First Annual Neighborhood Sustainability Indicators Roundtable:

February 18, 1998
Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church
Minneapolis, Minnesota


Summary of the Roundtable:
Purposes:
Outcomes:
Participating Partners:
Minutes:
Presentations by Featured Experts:
Discussion:
Scale and Scope of Indicators:
Political Issues:
City-wide Task Force:
Evaluation:


Summary of the Roundtable:
The initial roundtable for the Neighborhood Sustainability Indicators Project (NSIP) involved 65 people, including 20 neighborhood representatives, 7 unaffiliated citizens, 7 NGO representatives, 6 city staff, 1 county staff, 2 state staff, 2 Community Development Corporation staff, 2 foundation staff, 2 academic researchers, 2 graduate students, and 3 consultants.

Crossroads Resource Center offered introductory information concerning the project, including defining the concepts of "sustainability" and "sustainability indicators."

Featured experts included residents of Seward Neighborhood Group and the Longfellow Community Council, the two core neighborhood partners of the Urban Ecology Coalition's NSIP, who described their initial steps in selecting sustainability indicators for their neighborhoods. Two other Southside neighborhoods, Lyndale and Phillips, also outlined local indicator projects. City Planning Director Paul Farmer offered important perspectives.

At the conclusion of the Roundtable, a city-wide sustainability indicator task force was launched.

Purposes:
The main purposes of the Roundtable were:
€ To build connections among neighborhood participants in Indicators Project
€ To advance the indicator definition and selection process in participating neighborhoods
€ To bring greater visibility to UEC and its indicators project
€ To begin building a city-wide constituency for City Planning adoption of sustainability indicators.

Outcomes:
These purposes appear to have been achieved. Evaluation comments (these are listed at the end of this report) show that participants felt an extremely open and high-level discussion took place, and that strong enthusiasm for indicators was generated. Fourteen people signed up to launch the city-wide task force. It has also been suggested that there is a strong need for further networking meetings involving all participating neighborhoods. The main challenge offered was to increase representation from people of color.

Participating Partners:
Urban Ecology Coalition § Crossroads Resource Center § Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance § Dayton Hudson Foundation § Longfellow Community Council § Seward Neighborhood Group § Mississippi Corridor Neighborhood Coalition § Green Institute - Environment and Transportation Committee § Minneapolis Center for Neighborhoods § Lyndale Neighborhood Association § Sustainable Resources Center § Neighborhood Revitalization Program § Minneapolis City Planning

Roundtable discussion notes prepared by Darcy Seaver, Design Center for the American Urban Landscape and Ken Meter, Crossroads Resource Center

Minutes:
Introduction -- Crossroads Resource Center As coordinator of the UEC's Neighborhood Sustainability Indicators Project, Ken Meter began the roundtable with a summary of the project. This appears to be the first of its kind in the U.S., uniquely engaging neighborhood residents on the front end of the process of defining sustainability indicators for their neighborhoods.

This work draws upon experiences from numerous indicator projects underway around the country -- the three best known are in Seattle, Atlanta, and Jacksonville. The first question asked was, what is "sustainable development?" The City of Seattle defines sustainability as "The long-term social, economic, and environmental health of our community." The United Nations Brundtland Commission defines it as "Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Or, as co-coordinator Patricia Love says, "Having your cake and sharing it, too."

There are two defining characteristics of sustainability:
(1) the focus on interdependence. Sustainability considers links between multiple issues.
(2) Decisions are made from a long-term view, considering the needs of more than just the current generation.

Action toward sustainability strives to ensure that the social, economic and environmental realms operate in harmony with each other, rather than in conflicting ways.

The next question asked was, what are sustainability indicators? Professor Virginia Maclaren of the University of Toronto offered an excellent definition: "Urban sustainability indicators can be distinguished from simple environmental, economic, and social indicators by the fact that they are: integrating, forward looking, distributional, and developed with input from multiple stakeholders in the community."

Kate Besleme and Megan Mullin of San Francisco's Redefining Progress also make an important distinction between three kinds of indicators. (1) The first framework focuses on measuring local sustainability. Centered on a vision for the community's long-term future, sustainability indicators are forward-looking and address the linkages between various issues. (2) Quality-of-life indicators differ from sustainability indicators in addressing shorter-term goals and the lack of need to show linkages between indicator areas. (3) Finally, indicators focused on performance evaluation, most often initiated by government, are intended to determine how efficiently a jurisdiction is delivering a particular set of public services.

