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Hi, this is Ame from the State of Inclusion. Welcome.
In November, my colleague Emma Winiski and I led a breakout session at the Government Alliance on Race and Equity annual conference in St. Louis, Missouri. The Session was titled, Building for All: Connecting Inclusive Practices to Improve the Built Environment and Beyond. We thought we’d share our presentation via audio and also create a short video that includes our slides.
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If you’ve been listening to the State of Inclusion Podcast, you’ve heard us talk about our six practices for building a more inclusive community. You’ll hear more about those practices and our current work in this episode. You may also remember Emma from previous episodes. In this episode you’ll hear more about Emma’s “day job” with the Oklahoma City Government.
While Emma is here in her official capacity with Oklahoma City, she has also been part of State of Inclusion nearly from the beginning, starting as a student intern.
At first Emma and I focused on data, working to assess and understand the state of equity in communities across the country. I don’t have to tell you what we saw in the data was troubling.
That work left us asking ourselves…
What are communities out there doing to address these staggering inequities?
So, Emma and I have spent the last few years trying to answer that question by talking with people all across the country who are working to make their communities more equitable and inclusive.
We started the State of Inclusion Podcast in 2019 to lift up their work and share what we learned.
Over the years, I’ve talked with dozens of people from dozens of different communities. People from museums and nonprofits, people working across their faith community. I’ve talked with artists, librarians, and filmmakers. With people who acknowledge the past and focus on remembrance and healing, as well as people who come to this work with a decidedly forward-looking focus. I’ve had the opportunity to talk with people working with and within their city governments. I’ve probably spoken with some of you or folks from your communities.
So What Did We Find?
The best part…Uncovered beautiful and bountiful equity work happening in communities all across our country. I’ve been grateful for the wisdom and challenges that my guests have freely shared. Honestly, these conversations are the reasons I remain so hopeful. These conversations encourage my heart every day.
Recognized building a more inclusive and equitable community is in every way an inside job. Somebody from outside your community can be a guide, a thought partner, or a mentor – national organizations like GARE can certainly help. Still, all community progress, especially progress on equity and inclusion, is an inside job.
Confirmed there is no recipe or formula. No process to follow or best way to build a more inclusive and equitable community. Every community is unique and different, with its own resources, gifts, assets, starting point, history, and even its own ambitions.
Even though there is no recipe or formula, we have identified six practices for building a more inclusive community. We call them practices because they are not linear or singular, and the skill and mastery of each of these practices is worthy of a lifetime of work. And, these aren’t our practices. We didn’t make them up. We’re simply describing what we’ve seen and heard repeated over and over, community after community. So let’s have a look at the practice.
First, is the practice of Self Work. It is about looking inward before looking outward.
It is clear that nobody comes to this work of equity and inclusion without doing their own Self Work. Some form of self work is probably why you’re listening t me today and why our attendees were at the conference. Teams also have their own form of Self Work to do too. We believe SelfWork has a cycle that involves:
- Waking up – seeing and understanding in a new way
- Listening up – deep and empathetic listening to our neighbors and those with different lived experiences
- Opening Up – opening our hearts and our minds
- Speaking Up – finding our voice and using it
- Stepping Up – committing ourselves and taking action to advance equity and justice
- And when we fall down, make mistakes or falter, and we certainly will – its about getting back up.
- I’ll also just mention the idea of Resting Up. This work is hard and can be triggering for so many of us. We need to feed a deep well of energy in ourselves and our teams for this continued work. So, we need to practice self care.
I practice SelfWork in some form practically every day. The self work I do today is not at all the same self work I did 5 years ago or 15 years ago. It changes and evolves as I do. It will also not be the same self work that you do or your neighbor does. What is important is that we make time for SelfWork for ourselves and our teams and recognize that our Self Work is never really done.
As we zoom out and look at the broader community, we also see a practice we call GroundWork.
GroundWork is about preparing the community soil for the work of equity and inclusion to take root and grow.
In the practice of GroundWork we include things like
- community learning,
- touching and preparing the hearts,
- shifting the culture,
- holding space for and creating the conditions for a new and more equitable and inclusive community to emerge.
As an example, I talked with Gery Peredes Vasquez at the YWCA in Madison, Wisconsin, where they have hosted an equity summit for 21 years. Their summit has been a lasting container for community learning, but also touching the heart through a celebration of original art, music, and storytelling.
