Community Stewards: Building the Network to Create Great Communities
Location
We are building networks of engaged citizens who will shape the future of their communities by advocating for smart growth and livability. We educate and empower the community members with training and support as they campaign for positive change – everything from advocating for Complete Streets and Urban Forest policies to hands-on efforts like creating community gardens in underserved communities.
About You
About You
First Name
Skye
Last Name
Schell
Organization
Cascade Land Conservancy
Country
United States, WA, King County
About Your Organization
Organization Name
Cascade Land Conservancy
Organization Website
Organization Phone
206-292-5907
Organization Address
615 2nd Ave, Suite 600
Organization Country
United States, WA, King County
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Your idea
Name Your Project
Community Stewards: Building the Network to Create Great Communities
Country your work focuses on
United States, WA, King County
Describe Your Idea
We are building networks of engaged citizens who will shape the future of their communities by advocating for smart growth and livability. We educate and empower the community members with training and support as they campaign for positive change – everything from advocating for Complete Streets and Urban Forest policies to hands-on efforts like creating community gardens in underserved communities.
Website URL
Innovation
What makes your idea unique?
In Community Stewards, we’ve taken the best methods from organizing and advocacy and built a new model of engaging communities in land-use, development and community planning and change.
People often ask why we – a land conservancy – are involved in urban policy and community organizing at all. We got involved in cities a few years ago after realizing that we need to create great communities in order for people to choose to live within our existing cities instead of converting our lands into ever-more sprawling development. It is quite unusual for a conservation group to do serious community organizing around local community development issues.
Second, our program employs an interesting and unusual balance between advocacy and community organizing. Most environmental organizations stick to traditional advocacy – building lists of members to do “action alerts” via email as needed. We have committed to building deep relationships with community members and creating a two-way street. We ask our members to advocate for our priorities, but we also commit to supporting their projects – like community gardens, new transit stops or other community priorities – and working with them over the long term.
Finally, we use innovative tactics in unexpected situations. For example, we used campaign tactics and went door-to-door to 1000 houses in three underserved neighborhoods in Tacoma (low income and without good access to healthy food) to invite people to our Community Garden Summit – and our conversations and invitations led many people from those neighborhoods to attend and benefit from the workshops.
Do you have a patent for this idea?
No
Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
What impact have you had?
Our networks of citizens have successfully influenced public policy and started innovative projects in six cities around the region.
We piloted the program in the city of Tacoma in January 2009 with a “Taking Action” workshop focused on how citizens can get involved in the land-use planning process. Over seventy community members attended. We then led a series of organizing meetings in which the community members developed campaigns to improve their city’s livability and environment. The group built a coalition of environmental and neighborhood groups who saved a crucial habitat corridor from being closed off and advocated for transit oriented development. Since October we have been organizing for community gardens. We’re working with a neighborhood group to turn a former utility substation into a community garden in the North End. We organized a Summit of 150 citizens in March – where the Mayor announced the City will be creating 7 new community gardens and funding a Community Garden Manager to further enable this community energy.
Our workshops in Issaquah and Kirkland activated citizens to participate in major civic planning processes. In Tukwila we’re helping citizens advocate for a new light rail station in an area underserved by transit, and working with a coalition of refugees from Burma to start a community garden that will primarily serve their members – and also other neighbors, a local food bank, and the high school next door. Overall, our program offers a spark to community members who want to make change in their neighborhoods.
Problem
In the next 30 years, the population of the Puget Sound region will increase by almost one and half million people. Continued growth and development in rural and resource land is converting our working lands into car dependent subdivisions, shopping centers and exurban sprawl.
We work on both policies and projects to level the playing field, making compact urban neighborhoods more attractive and affordable than suburban sprawl so that people choose to live in cities. There is currently a resurgence of interest in livable urban neighborhoods with deep community amenities such as parks and community gardens.
Unfortunately, elected representatives often hear only negative voices that lack a regional vision or an understanding of options and opportunities. The Community Stewards will provide the “yes” voice for good policies, plans and projects that make cities more compact, vibrant and livable – and launch their own local projects as well.
Actions
We began by asking local community engagement experts for advice and researching successful models from Marshall Ganz and Jim Diers. We piloted the program in Tacoma, and upon seeing its success and receiving funding from the Washington Women’s Foundation, expanded to five more cities. We continue to invest staff time and resources, and have attracted a number of highly-skilled interns who have been invaluable in organizing our groups. We have also continued strengthening our relationships with city elected officials and staff, to ensure that our policy work in the cities will be successful.