One of the issues that has emerged in neighborhood indicator work is: Can neighborhood indicators serve as a tool for community groups to use in holding public officials and funders more accountable, and to build community within the neighborhood, or do they inherently involve an imposition of judgment from outside? It is Crossroads' sense that the more neighborhood residents are involved in developing sustainability indicators, the more opportunity there is for residents to use them as a tool to advance their own goals.

Presentations by Featured Experts:

(1) Seward Neighborhood Group (SNG) & Seward Redesign (SR) Seward is a core neighborhood partner of the UEC/NSIP. Representatives included Erik Riese, Mary Beth Neal, Dianne Anders, Patrice Koelsch, Maurice Trentel, and Debbie Wolking.

Erik Riese began with a brief history of Seward's 30-year tradition of participatory decision-making and organizing, a tradition they seek to continue with their indicators project. Their reasons for getting involved in indicators include: they want to step back from the "check-list mentality" to see how effective their work is; they seek to integrate the work of the various committees that have addressed issues such as housing, economic development, parks, and schools separately under the Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP); they want to develop benchmark or baseline information for assessing future programs; and they want to be able to look critically at indicators being urged on them from the outside.

Seward's indicator selection process is based on a shared vision and "guided brainstorming." They began by looking back at the neighborhood's goals: those set by the neighborhood group (SNG), those of the community development organization (Seward Redesign), and those developed in the NRP process. They are now developing specific indicators -- "based on our experience of living here" -- to address these goals. They will consider quantitative indicators later.

Seward has also drawing upon lessons from systems analysis and chaos theory, including how systems in Seward affect nearby neighborhoods. They are also interested in looking at political indicators, such as political involvement, representation, education, and change.

The Seward Task Force is now made up of about 10-12 residents. After developing an initial set of proposed indicators they will hold meetings with diverse constituencies in the community to ask their neighbors to help refine those indicators.

(2) Longfellow Community Council (LCC) Longfellow Community Council covers four neighborhoods in South Minneapolis including Cooper, Howe, Longfellow and Hiawatha, and is also a core neighborhood partner of the UEC/NSIP. Representatives included Candi Anderson, Jan Pearson, Christie Rock, Katharine Simon, Laura Soeteber, DeWayne Townsend and Tom Wegner.

The Longfellow indicators project is open to everyone in the neighborhood, but has been initially structured around working committees established to implement their NRP plan. Each subcommittee (housing, crime and safety, environment, business, and youth and family) has discussed indicators that would help them gauge the impact of their work. LCC is a fairly new organization; their goals were set in the NRP Action Plan in recent years. This is a resident-driven project; staff's role is to assist and facilitate.

LCC has found that the indicators process has helped them think about what has changed over the past three years of NRP work. Initially residents got involved in the project to "put some form of validation" on their NRP process -- do these NRP ideas work? Many of their NRP goals were based primarily on "gut" ideas and feelings about the neighborhood, and they hope the indicators will help them test and quantify these. Also, some worry about the fragmentation of the NRP process and plan -- it was difficult to see its impact overall and how different pieces fit together. When they put all the goals on a consolidated list, they saw that some conflicted, others were duplicated. Finally, the original NRP goals were put together by residents who are no longer that involved; LCC wants current participants to review this vision.

Other presenters noted additional goals for the indicators project: to decide whether a given activity is worthwhile; to "lasso forms of measurement"; and to understand connections to other neighborhoods. Others emphasized the latter as especially important, particularly given how the NRP has tended to isolate neighborhoods from one another. For this reason, they hope the city-wide indicators project will take off.

(3) Lyndale Neighborhood Association (LNA) LNA launched its indicator project three years ago, before the formation of the UEC/NSIP, as an independent indicator effort. LNA representatives included two LNA staff, Joe Barisonzi and Sean Gosiewski.

LNA's indicators project is rooted in the need to evaluate, especially given "our outcome-based world" and the indicator initiatives emerging from key funders such as the United Way and foundations. It also comes from the neighborhood's determination to hold itself accountable.

