July 2019 C&D Minutes
Topic: How to Address Trauma Through Nature
Location: Farm on Ogden, Chicago, IL
SUMMARY:
Table Intro Questions:
Discussion Questions:
For the first question, participants were asked to:
Introductions:
Interest in community assessment research and surveys, unclear if this was specific to a person/org or referred to the group in general
1. Barriers to Nature Engagement in your community
2. What are the barriers to nature engagement in your community?
3. What is needed to develop community informed partnerships?
4. How to fill the gap
- What actions?
5. How do you measure or identify needs and wants?
Introductions (who was at the table)
Gaps
Set 4 (Notes by Cecilia Jordan, rest of group unclear):
1. Barriers to Nature Engagement in your community
Introductions:
- Brushwood Center does art and nature programming, community engagement and community programming, some evaluation
- UCAN does program evaluation, wants to do nature based programs
- Above and Beyond Family Recovery Center is developing community based partnerships
- Conservation Foundation is trying to get groups to do nature hikes and get involved with healthcare providers
- CBG does nature programming and a little research
Location: Farm on Ogden, Chicago, IL
SUMMARY:
Table Intro Questions:
- Who does nature programming?
- Who represents a community group that wants to use nature-based programs?
- Who does research and evaluation?
- Do you want to do research and evaluation?
Discussion Questions:
For the first question, participants were asked to:
- Identify gaps in knowledge that contribute to barriers in your community
- Consider what you need to fill the gaps and lower barriers
- What actions need to be taken?
- What partners do you need?
- What resources do you need?
- What are the barriers to nature engagement in your community?
- Financial Concerns
- Funding and staffing costs, cost of participation/transportation
- Physicality/Location based issues
- Proximity to green space, lack of transportation
- Accessibility, equity, and inclusion issues
- Unequitable access to green spaces, timing of programs/activities/open hours (people work), language of materials,lack of physical accommodations and accessible recreation opportunities (ADA compliant activities)
- Cultural barriers
- Misaligned priorities, lack of community engagement work, not everyone knows what to do in nature once they are there, over-policing of green space, fear of ICE, lack of community trust and cultural competency
- Infrastructure or capacity issues
- Lack of “meaningful” programs, lack of staff/stakeholders from target communities, competition w/ technology, lack of equity/inclusion training and mental healthcare/trauma-informed training for staff, lack of data
- Financial
- Share resources and successful ideas, don’t reinvent the wheel, partner with other successful organizations
- Physical
- Partner w/ community groups to do onsite programs, again communicate with successful program leaders and build off of community assets, apply for transportation funding
- Accessibility
- Translation of resources/materials, host programming in accessible community sites (small gardens, community centers, etc.)
- Cultural
- Create incentives and paid opportunities for youth engagement, ask community members and listen, build relationships with community partners, hire people from the community you are focusing on, need to find a way to reduce hyper-policing of greenspace but make people feel safe
- Infrastructure
- Training for staff in equity/mental health/trauma informed care, training for community groups on health benefits of nature, partnership w/ healthcare organizations
- Trust and authentic connection w/ community leaders
- Community buy-in and ownership of projects/programs
- Programs need to be of, by, and for the community, not simply offered in the community
- Community spokesperson to help increase engagement and awareness
- Accessible language surrounding environment
- Translated materials/resources
- Also relevant information
- Language needs to be easy for a variety of audiences/ages to understand, can’t be highly academic or dry
- Funding
- Compensating people for time and input
- Staff trainings
- Transportation
- Ask!
- Create forums for conversation (needs funding for food, stipends for participants)
- Include funding for evaluation in proposals for program funding (10-20% of budget)
- Create forums for conversation (needs funding for food, stipends for participants)
- Connecting through personal stories and narratives, interviews
- Qualitative data analysis
- Mapping and design experts could be useful
- Need to form connections to research and researchers
- Many universities in Chicago area, great resource to start with
- Expertise in data collection and analysis
- Partnerships with informed community institutions
- Already clued in with needs/wants of community
- Can help with distributing surveys
- Needs to be a two-way street, evaluation results need to be shared back to community
Introductions:
- Forest is interested in career training, youth engagement (paid opportunities), stewardship, and greenspace planning
- Gladiz & Tom are concerned with trees, birds, and gardens
- Kristin is interested in nature, nature play, camping, fishing, gardening, early childhood ed, eco recreation, paddling, climbing, etc.
