Source: http://smithcom.ca/mining-reputation-challenge-opportunity
Our philosophy at The Civic Innovation Office is that service and design challenges are opportunities to create innovative solutions. In this post, we’ll share some relevant findings connected to our research on local civic engagement. Focusing on opportunities means that we recognize barriers associated with civic engagement, but turn these pain-points experienced by residents into new possibilities by co-creating and prototyping activities that can enhance resident mobilization.
Beyond Conventional Civic Engagement
One of the most prominent baselines of civic engagement is voting. A reason for this is that the election of representatives is a cornerstone of modern democracies. As Matt Leighninger and Tina Tatabachi state: “conventional participation is intended to provide citizens with checks on government power.”
That said, research indicates that the support of political parties as well as showing up to vote at the polls has tended to decline overall since the early 1990s (though not a linear decline year after year). In addition, there is a downward trend in voting at the municipal level in Ontario. While it is common to look towards voting trends to ascertain civic involvement, they do not tell us why people don’t show up to the polls. A common assertion is that there are deficits at the heart of conventional forms of civic engagement, causing apathy towards formal democratic institutions. This indicates that there is a perceived lack of transparency, trust and accountability of certain political institutions according to segments of the public. Nonetheless, there is simultaneous desire by the public to shape decisions that a affect their lives.
What does our most recent election tell us in terms of voter turnout? In October 2018, the Toronto municipal election turnout was 41% of eligible voters. In Ward 7, including Jane-Glenfield Heights and Black Creek NIAs, turnout was 35% (and the percentage of visible minorities in the ward is 74%. In Ward 21, including Ionview NIA, the turnout was 35% (and the percentage of visible minorities in the ward is 46%).
This context informed how we went about doing generative research with residents and local service providers. Our goal was to nuance how civic engagement is defined by residents living in Toronto’s Neighbourhood Improvement Areas, why certain activities may be preferred over others, the common challenges residents face while being civically engaged, and how these challenges present an opportunity to provide support through experiments with new tools.
Working With, Not on Behalf of Residents
“To me, my leaders are very simple. The teachers that teach my children. The church where I go — the pastors. My neighbours are my leaders. My mom is my leader. Because these are the people that influence my life. It’s really people I interact with […] So, I don’t think about leaders as institutionalized.”
-Resident interviewee when asked “Who are your local leaders?”
“People coming together. Coming together to build … it’s this oneness. So, you’re coming together to find out what — what I like to do, what you like to do, to see if we could all have a chain reaction in getting different, many different dreams but having one direction in achieving it. So were all helping each other along that mile. So, the bible speaks about if your friend asks you to go one mile, go two and take that person with you.”
-Resident interviewee when asked “What does civic engagement mean to you?”
We were continuously told that communities are skeptical of being studied: simply entering into neighbourhoods only to examine ‘local problems’ is something that needs to be avoided if the goal is to establish trust between public sector agencies and residents. This is why one expert noted that we need to have ongoing and an even more concerted effort to work with residents, including the networks and alliances they have built on the ground.
At the same time, nearly all of the residents that we interviewed were asked how they define civic engagement, and they described it as getting involved in the inner workings of their local communities. In this sense, civic engagement is less about traditional forms of civic decision-making, and more about paying it forward and giving back to communities. While residents cited that they want to influence what’s happening in their neighbourhoods, their collective aim is to distill personal connections. It boils down to the importance of social interaction: in some circumstances there are isolated demographics, such as seniors, who miss that “personal talking medicine” and connection to other residents.
This relates to what one service provider mentioned, namely that there is no such thing as one and indivisible public. Rather, we need to be forward thinking, and strive to create new spaces — and ultimately new publics — that build, and integrate collective interests. It’s a relevant endeavour considering that many of the residents we spoke to are constantly looking for settings that embed meaningful experiences; for example, spaces that are safe, culturally, racially or linguistically rooted, gendered, and focused on considerable matters. There are possibilities to deliberately design spaces to reflect this diversity, using new online tools in addition to in-person interactions. For example, one resident spoke about how their children are the means to get parents that may not speak English as a first language more involved in local initiatives. Meanwhile, other’s spoke about creating online community hubs to inform and support resident initiatives.