Initially LNA believed the process would be easy: they asked Crossroads Resource Center to consolidate goals and objectives from previous neighborhood plans as well as information from other organizations and businesses in the neighborhood and develop lists of proposed indicators to be "mirrored back" to residents. But some challenges quickly emerged: they found that evaluation and indicators mean different things to different people; the initiative prompted fears and concerns since it was a new, alien construct. In particular, people were concerned the neighborhood would be blamed for things over which it had no control. When LNA took the indicators lists back to residents and organizations, they found people had differing expectations and goals.

In their current effort, they are addressing these challenges in several ways. They've changed the name to "Success Measures." They've differentiated audiences and the "lens" through which each sees the project: neighborhood residents, government, foundations, and "identity groups" within and outside the neighborhood (e.g., environmental groups and youth groups). They've identified a progression of four goals: the state of the neighborhood; the past state of the neighborhood; the neighborhood's programs (and how they affect the state of the neighborhood); and the state of the neighborhood association (and how it affects the neighborhood). Finally, they've identified three levels of indicators: primary (aggregated around the neighborhood's four main goals); secondary; and a base of data that includes both stories and numbers and that can be aggregated and examined in whichever ways individual groups or residents wish.

Their current challenges are (1) finding indicators and processes that work for different individuals and groups; (2) understanding the complex implications for programming -- presenting indicators assumes the program can be changed to affect that indicator, but identifying that kind of cause and effect is difficult; (3) it's difficult to get people interested in such "removed reflection" -- these are action-oriented individuals; (4) they fear they may be setting themselves up for blame, unfair responsibility, etc. The project has opened up new opportunities, too: hooking up with other efforts, such as the UEC and the Development Leadership Network's national "Success Measures" project; an ability to focus on how the neighborhood can do a better job; and developing a culture in which reflection and analysis are the source of action.

Joe Barisonzi ended by likening this process to harvesting. As with gardening, you can do your best to fertilize and care for your garden, but what you end up with is affected also by the weather and other forces beyond your control.

Discussion:

Indicator process in Phillips neighborhood: Another independent indicator process has been launched by the Environment and Transportation Committee of the Green Institute. The Green Institute is currently developing an "eco- industrial park" of environmentally-friendly firms. This indicator selection process has been initiated by NGO staff. Direct involvement of neighborhood residents will be sought once an initial set of indicators is selected.

Lonnie Nichols (Phillips): This is a challenging time in the neighborhood as we endure "self-governance." [The neighborhood organization has been closed down and a new one is being developed]. Still, a group of us is developing indicators. These are drawn from goals in Phillips' NRP plan, which was the most recent effort by the neighborhood to identify its goals. These also incorporate social justice issues, including the diversity of the neighborhood and the impacts of such forces as the freeway. An example indicator: comparing the number of bike paths to the number of streets in the neighborhood -- the ratio is 1 to 14. [Erik Riese (Seward) noted that Seward is considering the ratio of bike trips to car trips.]

Brian Levy (Phillips, Sustainable Resources Center): We are also looking at quality and use, particularly around the transportation system. One example: the ratio of transit miles to road miles (they found 1 transit service mile per 1.6 street miles.)

Carissa Schively (City planner, volunteer with Phillips): Our indicators work has "kept us on task." We are also looking for indicators that "cross" NRP goals (e.g., the effect of transportation on economic development).

Lonnie Nichols (Phillips): The group decided we might limit ourselves if we select only those indicators for which there is clearly data available. Data for any given indicator can probably be tracked down somehow.

Scale and Scope of Indicators:

Question: Education is so key. How can we integrate school/education issues into sustainability indicators? Bryan Barry (Wilder Foundation) answered that Garfield Park in Chicago has done this with its indicators.

Maurice Trentel (Seward): It's impossible to get an entire neighborhood equally evaluated. Also, economic, political, social, and racial differences and complexities can't really be measured or incorporated. I propose looking at financial indicators -- to measure the "solvency" of a community and put it in financial terms. I would argue for finding one index that summarizes all the indicators chosen.

Philipp Muessig (Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance): It seems harder at the neighborhood level to do this work. At the city and state levels, the sustainability language and approach are easier to see and use because they are often about "systems support" things such as air quality. That becomes much more difficult at a local scale. My question for neighborhoods is: has it been helpful to use this ecosystem support language?