Interest in community assessment research and surveys, unclear if this was specific to a person/org or referred to the group in general
1. Barriers to Nature Engagement in your community
- Gaps:
- Money, language, priorities, quality of life, proximity & transportation, doing it “for” the community vs. doing it “with” community, safety (environmental), lack of staff “of” the community/”from” the community
- Ways to Bridge Gaps:
- Financial incentives, translation of resources and materials, aim for win-win benefits to people and nature, use metrics that track progress in both categories, ask and listen rather than tell, record and respond fully, build skills and capacity, no “in and out” investment, creating opportunities for youth to develop translatable job skill
- Partnering with communities
- Understanding the histories of the people and the land
- Connecting communities with their natural resources
- Building trust w/ communities and making yourself available even if it doesn’t connect w/ your mission
- Collaborate on transportation for events
- Community ownership of spaces & housing (AFFORDABLE HOUSING)
- Educating community members on groups, inclusion in decision making
- Spending time listening (attending meetings)
- How to quantify engagement?
- How to measure impact
- Data and impact staff
- Following community members up the chain of leadership
- Stories and narratives as measurement
- Need mapping expertise
- Connecting with communities through personal stories
- Need community assessment data analysts and design experts
- During introductions,
- Chicago Park District (Citywide programming)
- Brushwood Center -
- National Recreation Foundation
- No one at this table.
- They are doing observations of activities
- Research for rehab patients in nature
2. What are the barriers to nature engagement in your community?
- Raising awareness
- Informing families of nature-based activities so they will want to support/participate in them
- Feeling unsafe in nature in my community; perception of (lack of) safety; fear
- Fears including of ICE and policing
- Presence of uniforms identifying people as part of government
- Concerns that areas provide hiding places for unsafe behavior;
- Don’t know what to “do” to engage with nature in my community
- Need for highly engaged individuals to drive the work
- Lack of community interests, community feels they have bigger problems and that nature is “extra”
- Lack of interests - not meeting community expectations.
- E.g. some perceived native plants as “weeds”
- How do we move beyond the captive audience of kids in schools?
- Knowledge (or lack there of? (italics are comments from THH) of nature-based programs in the SW suburbs. Need information on specific times, dates.
- Local access to green space
- Sense that the space belongs to others
- Lack of knowledge of places
- How to use the spaces: Identify picnic spaces vs. natural areas
- How to find the spaces
- Language of materials
- Mosquitos
- Heat, flooding, rain - climate impacts
- Transportation; access
- Partnerships with healthcare groups (how is this a barrier, or is it a way to overcome a barrier?)
- Need for trusted partners
- Technology
3. What is needed to develop community informed partnerships?
- Currently responding to community interests
- Works OK for gardening, but not perfect
- Communities are not used to getting positive and/or successful responses from city
- Resistance to paperwork
- Sharing the benefits of nature with some communities
4. How to fill the gap
- What actions?
- Ask the community what they want
- Form linkages with unconventional partners as well as those trusted by the group.
- Reach out to community activists to build trust/relationships
- Community spokesperson
- Partner within the community
- Can be any organization or one with a shared mission (health, environmental, active living)
- Important to have funding support for community convening
5. How do you measure or identify needs and wants?
- Need to form connections to research and researchers
- Nature fosters improved health by building connections between people
- Use nature to help build the connections.
- Nature fosters improved health by building connections between people
- Develop a forum for conversation
- Needs funding for food, stipends for community members
- Include funding for evaluation in each proposal for program funding (10-20% of budget)
- HULA - an evaluation resource through Harvard University.http://www.pz.harvard.edu/projects/humanities-liberal-arts-assessment-hula
- Ask the community what they want/need
- Face to face interactions are needed to build trust.
- At early stages ask communities what information they seek;
- Be sure to redistribute survey and evaluation results to the community “give back”).
Introductions (who was at the table)
- Kay (CBG) also works with Latinas Progresando
- Does nature related surveys adapted and translated
- Social-emotional learning
- Horticultural therapy based on combining results from the survey
- Lucy Feliciano (TNC in collaboration with Chicago Public Schools)“translates” previous nature experiences from homeland/country to encourage their children to get outside
- Gap - we don’t know how people living around parks engage with parks
- Kate Varey (Erikson Institute; PhD candidate on nature-based experiences)- Uses interviewing as a tool. Have to get consent; Using field observations to get a full picture
- Parent leadership and peer educator, developed a project; part of orientation; remember/celebrate childhood memories connected to land. This serves as a framework for other communities.
- Kim George - Chicago Youth Centers, North Lawndale.
- Working with youth for 3 years
- Gardening answers so many problems - academic support, outreach, food desert, meditation, physical exercise
- Syda (Chicago Public Schools, Family and Community Engagement at Waters School) Waters School uses gardens at the school in Lincoln Square as a model; Work with Dr. Fox on behavioral and mental health issues.
