In her chapter from What’s Possible: Investing NOW for Prosperous, Sustainable Neighborhoods, LISC’s Madeline del Carmen Fraser Cook, who also co-edited the book, explores the imperative of authentic community engagement in the work of supporting historically underinvested places to become more energy efficient and climate resilient. It’s a process that demands insight, bona fide listening and what she describes as “working at the speed of trust.”
What do you want? What do you need?
In the world of community development, these two questions jumpstart an equitable approach to resident engagement. At least, that’s what they’re intended to do. But increasingly, they’ve become “check the box” questions, almost rote for any organization working with communities. They frame a conversation not about community members as empowered, but about powerless people asking for help. These questions, it turns out, rarely create opportunities for full partnership in decision-making and—if not paired with tangible outcomes—actually can be exploitive.
Sometimes the answers that “what do you want” and “what do you need” elicit don’t align with the purpose of the engagement, essentially saying: “We know you want to improve business facades and clean up the neighborhood, but we’re talking about green infrastructure and complete streets in this charrette.” As a result, community responses don’t get acted on and don’t reach the people and organizations that need to hear them.
These questions have a long pedigree in community-engagement efforts, yet the examples of effective engagement in this book show that we need to do more. Funders frequently require community engagement, but the process often proves anemic or memorializes results in planning documents that either sit on a shelf or get duplicated mindlessly in subsequent reports without true implementation. In addition, the plans frequently don’t deliver the resources necessary for implementing the projects and services that community members have said they want or need. Many well-meaning conveners of engagement processes for new plans have no access to or information about plans that came before, perpetuating a cycle of recreating plans. Trust breaks down, planning fatigue thins the ranks of participants, and the possibility that community members can actually shape the future meaningfully grows increasingly remote.
Highlighting Old Inequities in Light of New Urgency
Theories of successful community development and equitable outcomes through resident input have always described the two as inextricably linked. In practice, the community-development sector has a long way to go to meet this ideal. Adding complexity to this interplay, the impact of natural disasters has emerged as a critical consideration in planning and implementing equitable community development projects. Its impacts disproportionately burden the most vulnerable communities, magnifying the urgency of uniting environmental concerns with equitable development.
The environmental movement’s more recent focus on environmental justice (EJ) and climate justice comes in response to the urgency of responding to increasingly intense natural hazards. Despite some progress, significant work remains to meaningfully include historically underrepresented people in this movement and center EJ and climate justice in environmentalism. Historically, environmental justice has been pursued with a focus on opposing unwanted developments. Recent years, however, have produced an increasing recognition that EJ actions must mobilize around not just saying “no” to undesirable projects but also actively seeking projects and economic opportunities that, based on community input, can earn a “yes” from residents. This will require inviting community members to help chart roadmaps for healthier, more economically viable communities—in other words, to unify community development, community organizing, and environmentalism.
Embracing a Broader Role and Bringing It All Together
Thankfully, we have examples of how to do this. In Duluth, MN, Ecolibrium3 (also called Eco3) demonstrates the pivotal role community input plays in fostering sustainable and equitable outcomes. Duluth’s Lincoln Park neighborhood represents an archetypal rust-belt community facing many of the challenges and opportunities a clean-energy transition presents—in particular, the problem of legacy infrastructure. The neighborhood hosts port operations, light and heavy manufacturing, a regional sewage-treatment plant, a disinvested main street district, and heavy highway infrastructure. Housing stock—aging and in disrepair—mostly dates to the early twentieth century. Residents endure disproportionately high levels of asthma and exposure to lead paint. Twenty-six percent of residents live in households with incomes at or below the federal poverty level. On average, Lincoln Park residents’ life expectancy is more than nine years shorter than that of the typical resident of Duluth.
Low-cost and mostly rental, the neighborhood has historically had a transient character and little social cohesion. That has undercut local advocacy for resources that could improve human and environmental conditions. The situation began to shift in 2011, when a grassroots environmental organization began to engage the community to envision the possibilities for Lincoln Park. Over the last decade, Eco3 has upended the common narrative of environmental organizations prioritizing the planet over people.
Eco3’s efforts started small, when resources were scarce and community voice and capacity remained nascent. The team worked to understand the challenges facing residents and small businesses. Yes, they asked What do you want? and What do you need? But they also probed more deeply with a range of other questions. They learned about unreliable public transportation and limited access to fresh food. They pursued low-cost, easy-to-execute opportunities to connect businesses to the community and improve the physical environment. Over more than a decade the organization earned trust by listening and responding, all while working to elevate a shared vision of an equitable, sustainable, and resilient future for residents.
Ecolibrium3 has pursued projects as diverse as the community’s needs and opportunities. Projects include an urban farm that produces local, culturally appropriate food using regenerative practices; a home-rehabilitation program that reduces emissions and energy costs; a community solar program that provides emissions-free electricity and other benefits to families struggling to pay utility bills; a grocery store; and, most importantly, the planning and deep engagement needed to ensure that these initiatives reflect the community’s vision. Ecolibrium3 shows up reliably, remains present, listens, and puts plans into action.
