• the imagineCALGARY Web site (including the opportunity to complete the questions online in nine languages)
• imagineCALGARY booths at more than a dozen festivals and approximately 364 events
• over 40 youth volunteers spent approximately 425 hours interviewing 150 community leaders
• focused visioning sessions with over 60 groups from a range of diversity communities (ethno-cultural, seniors, low-income, urban aboriginals, disability groups)
• focused visioning sessions with 70 youth groups
• about 30 sessions with City of Calgary internal groups; and
• over 40 CalgaryQuest sessions (scenario exploration tool).5
Once all the responses were in, the next challenge was to compile them and translate all the input into a coherent, inspirational and above all concise vision statement. The city used a couple of different tools to do this. One was a computerized database of all the answers that could be searched by keyword so that themes in all the answers could be identified.6 People were able to enter their answers directly into an on-line survey, but one of the lessons learned from the project was how few participants actually did it this way. The city’s consultants worked to compile the themes and produced a report on the collective vision for the Round Table and the staff.
The next step was to craft a statement that reflected the themes and was inspirational enough to serve as a collective value statement for the city. A small committee from the Round Table was convened, and a local poet was hired to help do this. Many drafts went back and forth; there was much wordsmithing and revision to arrive at the final result.
Our vision for Calgary
For thousands of years, people have met at the confluence of two vital rivers to imagine and realize their futures. Together, we have built a city of energy, born of a powerful convergence of people, ideas and place. Together, we continue to imagine Calgary, making a community in which
• We are each connected to one another. Our diverse skills and heritage interweave to create a resilient communal fabric, while our collective spirit generates opportunity, prosperity and choice for us all.
• We are each connected to our places. We treasure and protect our natural environment. Magnificent mountain vistas and boundless prairie skies inspire each of us to build spaces worthy of their surroundings.
• We are each connected to our communities. Whether social, cultural or physical, these communities are mixed, safe and just. They welcome meaningful participation from everyone and people move freely between them.
• We are each connected beyond our boundaries. We understand our impacts upon and responsibilities to others. Our talent and caring, combined with a truly Canadian sense of citizenship, make positive change across Alberta, throughout Canada and around the world.
We can make it happen!
With purpose, drive and passion, Calgary will be a model city, one that looks after the needs of today’s citizens and those to come. We make imagination real; it’s the Calgary way. It’s what we’ve always done and will always do.
Calgary: a great place to make a living, a great place to make a life.7
The vision statement was further elaborated by goals, which were organized around each of the human needs within the different city systems. The goals articulated the end state that Calgary wanted to achieve in 100 years. Each of the goals was then put into action through a series of 10, 20 and 30 year targets, which were measurable steps to the goal, and these in turn each had a set of strategies to be used to achieve the targets. All of this was written up in the ImagineCALGARY Long Range Plan for Urban Sustainability, along with a plan to institutionalize the process, both within city government and in the community. To launch the plan, Calgary attended the World Urban Forum in Vancouver in the spring of 2006, where it was featured as a leader for urban sustainability for cities all over the world.
Award Winning Plan
Since the adoption of the plan, Calgary has won several awards for its work in this area. The Canadian Urban Institute presented imagine-CALGARY with its 2009 Natural City Award to recognize the role the plan has played in creating a sustainable future for the community. Other awards the city received include the Municipal Sustainability Innovator Community Award from the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association and the CH2M Hill Sustainable Communities Award from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities.
At the time of this writing, it is too early to say much about the implementation of the plan, although work has been done to institutionalize it into city government by creating a Sustainability Coordinator in the City Manager’s office and to establish a formal organization outside of city government that will keep community efforts going. The new coordinator’s job is intentionally low-key; the goal was not to develop a new department for sustainability, which has the unfortunate unintended consequence of allowing other departments to assume that the job is being taken care of without their involvement. The position will instead continue to integrate the work of the broad range of city departments and to hold their feet to the fire with respect to the targets that were set and refined by the City Council into a shorter term work plan for the city.
Calgary Dollars
As was the case in Burlington, the City of Calgary already had a complementary currency when imagineCALGARY began. Called Calgary Dollars, the currency is a taxable currency that exists both in printed and in electronic form. The project is supported by the Arusha Center, an organization dedicated to social justice, the United Way of Calgary, and the City of Calgary Family and Community Support Services.8
One of the benefits to Calgary Dollars of the imagineCALGARY project was that its importance to the different goals and objectives the city established was articulated in the long-term plan the city developed. This raised awareness among a broader range of stakeholders about the currency and linked it to city objectives.