Building Up Democratic Fitness
“We organize different events. We had a recent Fun Fair that took a lot of time with a small committee […] I’ve never really planned a big event like this. It felt like planning a wedding.”
-Resident interviewee who spoke about creating impactful community events
“I wanted to get involved, mainly to shape my children’s lenses as to what their environment really was, and to show them and let them know that you can make the best of anything […] That’s what was fueling me, and then after getting involved, it became an addiction. Because it was like, ‘We can just work with people!’ It felt like we get to literally shape our community. Then, what really fueled me is just being the positive change in other people’s lives.”
-Resident interviewee when asked why they invested their personal time to organize community events
There are dozens (if not hundreds) of resident groups and networks — from parent councils, tenant organizations, resident associations, student groups and so on — all working to make their communities better places to live in. Motivated members that want to be involved in community initiatives, as shown in the quote above, are actually taking on the role of planning local events. Many folks that have never conducted outreach, created flyers, applied social media, booked event space, organized food, and acquired vendors, sponsors and in-kind supports, tend to face logistical challenges while doing local civic engagement. This is compounded by how much time people have to commit when balanced against their own personal lives.
This is interesting for a few reasons. In one sense, residents often spoke of civic engagement in terms of ‘recreation’. But there is more to thinking about so-called recreational engagement. Part of the reason is that civic engagement is often on a volunteer basis, which denies and often devalues how much effort is put into creating and scaling local initiatives. Many of these initiatives end up generating neighbourhood interactions that bring people together through food and story-telling. Perhaps the most unassuming part is the fact that it requires project management skills. The residents we spoke to had created many do-it-yourself (DIY) programs that include bee hive collectives and community gardens to broader advocacy groups such as action councils and community hubs.
This all points to something one expert noted - that residents living vulnerable situations and communities are an extremely productive and essential force, who in the face of certain challenges, still go out and do good work for their communities. But like anything else that requires efforts, building up the capacity, or the ‘democratic fitness” as one practitioner called it, involves a conscious effort to learn/educate and ultimately support/scale projects. This assumes that there is a necessity for core supports (grant funding, space), trainings (on-line, in person), and perhaps even how-to’s, tool-kits and curriculums on the different aspects of what it requires to be engaged and at different scales of participation — Community, City, Provincial, Federal, etc.
The Opportunity Tree We See
Opportunity trees are common among service designers as visualizations of what are essentially the pain points — locations, settings, experiences — that can be a focal point for an intervention.
Source: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2017/10/critical-thinking-product-teams-teresa-torres/
We’ve adapted this model to support our work to uncover civic engagement opportunities:
- We start from an initial project objective, i.e. inclusive civic engagement with underrepresented people.
- Then began a broad search types of activities residents were involved in. The types of activities can vary by the type of organization/initiative and issue/objective.
- Arising from time spent in different types of activities are the sorts of challenges or pain-points associated with doing civic engagement. In the end, stories lead to the nuances of civic involvement, some of which form the foundation for a prototype we are currently testing and refining.
From this, we can build out opportunities to solve certain pain-points that fit within our office’s timelines and mandate. But to fully understand why a pain-point is a challenge to residents who want to engage with the local government, we also need to dig deeper and ask what the conditions may contribute to it being a challenge. This is exactly what the synthesis stage of the design process uncovered, and in the next post we will highlight the six core insights we found from our research, literature scans, resident 1–1 and group interviews, as well as practitioner 1–1 and group interviews. Stay tuned for more!
In the meantime, let us know what you think! What do you think can enhance civic engagement in neighbourhoods that are traditionally marginalized? How would you measure impact beyond voting data?