Our goal is to find local volunteer leaders to take over the groups’ coordination and organization – allowing us to step back into a support role and start groups in other cities. So far we have successfully gotten community members to take action, host events, and lead campaigns, but we’re still working to develop leaders at the larger scale.
Results
By investing staff time in organizing, we expect that we will incubate a number of vibrant community groups, all working with considerable self-direction to improve the livability of their cities. The leaders of these groups will track local issues and lead their fellow residents in taking positive action around policies, plans, or specific projects. They will speak up for smart growth, conservation, affordability, and livability when city officials make important decisions; and they will build community through projects (like community gardens) in their neighborhoods.
Our groups are already doing this at a small scale, but as we continue to grow and build trusting relationships with ever-more-skillful organizers, we expect that we will one day have powerful groups of citizens who will be able to change the debate in their cities – from “not in my backyard” to “how can we shape new growth so it benefits our community?”
What will it take for your project to be successful over the next three years? Please address each year separately, if possible.
As described above, a key challenge is getting local leaders to take ownership of the programs. We have been working with people for one to two years so far – empowering them, helping them become strong public speakers, organizers and leaders – and hope that soon they will take over leadership of their groups. We know that it can take ten years to really build a sustainable and robust community organization – so we are working with patience and a long-term view of building relationships and ever-more-significant projects with our community members. Over the next three years, we realistically need to double our paid staff time on the project in order to bring our six city networks to full success.
Next year our priority is getting the program off the ground in the cities where we’ve recently launched, and developing leaders in the cities where we’ve been for the longest – Tacoma, Issaquah and Tukwila. We also want to win a policy campaign or successfully launch a project (like a community garden) in at least three of our cities.
The following year we want to hand ownership of the groups over to the established local leaders; and develop leaders in the newer groups. At this point we also want to achieve larger policy wins in partnership with other organizations. We also will need to find new funding sources, and hopefully expand our staff resources so we can launch in new cities as appropriate.
In the third year, we expect we’ll have vibrant networks in all of our target cities, and be able to work with the leaders to identify and launch powerful campaigns in many of those cities. We’ll switch gears to being support, instead of leading, and bring the Community Stewards together to share what they’ve learned with each other.
What would prevent your project from being a success?
The largest potential obstacle to our success is simply not being able to fund our continued investment of staff time. We are exploring new funding opportunities that can come online as existing funds expire in 2012. If we do not obtain funding we will have to scale back massively on staff time. Without staff time, we couldn’t adequately organize in our cities, and the groups would likely not sustain themselves without support at this point. However, we are hopeful that we will be able to find new sources and continue our investment of staff and resources.
How many people will your project serve annually?
101‐1000
What is the average monthly household income in your target community, in US Dollars?
$1000 - 4000
Does your project seek to have an impact on public policy?
Yes
Sustainability
What stage is your project in?
Operating for 1‐5 years
Is your organization a
Non‐profit/NGO/citizen sector organization
Is your initiative connected to an established organization?
Yes
If yes, provide organization name.
Cascade Land Conservancy
How long has this organization been operating?
More than 5 years
Does your organization have a Board of Directors or an Advisory Board?
Yes
Does your organization have a non-monetary partnerships with NGOs?
Yes
Does your organization have a non-monetary partnerships with businesses?
Yes
Does your organization have a non-monetary partnerships with government?
Yes
Please tell us more about how these partnerships are critical to the success of your innovation.
In community-driven policy advocacy, building broad coalitions is extremely important, so we are constantly working to engage trusted and new partners in our work. For example, we recently launched a Complete Streets campaign in Edmonds and Shoreline. We brought the Cascade Bicycle Club, Transportation Choices Coalition, and pedestrian advocacy group Feet First along for every step of the process. In Tacoma, we partnered with the City, Health Department and Pierce Conservation District to start a new Community Garden Manager position – and worked with them, the Parks Department and numerous small community organizations to plan and execute the Community Garden Summit. We rely on local partners like Sustainable Edmonds or the Tukwila-based Coalition for Refugees from Burma to inform and assist our planning, decisions and outreach.
What are the three most important actions needed to grow your initiative or organization?
Funding: Identifying a sustainable funding strategy. We have begun conversations with other regional groups engaged in similar smart growth advocacy work, and are working to identify longer-term funding at a national level. We feel that our new model of organizing and advocacy is worth replicating around the country, and other groups have reflected that interest as well – most recently through conversations after our presentation at the New Partners for Smart Growth conference.