Joe Barisonzi (Lyndale): We need to ask what scope of work neighborhoods can appropriately handle. Also, how can a neighborhood bring its data to bear on a citywide or statewide issue? How can it harvest its data to feed into those larger issues? Questions of resources are also key: do we have the time, people, money, etc.

Patrice Koelsch (Seward): The issue of scale is a fundamental question. Which indicators make sense intuitively? What feels to be in the neighborhood's control? An interesting thing I have found: even just the data collection and process of talking about indicators has been very helpful to the neighborhood. For example, we talked about developing a measurement of what we call "friendly space:" places that diffuse the boundary between public and private property, where people can gather and feel ownership of the community. This might include transition zones such as boulevard gardens, the sidewalk benches outside a cafe, and so forth. Just identifying that concept and those spots has had a positive effect.

Ken Meter (Crossroads): One of the most cited indicators in Seattle has been the number of wild salmon returning to spawn. This links a number of issues, including water quality, sedimentation and runoff, strength of the fishing economy, regional income, and others. Maureen Hart, a respected indicator consultant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, calls such concise indicators "data poetry." Each neighborhood is uniquely able to define concise, linked indicators for its locale. At times these can be very persuasive since they encapsulate important issues in a potent image so elegantly. Longfellow has developed a possible poetic indicator for public safety: the number of stores with signs stating "only one child in the store at one time." This is relatively easy for residents to collect and assess, and may carry as much or more weight than detailed crime maps. In this project we are searching for solid data poetry that link a number of issues effectively.

Terry Gips (Kenwood): The Natural Step program out of Sweden, including its "ecological footprint" idea, may be helpful to neighborhoods.

Diann Anders (Seward): Looking at the neighborhood level brings an ability to see connections, the "integrative indicators." The scale is small enough. Neighborhoods and their core -- homes -- are by their nature integrative.

Erik Riese (Seward): Reading systems theory convinced me that change needs to take place incrementally. Data will not in themselves change a system unless the information they contain changes behavior.

Ken Meter (Crossroads): We spoke about whether neighborhoods should try to hold themselves accountable to indicators when they do not have control over the factors that affect that indicator. That reminded me of a story from my journalism work in the Philippines. Under martial law, people knew they didn't have the power to reduce the number of people being killed and tortured. But they could keep detailed records on human rights violations. Over time, this information helped develop the power to apply political pressure to reduce those violations.

Political Issues:

Fran Guminga (Mississippi Corridor Neighbors Coalition): I am interested in the "political overlay" -- how do we move the discussion to address the "corrective measures" necessary to get rid of the waste and lack of sustainability our indicators identify?

Tim Burkhardt (St. Paul): I am interested in the political power of indicators, and want to ask Planning Director Paul Farmer how neighborhoods can define indicators that have political power/impact. This question is based partly on what I've heard about the Seattle experience.

Paul Farmer (Minneapolis Planning Director): The Seattle work has been pretty much "roundly rejected." In my opinion, when you talk about indicators you are really talking about a set of values implied by those indicators. This is a movement that goes back to the 60's, when people wanted an alternative to the GNP. Some indicators are based on fairly universal values -- for example, everyone thinks clean water is good. But we quickly get to indicators in which personal values conflict, as happened in Seattle. The City will probably end up dealing with indicators -- some that everyone agrees with, and some that spark disagreements and debate. The latter can be intentional, for the debate is important. Minneapolis' "State of the City" report, for example, states the amount of traffic, but Light Rail Transit (LRT) advocates pointed out that traffic engineers were not considering the numbers of people in the vehicles, so that a bus full of people was counted the same as a car with one person.

I encourage neighborhoods to engage City staff and officials in questioning and examining the indicators they already use. Don't wait to do that -- do it along the way, as you're developing your own indicators. Look at the "State of the City" report and start engaging the City now. The City has published this report every year for 20 years (probably because the City has no other performance evaluation). We made some significant changes this year -- deleting redundancies, improving the design, putting it on the World Wide Web. We are also trying to get individual departments to put additional data (not in the report) linked to the web site. The City uses GIS now, but this needs to be upgraded to a "true" GIS system, not just a way to do cool mapping. (Asked if previous years' State of the City reports are available on the web, Farmer promised to look into it.)