Groundwork is all about the long game.
But sometimes we want to drive progress over a shorter time frame and in more specific areas. We would likely rely, or we see people rely on the practice of Program Work. Here, we’re not talking about service programs but rather collections of initiatives that work in alignment toward a shared outcome.
Program work is about Catalyzing the changes necessary to advance community progress toward equity and inclusion. It is about working primarily from the outside-in as we drive progress toward some set of specific goals and outcomes. It includes work like
- Measuring, diagnosing, and assessing
- Mobilizing and organizing for action
- Building momentum
- Communication and change management
- But also, stimulating, advocating, and even demonstrating
As an example, I talked with Krystal Reyes from the city of Tulsa. Her team is leading and has co-created, with over 2000 community members, a program of 41 actions focused on building a more resilient Tulsa. This includes changes at all different levels across her community.
Sometimes it isn’t just about catalyzing change, but about establishing and building partnerships for change. The Practice we call Coalition Work, is about weaving institutions together to strengthen equity outcomes across a specific area of the community. The practice of Coalition Work is all about
- Engaging stakeholders in different organizations,
- Aligning around a shared mission and vision, and
- working together across structures, organizations, and teams across time.
In this practice, we see coalitions explicitly created to work on equity and inclusion, but we have also seen communities applying an equity lens to existing coalitions.
So, as an example, I spoke with Kalika Curry of Eastside Pathways in King County. They are part of the Strive Together network of communities across the country who are focused on education. Kalika works to explicitly build equity into an existing community coalition. She uses a tool called an Equity Pledge as a way to foster commitment across coalition members.
I also spoke with Tawanna Black of the Minnesota Center for Economic Inclusion. Tawanna’s team is working with communities across Minnesota and beyond. In their work, they bring public leaders together with business leaders to forge partnerships and coalitions for the purpose of building regional and local economies that work for everybody.
So, if we’ve talked about our own work, we’ve talked about working from the outside in, as a catalyst, and across, through coalitions, Systems Work is about changing larger systems and institutions from the inside out. It is about changing policies, practices, structures, and incentives. It is about locking in our progress and embedding change to ensure equity and inclusion continue going forward.
Many of the communities we’ve interview are GARE members. Like the folks that were in our breakout session, they are working to change their local government. But, I also spoke with Dr. Kathleen Yang-Clayton, who is working across Illinois as part of her state’s Great Cities Initiative to operationalize DEI in their member city and county governments.
And, I talked with Paul McCormack, about the work he and his team do to make our South Carolina State Park System more accessible, inclusive, and equitable.
A word about the final practice area of Ecosystem work.
I haven’t interviewed anyone who explicitly talked about their equity ecosystem work. Yet, when Emma and I look at almost any community with at least one initiative with a visible commitment to equity and inclusion, we find another and another, contributing in beautifully unique and different ways across that same community – sometimes coordinated, sometimes not.
The practice of Ecosystem Work asks us to see our work in the context of a larger ecosystem of actors and organizations that are all contributing to building a more just, equitable, and inclusive community. It also challenges us to be aware of the broader community context within which we pursue our work and to sense what is happening around us on a daily basis.
Because Emma and I believe that seeing is believing and we are stronger by working together, we have been developing an approach to help communities visualize, describe, and map their equity ecosystem. We’re currently testing and refining the approach, so if any of you are interested in trying this out with us, reach out.
After thinking about these six practices, many of you may see or think of yourself as mainly operating in one practice area. Maybe you see yourself primarily doing systems work, driving change from the inside out within your own institution or organization.
I’ll just say that these practices strengthen our work when they are considered and integrated together. When we consider them in an integrated, interconnected, and nested way. If you are doing systems or program work, ask yourself have you done the GroundWork to prepare the organizational or community soil for your initiatives to take root and grow? Or, you wan to ask yourself, how could your work be more successful by building coalitions or partnerships to extend the impact and reach? You might also ask, if you’re feeling a little fatigued or overwhelmed by this work, you might ask who else in your equity ecosystem might be able to step up help or support? And, have you changed the systems, the underlying processes, practices, and incentives to ensure your changes last?
That’s a little about our six practices.
I’ll turn it over to Emma so she can discuss her work at Oklahoma City and help us better see these practices at work.