Local leaders: We need our community members to take on full ownership and leadership of the groups in their cities. We’ve developed a simple structure for a “leadership team” and have been working with the most active community members to build their capacity. We do leadership development with them in the form of deeper support and advanced training in organizing and campaigning, and hope that as time goes by they will feel comfortable taking on full leadership.
Deeper roots in the communities in which we work. We hope to build these relationships through our work with partner organizations and by investing time and resources in communities over the long term. Our goal is to become a trusted partner to communities as they work to shape growth and make their communities better places to live. The “action” here is simply staying engaged and building our relationships – meeting and talking frequently with the community members in our groups.
The Story
What was the defining moment that you led to this innovation?
Over the last five years, we’ve built strong relationships with elected officials and staff in many cities throughout the region, as part of our Cascade Agenda Cities program. We successfully advocated for smart growth policies and plan implementation, but had not yet engaged citizens in the conversations.
In the Fall of 2008, a local city manager came to us with a problem: the city had before it a proposal for a dense new development near the city center that would provide local employment and many needed community amenities that could serve the daily needs of residents. However, the project was facing opposition from citizens and nearby property-owners. The city manager was a strong proponent of smart growth and wanted to see the project move forward. He understood that if good projects wilted under political pressure from a handful of citizens, development would continue to push into outlying areas, driving more congestion, sprawl and unhealthy communities.
The city manager asked for our help in building support for the project. We thought, “we should activate our base of citizens who believe in smart growth” – and then realized we hadn’t yet built that base. Our members were strong supporters of conservation and the environment, but we hadn’t yet built a constituency that was ready to advocate for smart growth as a method for stopping sprawl and conserving land, while also making cities better places to live. After a season of planning and listening to local experts, we launched Community Stewards in Tacoma.
We largely built on the work of Marshall Ganz, a brilliant community organizer, and his training for the Sierra Club and the Obama Campaign. The key to our program development is constantly experimenting and adapting our approach. We try new ways of outreach, meeting format, campaign style and goals, and see what works in these very diverse communities. In Tacoma we asked the community what their priorities were, launched campaigns around their top three, and worked closely with the group members to discover what kind of support was most helpful.
We applied the lessons learned in Tacoma to our subsequent launches in Issaquah and Tukwila, and as we have encountered an increasing diversity in the cities, continued learning and developing the program. We have fine-tuned an effective process for engaging community members and have built a curriculum that has been successful in building a common language among neighbors and empowering them to get organized and make change.
Tell us about the social innovator behind this idea.
As a community organizing program, there are necessarily many people who have contributed crucially, and we should highlight both staff and community members who have made Community Stewards successful.
Our Urban Policy team incubated this program, and for the first year all of our team members worked on it materially: Alison Van Gorp, Urban Policy Director; Jeff Aken, Cascade Agenda Cities Program Manager; and Craig Benjamin and then Skye Schell, Community Engagement Manager. Craig was the lead in the program’s initial development. He met with dozens of local organizers, community planners, city staff and community members, read deeply into organizing theory and came up with our initial strategy plan and training curriculum. Craig also brought Skye on as an intern to help with the pilot launch in Tacoma.
Skye had recently moved from New York City where he worked as an advocate for clients in a soup kitchen and then as a housing advocate, obtaining permanent supportive housing for people living on the streets in Brooklyn – in both positions, peripherally involved in community organizing. The following year, Craig left CLC and Skye took over as the program manager. He has deepened the program’s focus on social equity and housing affordability, and worked to truly engage diverse communities – for example, leading volunteers to knock on the 1000 doors in Tacoma’s underserved neighborhoods before the Community Garden Summit, and starting the Tukwila community garden project with refugees from Burma.
Dan Fear is one great example of a citizen who has taken on serious responsibilities throughout his involvement with Community Stewards. Dan had been involved with his First Creek neighborhood group in Tacoma, but not very active in city-wide politics. After attending our workshops, he stepped us as the lead organizer of the campaign for the habitat corridor. He spoke at City Council meetings, brought 100 people to open houses, persuaded other local leaders to write op-eds in the newspaper – and in all ways infused the campaign with the energy it needed to succeed. He has since been a core leader for the new partnership of the City, the Puyallup Tribe and his neighborhood in building two new community gardens and cleaning up and revitalizing the neighborhood. We’ve shaped the program largely through the feedback of Dan and other community members like him.
How did you first hear about Changemakers?
Through another organization or company
If through another, please provide the name of the organization or company
Karen True at Third Place Company recommended the Community Matters conference
 | skyeschell said: Hi - Skye here. I'd love to hear your reactions to reading about our program. Are there community development issues, policies, or ... about this Competition Entry. - 517 days ago read more > |
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