A True Community Summit
Vireo Principal Steve Rhoades at the Community Summit.
It took nearly 50 years for US-71 Highway to be planned and fully built through the neighborhoods on Kansas City’s east side. It was a massive feat of planning and engineering designed to make it easier for the expanding edges of the KC area to access the downtown core, which it did. But it also displaced thousands of residents and split a community in two, leaving a legacy of grief and mistrust in its wake.
Resistance to the project was constant for nearly 30 years, yet it was still completed and the damage was done. Homeowners were forced to move, property values dwindled, business declined, and the community had a highway separating them from their schools and resources.
So where do we go from here? How do you reconnect divided neighborhoods? How do you reverse the economic stagnation? And how do you make it a safer corridor for motorists, pedestrians and residents? Those aren’t easy questions to answer.
We’re community planners and landscape architects. Time and again, we’ve worked with our clients to reach out to neighborhoods, to user groups, to city staff, to philanthropic entities, and just about everyone else. But in most instances, we have a focused task at hand – what goes in a new park, how do we plan for historic interpretation of a site, and how would business owners like to see their business district improved?
But how do you bridge a canyon? That’s going to take a lot more than a typical public meeting. That’s where a Community Summit comes in. The Community Summit is an intensive collaborative effort and it’s not something every engagement firm can pull off. It takes coordination, patience, a wide range of expertise, and a whole lot of hard work.
The words ‘engagement’ and ‘workshop’ get thrown around quite a bit, but the real activity often fails to live up to the name it’s given. A Community Summit is built upon a commitment to deepen a connection with the community and ensure residents’ voices are heard in the decision-making process. It creates an opportunity for any given resident to connect with one another, the project team, public officials, and others. It gathers people in one place at one time for genuine conversations about the issues and opportunities ahead of them, providing them with an opportunity to go through a fun and complex process of sharing, discovery, and teamwork.
Each Community Summit must be designed very intentionally to create and strengthen relationships, to foster meaningful discussions, and ensure residents’ voices are heard in the decision-making process. Each must be built on four key pillars if it is to succeed:
A shared purpose
A commitment to knowledge exchange
Opportunities to connect and network
A commitment to creating action
A successful Community Summit purposefully places people with differing viewpoints and expertise in the same place while allowing for organic interaction. It encourages movement through different areas of exploration. It creates a exciting and welcoming environment while encouraging the entire family to participate. It allows every resident to see the commitment city officials are making and connects them face-to-face to work on a solution.
For some focused projects, a standard public meeting or two may be enough to serve your purposes. But if you’re looking for real solutions to significant challenges, you will need to ask youself “are we digging deep enough”?
Emmet Pierson (Community Builders of Kansas City CEO and President) said, “Engagement is like oxygen for [a] project.” Like Vireo, he knows that any successful solution starts with community members and takes remarkable commitment from city staff and willing partners. That’s why Kansas City (and Vireo) are hosting four Community Summits for US-71 Reconnecting the East Side and taking a big step toward building the necessary relationships and having the conversations that will yield a thriving corridor for residents and businesses alike.