Best Practice

GreenStep City Best Practices: Resilient Economic and Community Development
Benchmarks and Community Engagement {BP No. 24}

Adopt outcome measures for GreenStep and other city sustainability efforts, and engage community members in ongoing education, dialogue, and campaigns.

Best Practice Actions

1. Inclusive and Coordinated Decision-Making: Use a city commission or committee to lead, coordinate, report to and engage community members on the identification and equitable implementation of sustainability best practices.
2. Communicating Progress on Goals: Organize goals/outcome measures from all city plans (social, environmental, economic) and report to community members data that show progress toward meeting these goals.
3. Measuring Outcomes: Engage community members and partners in identifying, measuring, and reporting progress on key sustainability and social indicators/ including energy use/greenhouse gas emissions, social vitality/social inclusion outcome measures.
4. Public Education for Action: Conduct or support a broad sustainability education and action campaign, building on existing community relationships, networks & events involving:

a. The entire community, community leaders
b. Homeowners, manufactured home communities, landlords and tenants
c. Community-based organizations, block clubs, neighborhood associations, front yards/sidewalks
d. Congregations.
e. Schools, colleges.

5. Planning with a Purpose: Conduct a community visioning and planning initiative that engages a diverse set of community members & stakeholders and uses a sustainability, resilience, or environmental justice framework such as:

a. Strong Towns, Resiliency, Transition, Appreciative Inquiry.
b. Eco-municipalities, Smart Cities, Healthy Communities. 
c. Environmental Justice, Race Equity, Equitable Development.

6. Engaging the Next Generation: Engage wide representation of community youth and college students by creating opportunities to participate in city government (including commissions).
7. Expanding Community Engagement: Engage Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), renters, low-income, new Americans, differently abled and other traditionally under-represented community members by encouragement, and support to participate in current and new opportunities in city government.

Step 3 Recognition Best Practice for Category A, B and C cities

Category A cities: implement this best practice by completing actions 1 and 2.

Category B cities: implement this best practice by completing action 1 and any one additional action.

Category C cities: implement this best practice by completing action 1.

Step 4 Recognition Metric #17 for Regional Indicator Cities; Optional Metrics for Step 4 Recognition for all other cities

Metric # 17 and # 18: Climate and Additional Metrics/Social Vitality
 

Summary

What's measured matters. Or put another way: if it matters, measure and report it. Adoption of a comprehensive set of sustainability indicators (that may have been developed as part of a sustainability plan) provides one vehicle for a city to report on accomplishment of multiple (and often interlinked) city goals, programs and projects, including GreenStep best practices and comprehensive plan goals. This transparency and accountability to community members about city sustainability work fits well with educating and engaging community members as partners in envisioning and building a more sustainable city. The point of public participation in city affairs is that by adding the value-rich perspectives of community members to the information-rich perspectives of city staff, we can create wiser public policy.* In total, actions to implement this best practice result in:

  • A commitment to achieve specific outcome measures based upon a vision for the city, developed through community engagement.
  • Educating community members about the city vision and desired outcomes so that these become a shared vision and outcomes.
  • Engaging residents, businesses and institutions to change their practices to help meet city goals.
  • Reporting on accomplishments each year.

* from Daniel Yankelovich: The Magic of Dialogue (2001)

Greenstep Advisor

Sean Gosiewski, Resilient Cities & Communities: 612/250-0389, sean@rccmn.co; www.rccmn.co

Connection to State Policy

The state of Minnesota requires various specific reports from cities, which typically contain data of interest/use to community members. Extracting the most relevant data from these submittals and presenting it in a useful way is a service to community members.

Benefits

Major Benefit

  • In themselves, none of these planning, measuring and reporting actions produce direct sustainability benefits. However, the experience of cities that engage community members and publicly report on progress is very powerful: this accountability drives more action faster than if city plans and activities are mostly developed and discussed by only city staff and elected officials.
  • For those conducting education and action campaigns to effect specific behavior changes, don't miss the annual Eco Experience at the MN State Fair where staff typically share expertise on:
    • Reusing consumer products.
    • Preventing junk mail, recycling, composting.
    • Decreasing use of fossil fuels and using more renewably generated energy.
    • Using less natural gas, electricity and water.
    • Decreasing car use and increasing car efficiency.
    • Buying durable goods and maintaining them.
    • Planting trees and native vegetation.
  • The Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan produces two-page data- and graphic-rich fact sheets showing patterns of use and life cycle impacts covering topics including energy, water, food, waste, buildings, materials, and transportation systems. For 2-3 page summaries of 100 global solutions for reversing global warming, each modeled with the climate impact, and financial costs and benefit out to 2050, see Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed for this compendium of the global sustainability actions. For data and approaches to global population growth, see World Population Balance based in Minneapolis.