Importance of Public Engagement
The Baltimore Office of Sustainability (BOS) and the Commission on Sustainability (CoS) recognize that creating a sustainable City rests in the hands of the entire Baltimore community. Some already have an understanding of and a vested interest in the global and local fight for sustainability. There are others, however, who have not yet been engaged in the conversation or moved to action. The desire to include the voices of all segments of Baltimore motivated the BOS and CoS to engage the community in a planning process to shape Baltimore’s Sustainability Plan, a process designed to give all citizens, businesses, and institutions multiple ways to participate and provide input to the Plan and its development.
The SC’s commitment to a public engagement process was emphasized at its first public meeting on May 27, 2008, that included commitments to the operating principles of inclusiveness, engagement, and translation. All components of the public engagement process have been guided by these principles.
Baltimore’s Approach to Public Engagement
The sustainability plan’s public engagement process, which ultimately engaged over 1,000 citizens over an eight month period, gathered and analyzed ideas, studied best practices, and developed aspirations for a more sustainable city. The process included input from average citizens, City agency personnel, environmental activists, and sustainability experts. The results of this process are the basis for the recommended goals and actions in the Sustainability Plan. To reach over 1000 people from all sections of the City, the public engagement process had multiple components – working groups, community conversations, a youth strategy, and a sustainability forum.
Working Groups
The primary vehicle for developing the core content of the Sustainability Plan was six Working Groups , each corresponding to a sustainability resource - Energy/Air, Water, Green Infrastructure, Built Environment, Transportation and Waste. Each group was comprised of at least two CoS Commissioners, five to ten non-commissioners with expertise in the respective resource areas, and any citizens who were interested in getting involved. The Work Group’s were staffed by people from across City government. Using the people, planet and prosperity lenses, they gathered information about existing programs, established a vision for their resource issue, identified goals and benchmarks, and established some programmatic priorities. Between June and August of 2008, the group’s collectively convened 18 public meetings and dozens of working sessions, engaged over 300 citizens, and produced a detailed set of recommendations to feed into the Sustainability Plan.
Community Conversations
While the Working Group’s gathered information around designated, resource-focused issues, the Community Conversations enabled people to discuss Sustainability out of these silos and in ways that relate to their everyday lives. An ad hoc community advisory team, consisting of 20 citizens, were asked for advice on how to balance the BOS and CoS’s need to talk about traditionally environmental issues such as greenhouse gas emissions and green infrastructure with the reality that many people do not typically think in these terms and may have other issues on their minds. The advisory team suggested that the BOS get on the agenda of already scheduled community meetings such as senior citizen groups, business groups, and community associations to raise people’s awareness about the Sustainability Plan, discuss issues raised by the Working Group’s, get people’s reactions to proposed goals, and hear new ideas for what priorities the Plan should articulate.
Based on this advice, the BOS recruited over 30 Sustainability Ambassadors who worked in pairs to attend over 35 community meetings in September and October of 2008. The Ambassadors, a diverse mix of interested citizens and City staff, were trained by professional facilitators to make brief sustainability presentations. Collectively, Ambassadors met with over 550 people from across Baltimore and gathered scores of ideas, some of which reinforced information already gathered by the BOS and some of which challenged and enhanced the emerging framework for the Plan. One result of the Community Conversations was a revised set of cross-cutting themes that were brought to the public for discussion at an October 28th Sustainability Forum (see below). Another, less tangible, result was that people who are not traditionally involved in environmental issues became more informed about sustainability and were given the opportunity to discuss how concerns they encounter in their everyday lives, such as their child’s asthma, are connected environmental problems, such as greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.
Youth Strategy
Young people have the most at stake in terms of our ability to act now to meet the environmental, social, and economic needs of Baltimore without compromising the ability of future generations to meet these needs. In early July, the BOS and CoS convened 11 young people and some adult leaders of youth development organizations to describe Baltimore’s Sustainability Program, discuss the six resource areas, share the desire to involve young people in the Plan’s development and get their advice and guidance on how to meaningfully engage them and their peers in the process. Through that discussion, young people asked to be fully integrated into the ongoing work of the SoC.
The idea of hosting a one day event presented itself as a feasible and effective way to immediately involve youth in the process. The attendees felt that in order to be successful, the one-day event had to have four key components. It had to be educational, hands-on, and entertaining, while gathering feedback from attendees. That became the guiding principle of Greenscape’08 -- to create an event specifically for young people, planned by young people. Greenscape’08 was held at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute on October 18, 2008. The event was attended by over 150 young people ages 3 to 24, plus volunteers including public and private school students, college students, community leaders, Commission on Sustainability Working Group members and Sustainability Commissioners. This one day event incorporated art, music, education, and fun to generate interest in the subject of sustainability and gave young people a time and a place dedicated to their concerns. Activities were planned that would inspire attendees to think about their environment and then express their ideas through artwork, media production, graffiti walls, and a survey.
Sustainability Forum
The final phase of community engagement was a Sustainability Forum held on October 28, 2008 at Poly-WesternHigh School, which brought together over 100 community stakeholders. The purpose was to hear the results of the planning and community engagement process to date; to seek feedback and recommendations; and to gain an endorsement of the process and products of the effort thus far, including the recommendations from the youth-led Greenscape event and the 8 themes from the Community Conversations: Cleanliness, Pollution Prevention, Resource Conservation, Greening, Transportation, Education & Awareness, Community & Economic Development, and Baltimore Uniqueness. Forum participants worked in breakout groups to consider each theme and the corresponding priority goals and strategies, the necessary partnerships required for implementation, anticipated challenges, and any “blue sky” ideas that should be explored to make the Sustainability Plan as bold as possible.
What we Learned from Pubic Engagement
The public engagement process was a significant step in ensuring accessibility and equity in what will be an ongoing effort to make Baltimore a sustainable city. The process successfully introduced the broader community to the sustainability initiative and the planning process, gathered information about community priorities from the perspective of diverse community representatives, shed light on issues for future community education and further conversation, built relationships between community stakeholders, BOS and the CoS, and recruited a cadre of citizens whose participation will be essential to the successful implementation of Baltimore’s Sustainability Plan. The public engagement process affirmed and enhanced the goals, strategies and short term priorities that had been developed by the BOS, CoS and its Working Groups, as well as highlighting the need to create vehicles for ongoing dialogue, engagement and collaborative action that connect broad community stakeholders to the initiative.