I also encourage neighborhoods to look at data according to different "cuts." The Planning Department has guides about how to do that. I would warn you against doing "summary indicators" (such as the "best college" or "most livable cities" indicators some magazines publish). These can be dangerous - they are often very arbitrary and are highly weighted by assumptions about values.

City-wide Task Force:

Ken Meter (Crossroads): The final topic of roundtable is how to build a city-wide effort.

Sean Gosiewksi (Lyndale): We need ways to identify people interested in specific issues. They could then be asked to talk to City staff about these specific topics and then to develop indicators according to the Comprehensive Plan's goals/strategies.

Ken Meter (Crossroads): UEC's vision is to have a second roundtable one year from now and to have the citywide task force report back with a process for developing indicators. The roundtable will also check in again with the three neighborhoods that presented tonight.

Dave Olmscheid (Citizens for a Better Environment): In our work with neighborhoods, we've concluded that for every dollar spent on data collection, three dollars should be spent on organizing around that issue. I offer that guide for this city-wide effort.

Maurice Trentel (Seward): We need vigilance and action, not just data collection. We need to make this effort bigger than indicators. I hope the group will meet more frequently than once a year.

Sean Gosiewksi (Lyndale): Who would volunteer to create a web site where people could check on the status of the project? (Maurice Trentel offered to design it. Paul Farmer offered to link the Planning Department's site to it.)

Carolyn Carr (Sustainable Resources Center): There's "data poetry" out in the 80 community gardens in the city, and food is key to sustainability. An important question is how we can make the City's space more effective, for the amount of land won't change. SRC will help put together data about gardens, "food space," etc.

Erik Riese (Seward): We are also looking at qualitative indicators and I urge the city-wide effort to consider those, too. One idea in Seward: to hang a large wall map of the neighborhood. At an annual celebration, residents would be invited to tack up strips of yarn connecting their home with the homes of all the neighbors they know. Over time, as the overlay of yarn becomes more dense, Seward will have an indicator of community cohesion.

Evaluation:
Fifteen participants were asked, in person or by telephone, to comment on their experience of the Roundtable. Following is a summary of the comments received:

I enjoyed the Roundtable a lot.

This made me very enthusiastic about getting involved in indicator work.

Neighborhoods offered very thoughtful presentations and the quality of the discussion was high.

I learned why it is important to use indicators.

The handouts were excellent.

I learned that the County can learn from neighborhoods how to define indicators.

Neighborhood groups suggested some excellent indicators.

Paul Farmer's comment that indicators express values was very useful to me.

I liked the lesson that there are a variety of paths to use for developing indicators, there is no single formula.

I don't want the City-wide process to draw us away from the work at the neighborhood level.

The construct that there are 3 different kinds of indicators was especially helpful (sustainability, quality-of-life, and performance evaluation).

It was a new idea for me to learn that indicators can be forward-looking, rather than simply reviewing past actions.

Useful to consider that tying indicators to a specific program can be difficult.

This also depends how one uses each indicator.

It's a new idea that neighborhoods can use indicators to hold foundations and public officials accountable, instead of just the other way around.

It is important to keep track of the political realities, and not to define indicators in a vacuum.

I felt bogged down when we began to consider long lists of data.

I liked the "data poetry" idea.

Data poetry is perhaps what neighborhoods can do best.

It is important in defining sustainability indicators to look at the basic life support systems (food, air, water, waste treatment, etc.) and develop indicators that reflect the sustainability of each.

I think people understood that neighborhoods are in the very early stages of this process.

Where were the people of color in this discussion? I looked around the room and it was mostly white homeowners who were represented.

We need to involve more stakeholders.

In our neighborhood we will hold at least five community meetings to ensure that more people of diverse backgrounds help us to define the best possible set of indicators.

Second Annual Neighborhood Sustainability Indicators Roundtable:

February 17, 1999
Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church
Minneapolis, Minnesota




Summary of the Second Roundtable:
To be installed soon!

 

Third Annual Neighborhood Sustainability Indicators Roundtable:

February 16, 2000
Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church
Minneapolis, Minnesota




Summary of the Third Roundtable:
To be installed soon!