Plan-It Newburgh
At the same time Calgary was moving forward with its 100 year plan, another small city on the Hudson River in New York State — Newburgh — hired a new City Manager. Jean-Ann McGrane had been a professor who taught sustainable development before she worked in Newburgh. She was interested to hear what a local organization called Sustainable Hudson Valley, led by Melissa Everett, had to say about the possibility of producing the state’s first sustainable Master Plan. Gwendolyn was invited to speak to department heads in the city about the work that Burlington had done, and a new partnership was formed to begin work on a stakeholder process in Newburgh.
The story of the two planning initiatives in Calgary and Newburgh could be a tale of two cities, because they couldn’t be more different. It was the best of times in Calgary, it was the worst of times in Newburgh. Calgary was a wealthy city and could budget $2.4 million simply to produce the plan itself. They had a worker shortage and were looking for immigrants to fill over 16,000 jobs that were available. Newburgh was an impoverished, boarded up, crime ridden pocket of urban blight — the construction of an interstate highway bypassed its downtown in the 1970s, and the city had been in decline ever since. Newburgh suffered from high unemployment, double digit teenage pregnancy rates, a long history of corruption and almost feudal governance that allowed a small handful of elites to use the city’s resources to enrich themselves. An urban renewal program in the 1960s had been the flagship of this effort; it displaced the African American population without ever completing the projects that were promised, creating an open wound in the city that still festered 40 years later.
The population of Newburgh was split three ways — African American, over Hispanic (undocumented illegal immigrants made this statistic a bit slippery) and a little less than white. The city had a total population of about 32,000, so it was similar in size to Burlington. There was enormous tension among the different groups, everything from serious gang warfare in the streets to a take-no-prisoners approach to local politics that dominated City Council meetings. Convening a group of stakeholders that were
truly representative of the different parts of the community and creating a shared vision was going to be difficult. Gwendolyn figured that if she could do it in Newburgh, it could be done anywhere.
Stakeholder Recruitment
Following the instructions in the EarthCAT book, the first step in Newburgh was to recruit a Core Team of people who represented the various constituencies in the city. In Calgary, this group had been the advisory panel to the Mayor; in Newburgh this group represented trusted members from each of the ethnic groups who managed to rise above ongoing strife. Nuns from the Catholic Church had already heard of the Earth Charter and were eager to help. The daughter of a prominent pastor in the African American community and a few other key citizens volunteered to help recruit stakeholders.
The city planned a two-day training for the stakeholders, which was led by Gwendolyn and Melissa. The training covered the methodology for the process, but also included an important section on conflict management, listening skills, facilitation skills and dialogue. It also gave all the participants a lot of opportunity to interact with each other and to get to know everyone there — plenty of small group work and hands-on exercises demonstrating everything from cooperation and teamwork to systems dynamics.
The first group of stakeholders met for the training on a sunny day in the spring of 2005. The local bank, which had a meeting room that offered a beautiful view of the Hudson River, made the training space available — it was to become the main meeting room for the stakeholders for the entire process. There were about 50 people there, representing everyone from the local police department to the leaders of a local group of street poets and rappers who were known for being vocal opponents of city policies.
Every training started with introductions, despite objections from the staff in Newburgh that it would take too long for 50 people to say a few words about themselves. An important principle of adult education is that people need to identify themselves to the group; they can’t be anonymous. Given the volatile political situation in the city, this was more important than ever. People stood in a circle and were asked to give their names, either where they worked or lived and to say one thing about Newburgh that they thought was hopeful for the future. We also asked them to think about who was missing from the training and the planning process that should be there and to make suggestions to us before the end of the training.
This method of recruiting stakeholders came to be named the concentric circle process, because it turned out to be so successful in Newburgh. The trainees at the first session did suggest other people to the city staff person, Betsy McKean, who was the backbone of the project as it moved forward. So after the first training, 50 more trainees were invited to the second, who in turn were asked to suggest people for the training. A third training was held, and a fourth. Finally, during the fourth training the stakeholders suggested that more youth be involved, and a special youth training was scheduled — by this time it was summer and so a local youth group could be recruited to accomplish this.
In hindsight, while it was a great idea to have more youth involved, it was a real challenge to manage an entire training session filled with inner city teenagers. At first, it was like pulling teeth to get them engaged — the training was so dependent on hands-on, small group work that engagement was not optional. Gwendolyn finally figured out that several kids thought that they were in this session as some kind of punishment. This called for a change in the approach. She reassured them that, to the contrary, they were taking the training because someone in the city thought they might make good leaders. She abandoned one of the modules scheduled for the first morning and walked them all over to City Hall where she gave them a chance to sit in the seats occupied by the City Council and let them pretend to be the mayor. This impressed them, and helped them be a little more cooperative for the rest of the two days they spent with the trainers.