Thank you! So, as Ame mentioned my name is Emma and I work in the Office of Equity for Oklahoma City. My work is pretty wide ranging, which I really enjoy. For example, I serve as the Compliance Officer for the Human Rights Commission and have the opportunity to conduct a needs assessment for our opioid settlement funds. My background is in health policy research, specifically on substance use disorders and 911 alternative response programs. So I’m always happy when I can apply some of that experience at the local level.
As Ame mentioned, we’ve been working together for a while. I feel a deep sense of conviction that City government is such an important place to do equity work. I’ve now had the opportunity to work with multiple cities, from Topeka to Baltimore to Cambridge and now Oklahoma City. Of course my time with each city has varied, but one thing is clear. There are so many dedicated and insightful people in this space across the country, and I’m so grateful to be in the room with many of you today.
So, I’ll talk a little bit about my work in Oklahoma City and discuss a couple of key initiatives that I have been fortunate to be a part of that tie to the Six Areas of Practice that Ame just went over.
Specifically, I want to talk about how success in one project–our work on a General Obligation, or GO Bond, is leading to broader, systems-level change within our city.
For the past year, we have been preparing for our 2025 GO Bond. And for Oklahoma City, these bonds are especially critical because they are funded by property taxes. This matters because Oklahoma is the only state in the nation that doesn’t allow its municipalities to use property taxes to fund day to day operations. We primarily rely on sales tax revenue.
So, our GO Bond is a huge opportunity to fund really critical capital improvement projects. It touches basically every aspect of the built environment that our residents interact with. These include things like repaving streets and repairing bridges. We only vote on a GO Bond every 10-ish years. So again, it’s a big opportunity for us. For reference, this year’s bond package will be around $2 billion.
I would categorize this work as Program Work using the Areas of Practice framework. There’s a ton of measuring, diagnosing, and assessing. For example, measuring could look like documenting the pavement condition index, or PCI, of every single street in the City.
And things like measuring the PCI for every street is an especially big task because OKC spans 621 square miles, making it the 3rd largest city by square mileage. Beyond technical measures like the PCI, we also do things like assess where and how we think our population will grow in the next decade and beyond and how we want to invest in our city to support that growth.
Because there is so much to consider, the GO Bond is a multi-year effort.
First, departments identify all of the potential capital improvement projects, and then rank them in order of most important to least important. Then, the community engagement process happens, where City council members and the public are invited to learn about the potential projects and provide feedback. We are currently in this phase. After the engagement our departments revise their lists, and then, we prepare for the vote.
Residents must approve each specific category of project types. While we’ve passed our last couple of bond issues, just last month a neighboring city did not pass their bond this year, so it’s extra important to us to listen to our community’s priorities.
We do a lot of engagement activities. We administer a survey, our Councilmembers host town halls in their wards, and we partner with neighborhood organizations and nonprofits to host what we call “Meetings In a Box.”
This year, we are also utilizing an online platform called Social Pinpoint, where folks can do all kinds of things. They can learn about what a GO Bond is and see when and where the next meetings will be.
And they can do things like drop a pin on our map to let us know what infrastructure project they think is needed.
We even added a “game” where people have 100 points to allocate across the different project categories.
After doing all of this engagement, we now have all of this data. Departments will use it to revise their project lists. The final dollar amount of the GO Bond is split across the propositions, which you see here. This determines how many projects on each list will be funded if the vote passes.
Per usual, there’s not enough money to fund everything, so some process must be in place to determine priorities. Let’s back up to that initial planning phase that took place before our public engagement.
In previous years, the methodology that departments used has been subjective to say the least. Some departments didn’t document their process at all beyond saying that the department head determined what projects were funded. This makes it challenging to communicate with residents about why they should support bonds if they don’t understand how the decisions were made.
This year, things changed. A small group of employees got together to try to standardize how departments rank their projects. Much of the prioritization process is based on technical measures, such as the PCI like I mentioned before. But, this year we added in an equity component.
We used examples of how other cities, like Oakland and Syracuse did similar projects, to provide a framework for departments to use demographic factors to rank their projects. Syracuse and Oakland both incorporated equity into their road reconstruction process. To do this they used metrics like income level, race/ethnicity, employment status, age, and educational attainment.
The goal was to try to help broaden the view of these capital projects to include the context of the communities where the projects are physically located. By broadening our view beyond the literal infrastructure, we are trying to rectify some of the historical inequities in the distribution of investments across the City.