- Katty Regalado (Sierra Club)
- We need to take a step back to be careful how we “include” other people. The environmental movement has historically been about exclusion. We need to acknowledge this it needs more than an invitation. Trust is needed; as is a careful approach. Sierra has this history of excluding people which they are dealing with now. There is a gap of understanding.
- Need to add Tamika Johnson, Folded Map Project
- Laura Derks - Asset based approach to healing centered care training at all levels.
- Gap - Not enough research with kids and opportunity
- Safety - Universidad Popular; Family separation/gang areas.
- What is safe? Mostly inside, only some outside spaces are safe
- Smaller, accessible and “condensed” spaces can be safer (e.g. gardens, places where the community is involved).
- How do we use media
- Need to address the public narrative (e.g. Goodman Theater talking about race, the race riots that followed after a young man was swimming in the wrong place)
- Need to acknowledge the history of the country to address the legacy of the country,associated with trauma and control of power.
- Need to address equity issues
- Policies addressing equity of policing and investing
- On boards of public bodies
- Training of staff
Gaps
- How to connect resources and breakdown silos; need systematic change to breakdown silos
- Park district should engage with natural resources, not just gyms
- Lack of expertise (by environmental educators?) in mental health and/or behavioral health
- How to create intentional accessibility policy
- Cultivating a culture of outdoor educational experiences
- How to reduce/overcome hyper policing of natural spaces
- Lack of knowledge of the history of people of color using parks
- How to develop holistic approaches with wrap around programming
- Lack of equitable access to natural spaces
- Lack of recess in schools
- Changes needed for CPS (did this mean Chicago Public Schools?)
- Disparities in schools approaches to being outside
- Need training for staff in natural spaces (which staff and what type of training? Does this mean training naturalists in DEI, or what?
Set 4 (Notes by Cecilia Jordan, rest of group unclear):
1. Barriers to Nature Engagement in your community
- Lack of meaningful programs
- Staffing costs, funding, human capital
- Identifying community stakeholders
- What are BROAD issues affecting Chicago (nature based), and what is feasible
- Consistent land and water access
- Knowing where to start
- Creating a program that is sustainable and realistic
- Money
- Asking the question what do you want/need
- Aesthetics
- Authority and city compliance come into play
- Accessibility
- Can everyone physically access the outdoors equitably?
- Trust with the community & cultural competency
- Ways to Bridge Gaps:
- Financial incentives, translation of resources and materials, aim for win-win benefits to people and nature, use metrics that track progress in both categories, ask and listen rather than tell, record and respond fully, build skills and capacity, no “in and out” investment, creating opportunities for youth to develop translatable job skills
- Effective communication
- Language used
- Ownership (physical and spiritual)
- Accessible language around environmentalism
- Community problem solving
- Compensating people for their time and input
- Employing context
- Networking with stakeholders who live and work in the community
- Considering different access points to the community
- Partnering with an institution that is community informed
Introductions:
- Brushwood Center does art and nature programming, community engagement and community programming, some evaluation
- UCAN does program evaluation, wants to do nature based programs
- Above and Beyond Family Recovery Center is developing community based partnerships
- Conservation Foundation is trying to get groups to do nature hikes and get involved with healthcare providers
- CBG does nature programming and a little research
- Barriers to Nature Engagement in your community
- Gaps:
- Access to greenspace
- Time available to access outdoors
- Safety in greenspace
- Not knowing what to do in nature, feeling out of place
- Transportation to greenspace
- Ways to Bridge Gaps:
- Communication w/ others to solve issues (what we are doing now)
- What resources can be shared or problems solved together?
- See what works in other communities or agencies, observe then write protocol
- Don’t reinvent the wheel, find and partner with existing programs and resources that you can tap into, build on past success instead of starting from scratch
- Communication w/ others to solve issues (what we are doing now)
- Participating with other organizations
- Connect and share resources
- When you go to a community ask what they need and what can we provide to help
- Don’t establish a program without input and assume people will participate, you have to partner with an org to access communities
- Ask early in decision making process to get the people engaged
- Need to give people a seat at the table from the beginning to get real buy in
- Take down barriers to services, allow opportunity for feedback
- Programs are built on communication, invite community members
- Build relationships with community leaders
- ASK
- Reach out to already established orgs and programs to utilize resources and data that already exist
- Figure out what success is and work backwards to take necessary next-steps
- Partner with universities and other orgs to do research and collect data on community needs and wants
- Do pre and post data collection