Community Listening Project connects KCK Community College with key stakeholders

By Jennifer Wilding, Consensus KC

Enrollment is at an all-time high. Agreements in place allow credits to transfer to most four-year colleges in the area. The debate team continues its march to national dominance. The college is expanding its space for technical education in a renovated facility. By most measures, the Kansas City Kansas Community College (KCKCC) is doing well. So why embark on an extensive listening project now?

“We believe that the best way to meet the needs of our community is to talk with the people who are counting on us,” Ray Daniels said. Daniels is the retired superintendent of the Kansas City, Kan., Public Schools and a trustee at the college. “We felt a deep curiosity about how people perceived the college and what role they want us to play in the future.”

The realities of inequity

By Daniel Cash, One KC Voice

Time Magazine is famous for its end-of-year top 10 lists, which cover topics such as the top 10 albums, feuds, celebrity breakups and more. One such list is the “Top 10 Underreported Stories.” According to Time, the most underreported story of 2009 was “Continuing Segregation Is Hurting U.S. Competitiveness.”

Remaking the heart of flyover country

By Daniel Cash, One KC Voice

Kinky Friedman identifies the area between New York City and Los Angles as “flyover country:” the land you fly over when traveling from New York to LA or vice versa. The Kansas City region is located in the heart of flyover country, and it might just be the definitive flyover city. Friedman implies in his writing that nothing of importance occurs in flyover country. 

Historically, Kansas City has been seen as a cow town, the home of a certain style of jazz, and a barbeque Mecca. I’m sure there are other identifiers for Kansas City, but I don’t think any of them completely remove the “flyover” designation.

Participatory budgeting in a time of fiscal crisis

By Daniel Cash, One KC Voice

State and local governments are feeling the effects of the ailing economy. Many have already slashed programs and services to reduce spending. What role should citizens play in determining which programs get cut and which survive this crisis? How can the public be involved in making these difficult decisions?

A 2009 study conducted for the U.K. Department for Communities and Local Government, Empowering communities to influence local decision making, identified a process known as participatory budgeting as “a tool for empowerment that can have a significant impact in a range of contexts and settings and the potential to provide transformational political change.”

Consensus convenes statewide Missouri River basin engagement

By Jennifer Wilding, director of Consensus

Farmers, historians, businesspeople, environmentalists, people who make their living taking sand or water from the river, and those whose livelihood depends on recreation all gathered Oct. 2 at a hotel meeting room in Jefferson City. Their job? To discuss how best to restore the Missouri River basin ecosystem. Consensus was selected by the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution to convene the Missouri meeting, one of eight held in states in the river basin.

Congress has required that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service restore the ecosystem in order to lessen the loss of habitat and recover native fish and wildlife. (Of 67 native fish species, 51 are now rare, uncommon or decreasing.) The plan requires that the restoration also consider social, economic and cultural values for future generations.

At 30 participants, the Consensus meeting was the second largest of the eight meetings. Each state needed to get answers to the same questions, but each convener had free rein over the meeting design.

Group members began by interviewing one another about values related to the river. Many people who live and work near the Missouri River value its history and culture, ecology and recreational opportunities. But more than anything else, they see it as a source of business. People live near the river because they can farm, transport goods and make a living on tourism. They view it as an asset as well as an unpredictable interference in their lives. The most often mentioned value was balance: the need to balance the natural state of the river against the economic livelihood of farmers, the navigation industry and others.

In general, Missouri participants saw possibilities for the river to add to quality of life and tourism, but those possibilities are not nearly fully realized, with towns often cut off from the river by train tracks and the perception that the river is dirty and dangerous. They also underscored the importance of the river for navigation, particularly navigation in support of farms in the basin, and said that fluctuations in water levels can make navigation difficult.

The group identified opportunities related to the restoration, including joining together to clean up the river, increasing docks and marinas, connecting the river to tourism in river towns and along the Katy Trail, reinventing barges to tailor them to the Missouri (rather than the Mississippi), and “reinventing American” by strengthening small towns.

Consensus puts the public in public policy for clients in metro Kansas City and around the U.S. For more information, visit www.consensuskc.org.

Why you should care about disaster preparedness

By Stephanie Williams, MARC Public Affairs Specialist

On Feb. 28, 2001, I was sitting in an archaeology lecture on the third floor of Gowen Hall, an old, red-brick building on the University of Washington campus in Seattle. The room had an enormously high ceiling with lights like upside-down salad bowls suspended on the ends of long rods. There were perhaps 150 students sitting in the long rows of continuous, curving desks in the drab, theater-style room.

The ground started shaking around 11 a.m. It was gentle at first. Students around the room perked up, wide-eyed, assessing the severity of the situation. Then it got worse. The hanging lights began to swing back and forth several feet in each direction. The building swayed. Small pieces of ceiling tile rained down. We dived for cover underneath desks barely wide enough to cover us.

After 45 seconds, it was over. The Nisqually quake had a magnitude of 6.8, injured about 400 people, and caused damage to property and infrastructure across Western Washington. But it could have been so much worse.

This is why we need to care about the actions our governments are taking to protect people and structures from the consequences of natural disasters. That day in 2001 made me thankful for the codes that ensured most buildings were able to withstand the force of the quake. I’m glad that as a kid growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I had been taught what to do during an earthquake. These things made it possible for me to be here today.

Earthquakes may not be common in the Kansas City region, but floods, tornadoes and severe winter weather are. If you’ve taken shelter in a basement because of a tornado warning, or lost power because of a winter storm, you’ve been affected by a natural disaster.

Fortunately, the Federal Emergency Management Agency requires state and local governments to develop plans to help lessen the impact of potential natural hazards, and right now in Greater Kansas City, those plans are being updated. November is your chance to give feedback on the steps your community is taking to prepare; don’t wait until you’re caught in the middle of a natural disaster to care. Share your own disaster story or learn more about giving feedback on local plans.

Learning from social research practices

By Stephanie Williams, MARC Public Affairs Specialist

What is the relationship between social research and public involvement? And are the two fields mutually exclusive? Not exactly.

For decades, social researchers have made careers and answered questions using quantitative and qualitative research methods. The designs are ideally carefully constructed to ensure that the results are representative of the population being studied and can be generalized to other areas or different circumstances.

Public involvement has long sought to link citizens to decision-making processes on a wide range of topics. Public involvement is many things — an exercise in community cohesiveness, an agent of cultural change, a way to break down barriers among stakeholders — but in and of itself, it is not social research.

But public involvement practitioners may benefit from looking at their methods through the lens of a social researcher. What population am I studying? How can I ensure the voices that need to be heard on this issue are included in the process? Can I make the assumption that people who are similar to my participants feel the same way about the topic we discussed? If the process intends to get a glimpse of a broader community’s feelings on an issue, calculated steps should be taken before the process begins to answer these questions.

By increasing their familiarity with social research practices, public involvement practitioners can broaden their scope of potential approaches to process development. The process itself will ultimately be cleaner and better planned. After all, sometimes when we need to do social research, we instead do public involvement, either because of limiting factors such as time or money, or because it’s what the client expects. As practitioners, we need to be clear enough on the relationship between these two fields to know what the project demands.