This process required a lot of internal stakeholder engagement.
We met with each department to share the new methodology and review what they had done in prior years. We had to explain why it was important to include equity and again reference other cities like Oakland and Syracuse who have set an example.
We also offered technical assistance to departments who wanted to incorporate our new prioritization criteria.
I want to be transparent that this process wasn’t perfect. We didn’t have the authority to mandate that departments use our methodology. But, we still had some pretty promising results.
For example, our planning department did a really in depth analysis of equity metrics, which you can see here. They weighted their equity score at 20%, which is higher than the 15% that we suggested. To calculate their score, they created hex bins, which are the colorful dots on the map. This let them get even more targeted in ranking different projects–here the red areas represent a higher equity score, which means that projects in those areas of the city should get more priority.
Other departments, like our Fire Department worked with our Planning Department and our small group to conduct an equity analysis. They then used this Excel template to re-weight all of their projects. This is just a screenshot of the equity part of the re-weighting, but they did this for all of the different prioritization that I showed on the last slide.
This was a huge improvement to that old methodology that I showed earlier that just said the Fire Chief got to choose what projects got funded. They used data (including equity-related data) to transform their methodology.
Again, we know that this part of the Bond is a critical one. Hopefully future bond projects and infrastructure projects that come up before the next bond can use this methodology.
We are still going to have to advocate for the importance of considering equity in service delivery and investments in the built environment. I’m really proud of the work that our team did. For reference, multiple departments did take us up on using our prioritization criteria.
And while we don’t know exactly how much of the $2 billion dollars they’ll get this year, in 2017, those same departments represented $674 million dollars out of $967 million total bond. That’s a huge chunk of money and the majority of the bond.
We still have work to do. I want Oklahoma City to get to a place where it is the default to use equity indicators when making decisions. I think our team’s work with the GO Bond is a step in the right direction–all of that internal stakeholder engagement with department leaders helped de-mystifying what this looks like in practice made including equity less scary for many staff.
Like I mentioned, we are now deep in the process of engaging with the community. While our engagement efforts continue to improve, there is still room for growth. For example, we are now trying to do much more youth engagement focused on the bond, since many of these infrastructure projects take years to finish, our young folks are the ones who will be impacted by the decisions we make next year. We want them to have a say.
So, we have laid some foundational work for how to better rank projects, but there’s a lot of opportunity for how and when we engage with the public both for bond projects, but really for all types of work that the City does.
These questions have been the impetus for the other stream of work that I mentioned earlier, which is developing a city-wide community engagement strategy. We are also working on a toolkit of practical resources to help staff design and facilitate better engagement activities.
To me, this is a prime example of Systems Work within the Areas of Practice. My involvement with the GO Bond prioritization work and community engagement process was an opportunity to pitch creating a City-wide strategy. My hope is that this strategy and toolkit will be useful across departments and project types moving forward.
Don’t get me wrong–many folks in the City do and have done extensive community engagement. But there hasn’t been any city-wide effort to set goals and expectations. And there is an enormous opportunity to increase the level and transparency of interaction so that it encourages more civic engagement instead of discouraging it.
We also often go to the same, familiar modes of engagement and likely miss out on chances to innovate and reach populations who aren’t often engaged.
So, this work is about changing the larger way that the OKC engages with the community from the inside-out. It’s about thinking long-term about the steps that we need to take to build trust with the residents we serve.
To do systems work, there needs to be more than just policy change. We have to make sure the policies lead to a change in practices. So, like I mentioned before, we are also working on creating a toolkit for our City. So, when people want to (or have to) engage with the community, there’s a city standard for how to do so.
For example, even asking teams to take the time to locate themselves on this spectrum of participation can help set clear expectations for themselves and the community. If the decision has already been made, then you might be downstream in the “inform” stage. But if you’re early on and can share power, you might be in the “empower” stage.
Even using a standard and clear methodology, like what we did for the GO Bond, helps staff communicate clearly how decisions are being made to residents. Instead of saying one person decides how millions of dollars get advocated, we can talk through how we ranked each project and what went into that ranking.
My hope is that the toolkit will be a resource for both our employees and our residents. I’m currently getting feedback from senior leadership and mid-level staff on the strategy, and will present it to our City Manager next week.