Lesson learned: it is critically important to involve youth in the training, but do it when a whole room of adults can help keep them on task by having them participate in the same training as the adults. The fact that the adults were required to take the same training was one of the important pieces of information Gwendolyn gave the youth group — this raised eyebrows and got them to sit up a bit straighter. Of course, being in the same training as the adults would accomplish this same goal.
Visioning Questions
Newburgh found that the questions Calgary asked were relevant to their community, so they began a public outreach process to ask citizens to answer them:
• What do you value about Newburgh?
• What is it like for you to live here?
• What changes would you most like to see?
• What are your hopes and dreams for the next 100 years?
• How can you help make this happen?
It was a challenge to find ways to reach out in Newburgh’s rough inner city context. The local team assembled to manage the project included Sarah Pasti, a local advocate from across the river in Beacon and a couple of local residents who could devote time to outreach and committee attendance. The Special Projects coordinator from the city was a contact person to help coordinate the group, along with the hardworking City Clerk.
Creative ideas about how to do the outreach included a kickoff event during the annual fall arts festival, using a bus to visit the neighborhoods and do some canvassing, visiting local community groups and asking all of the stakeholders to participate by bringing the surveys to the people they knew. A basketball game was held between the police and the school team, and the city printed buttons and t-shirts with the Plan-It Newburgh logo. (Plan-It being a homonym for Planet — it was a mild joke about the city). A local team of activists was hired to help with the outreach efforts, and they pulled together an outreach plan to reach all the diverse and often dangerously competitive sectors of the community. Community outreach can be very challenging in a city where gang violence is high; truces have to be declared before weddings that involve people from different neighborhoods can be held peacefully.
The School Surprise
Despite all these efforts, several months passed in the fall, and not a lot of surveys had been returned. People were busy, some of the initial enthusiasm for the project had faded and the stakeholders hadn’t really taken ownership of the visioning process. The December meeting arrived, and the staff of the project were getting nervous that there wouldn’t be enough surveys to be credible as a statement by the people of the city about their values and aspirations.
What we didn’t know was that while the rest of the stakeholders were procrastinating, one young student named Vinny Gaetano took on the project of getting student input into the plan quite seriously. He had gone to his principal, who in turn directed him to the school board to obtain permission to distribute the surveys to all the children in the schools. The school board had given him the OK, and he had personally visited a lot of the schools with the surveys in hand.
He got up to speak at the meeting, holding hundreds of completed surveys from the schools. The stakeholders spontaneously broke into applause — you could feel the mixture of excitement and embarrassment as everyone realized that Vinny, age 14, had done more work than any of the adults to find answers to the questions. From this moment on, things changed. The surveys began to come in from all quarters as people found new ways to circulate them to their peers and in their workplaces. The city decided to extend the period of time to collect the answers, to allow more of them to be returned, and in the end they had answers from more than 2% of the population — a level that indicates that just about everyone had been given an opportunity to participate.
The Vision
A small committee of stakeholders was formed to review all the surveys and draft a vision statement for the city. It was a diverse committee, and the statement went through many drafts, some which had wording that spoke more powerfully about the need for economic justice than the one finally ratified by the group. But given the challenges
and divisions that continued to run through city relations, the simple fact that such a diverse group of people settled on a shared vision was a real accomplishment in Newburgh.
Newburgh, Queen City of the Hudson River Valley, offers spectacular views, historic architecture, and a vibrant cultural blend. We share a vision of justice and prosperity for all, health and vitality for our people, and our own distinctive place in the world.
Established by immigrants seeking liberty and opportunity, the city is a natural transportation hub — the river, rails, highways and airport continue to shape our economy and our lives. Built on accomplishments of the past 300 years, Newburgh will foster the achievements of many future generations.
Our city continues to renew itself as a clean, safe and caring city, where community thrives and individuals flourish. A respected environment, an enterprising spirit, and the diversity of our citizens will shape our future. Newburgh and its people will be known for creativity, compassion, prosperity and peace.9
Even as the vision was being drafted, changes in the dynamics of local government were underway. When interviewed by a local cable station during one of the events sponsored by the project, the City Manager described how the stakeholder training had changed the tenor of dialogue at City Council meetings. She said that while a take-no-prisoners approach had been the rule in the past, the level of respectful listening and dialogue “changed the political culture of the city.”10
Creating Wealth Page 22