climate change, so I will speak about how we need to heal our divisions as part of achieving enduring solutions to climate change.
Seven minutes is not a lot of time. But it’s a chance to share the core ideas developed through The Answer is Community in front of national audience. Thank you!
My talk at ASLA is one of many conferences I will speak at over the coming months, including the Washington Chapter of ASLA, the Washington Chapter of the American Planning Association, and more.
What Else I’m Reading
“Parisians Are Pledging Allegiance to the ‘Republic of Super Neighbors.’ They Must Bring Cheese,” by Peter Yeung in the New York Times.
Oh my. This piece in the New York Times about Paris’s “Republic of Super Neighbors” makes my heart sing. What a wonderful demonstration of the power of the neighborhood-scale (aka “hyper-local) to restitch our social fabric. More please!
“Rediscovering our Shared American Values,” by Ed Warren in Persuasion
Ed Warren leans into his life journey through small-town America, the military, tech startups, and elite universities to highlight the inspiring shared virtues existing in our civic DNA. If you are tired of all the left vs right madness, here’s your morning cure.