The current federal funding environment offers transformative potential for Lincoln Park. As unprecedented resources flow to EJ communities, Ecolibrium3 has the capacity and relationships needed to pitch programs and projects that produce substantial, direct benefits for both the community and the climate. The outlook for meaningful new financial resources looks promising. In the past two years, the community has secured more than $30 million in federal funds. A partnership of the City of Duluth, Ever-Green Energy, and Ecolibrium3 won a $700,000 planning grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to explore design and construction of a geothermal district-heating system.3 This project would harness warm effluent, currently discharged from the wastewater plant into Lake Superior, to heat the community. It would turn a long-term environmental burden into benefit. The team plans to request funds to deploy the project in concert with a Department of Transportation-funded main street redesign intended to resolve flooding and lighting issues. The efficiency of building the projects together could cut the cost of the geothermal system by 40 percent.
What’s Possible highlights other examples of successfully melding community development, community organizing, and environmentalism. The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative demonstrates how community leadership and ownership produce sustainable improvements in residents’ quality of life. Pacoima Beautiful shows how incorporating residents’ expertise and wisdom into planning and advocacy, backed by significant resources for developing tangible projects, can make a vital difference in people’s day-to-day lives. Bridges to Green Jobs shows how opening a job-training-to-work pipeline in expanding fields in the clean economy can transform underrepresented workers’ financial futures. RAIL CDC’s Resilience Hubs acknowledge that the experiences of residents and families matter when planning resilient climate responses.
Working At The Speed of Trust
Transforming communities requires navigating complex development processes that often play out over long timelines and need significant capital investment to succeed. In addition, development projects rarely sail through community-approval processes—especially when no one consults the people directly affected by a project’s impacts, positive or negative. We can mitigate these risks, however, by 1) actively listening to community members and looking beyond basic questions of want and need; 2) respecting planning and input already completed; 3) remaining accountable to the community by transforming input into action; and 4) committing to showing up for the long haul. Without these basic elements of meaningful involvement, not just engagement, developers, financers, policy makers, and other stakeholders face a more circuitous road to community transformation. Community development, equitable engagement, and climate action represent essential ingredients for successful, sustained projects. Integrating them effectively takes trust, and trust takes time to build.
Decades of experience have shown that community developers will falter when residents don’t trust that project implementers work in the community’s best interests. Trust doesn’t grow out of two or three nighttime public meetings. A team has to earn it by demonstrating the willingness and wherewithal to put plans into action—creating tangible bricks and mortar, grass and trees, playgrounds and bike lanes that people can see, touch, and benefit from. Repeatedly asking the same questions and producing results that don’t reflect the time and energy community members invested in the process represents a recipe for distrust. Community members won’t feel ownership of their community; they won’t feel that their voices matter; and they won’t bestow the trust needed to move projects forward.
This represents a critical issue for addressing large-scale infrastructure and redevelopment plans with long timelines in which community engagement becomes a multi-generational affair. We can address trust-building head on, as the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative and Pacoima Beautiful have done. They put in time and energy because they understood the need for long-term commitment. Not only did they work to weave their organizations into the fabric of the community, but they also committed to devising solutions based on the community’s voice; to involving residents actively in developing roadmaps for change; and to holding funders, policymakers, and the community-development sector itself accountable for results.
Trust building also applies to organizations. To work effectively together, climate advocates, community developers, and community organizers need to understand each other’s motivations and implement initiatives that address each other’s needs. This should include positive short- and long-term climate, environmental, and equity outcomes. Successes on smaller projects show that incremental steps toward larger goals keep people engaged and demonstrate that their voices have been heard and acted on. Trust building at both individual and organizational levels creates neighborhood-engagement systems that can accommodate the wants, needs, goals, and aspirations of everyone with a stake in community change.
Models For Deeper Community Participation
No matter what community—from rural to urban and all in-between— people don’t attend community engagement meetings because they want to give opinions that never make a difference. If we want meaningful engagement, useful input, and community support, we need to create realistic opportunities for people with time and resource constraints to participate. And we need to commit to translating their input into action. Without action and community ownership of solutions and outcomes, community engagement becomes extractive. Any respectful merging of community development, climate action, and equity goals demands shared decision-making among residents, community representatives, and organizations.
Fortunately, we have models for building resident-driven governance and authentic participation. One example comes from a framework created by Rosa Gonzalez at the Movement Strategy Center in Oakland, CA. The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership posits a continuum of engagement—from ignoring the community to deferring to it—and impacts, which can range from marginalization to community ownership. The framework categorizes the different messages that various levels of engagement send to communities, from Your voice will have minimal impact on the outcomes to You can be a part of transformative solutions. The framework’s usefulness lies in its exploration of different actors’ roles in meaningful engagement. It requires introspection about roles and decision-making power and provides guiding questions to gauge where the community stands in developing a stronger community-engagement paradigm. It highlights the drawbacks of traditional extractive approaches and advocates a more inclusive and respectful strategy that ensures the relevance and ownership of community plans.
As communities and advocates collaborate, traveling these interconnected pathways together can lead to resilience, inclusivity, and sustainability. The imperative of climate change demands that projects have equitable results—and that will only happen through meaningful community engagement built on trust and action. The more we prepare the ground for that, the stronger our chances of nurturing the future everyone deserves.
About The Author
Madeline Fraser Cook, Senior Vice President
Madeline del Carmen Fraser Cook is the Senior Vice President of Community Building and Resilient Solutions at the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC). She is a recognized leader in green development and planning and has worked extensively with low-income Latino communities in both the mainland U.S. and Puerto Rico. She is a LEED accredited professional with over 20 years of experience in direct technical assistance to green projects.