So, those are just two examples of work that OKC has been doing this past year, but I’m excited about the potential for long-range impact. It’s been helpful to remember that work across these Areas of Practice isn’t mutually exclusive. In fact, in many ways work in one area can and should be leveraged to support work in another.
This framework helped me be strategic when doing the GO Bond work. By that, I mean I was able to leverage success in the GO Bond project to advocate for the opportunity to do some Systems Work–both with improved data-driven decision making and better community engagement practices.
So much of the internal stakeholder engagement was helping to pitch equity and data as necessarily linked together. Even among the members of that small group who worked on the prioritization methodology, we had to pitch that equity should be included. But, I’m hoping that doing this groundwork–sowing the seeds for why equity should be included–will help make it easier for this methodology and better community engagement practices to be supported in moving forward.
I’m also lucky that we had an assistant city manager who was really bought into the need for better community engagement across the City, who is able to be an executive sponsor for this work. I know that these pieces aren’t always in place. But still, by starting small with an eye towards scaling up, we were able to build a coalition of the willing along the way.
The work isn’t done. Like I said, I’m hoping that eventually there will be a situation where we have buy-in from people who have to actually implement things. AND we will have buy-in from senior leadership who understand that doing better CE improves how we operate as a government and serve our residents. Until then, I assume I’ll keep moving between the areas of practice.
Doing more groundwork with internal and external stakeholders to start to build more transparency and trust.
Using other highly visible projects as proof of concept.
And always coming back to self-work, so that our strategy is a living and responsive one.
Thank you so much for listening to Ame and share our Six Areas of Practice Framework for building more equitable and inclusive communities. And thanks for letting me share a little bit about the work that I’m a part of in Oklahoma City.
Following our presentations, Emma and I facilitated small group sessions where participants discussed ways that they might use an equity lens in their community to prioritize and direct funding for the built environment or in other types of community planning. At the end of that activity, we were pleasantly surprised to learn that of the approximately 75 participants, nearly all of the communities represented did include an equity lens in their planning and in funding their built environment. At least one of the communities there also used an equity lens in their city budgeting process. Of course, we had a pretty special group of people already associated with GARE. Still, it was encouraging to see the level of commitment in governments and communities all across the country and to hear the rich discussion among participants.
We also gave the group some time to discuss which of the six practice areas they felt most relevant to their work? And, to consider how to better integrate across practice areas to strengthen their work.
And then finally, Emma wrapped with a few suggestions for participants to consider:
• Act creatively: In this day and time, we need to see roadblocks as redirections and opportunities.
• Act strategically: Use the Six Practices together to effect change.
• Act collaboratively: Build community and take care of each other.
Finally, we left the group with some options for how to engage with us going forward, which I’ll also share here, in case it is relevant for some of you.
As always, thanks for joining us at the State of Inclusion.
Debrief
We have just a few minutes left, so please finish your last points.
We’ve got a few minutes to debrief. So, we won’t have time to hear from everyone, but we do want to hear a little from your discussions.
First I’ll just ask for a quick show of hands…
· How many of you use an equity lens in your community to prioritize and direct funding for the built environment or in other types of community planning?
Maybe a few of you would be willing to quickly share about the discussion at your table. Either about how you are using an equity lens to direct and fund the built environment or about the second question of how you might see yourself using or integrating the six practices we discussed in your work.
Raise your hand, and we’ll bring a mic to your table.
Thank you so much for sharing with each other and with our larger group.
We’ve saved a few minutes to respond to any questions you might have. If we don’t have time to get to your question, don’t worry. Emma and I will hang around for a few minutes after the session and also you’re welcome to reach during or after the conference.
That’s about all we have time for. So, I’ll let Emma bring this home with a few concluding points.
As Emma said, we’d love to hear from you – feel free to reach out
· If you have questions that weren’t answered today
· You want to learn more about the Six Practices Framework
• If you’d like to Create an Equity Ecosystem Map
• Conduct a Team Self Work Assessment & planning session
• Or maybe Recommend a guest for our podcast
Thank you again for the work you do every day in your community and for joining us today.
The best compliment for our work is your willingness to share the podcast or discuss these ideas with others. If you'd like to hear more about the practice of building an inclusive and equitable community, head over to theinclusivecommunity.com and sign up for our newsletter. Also, feel free to leave us a review or reach out we'd love to hear from you. Thanks so much for listening, and join us again next time.