Community Narrative as a Method for Increasing Participation in Civic Engagement
Authors: Katherine Deidrick, Fellow for the Atlanta Living Cities City Accelerator Project, Terica Black, Project Manager with the Mayor’s Office of the City of Atlanta, Christopher Le Dantec, Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech and Director of the Participatory Publics Lab
Current Engagement Practices
Historically, community engagement in Atlanta’s Westside has been top-down. City and private agencies ask community leaders to help them develop and implement projects ranging from housing, infrastructure, and parks to public safety, watershed management, and education. Although the project topics are diverse, the methods of engagement are often limited to evening meetings with project staff presenting fully developed plans for public comment. This process is also challenged by access and resulting low attendance; and therefore, does not achieve the goals of being collaborative, transparent, and inclusive.
Compounding this challenge, area universities, social service agencies and state and national non-profit organizations continuously run new studies in the area, leading many Westside residents to the conclusion that they are an “over-researched and underserved” community.
Residents’ Gentrification Concerns
In Atlanta’s historically Black Westside neighborhoods, income levels are amongst the lowest in the country. Despite 17 strategic redevelopment plans in the last fifteen years, there has been little change. Compounding this, levels of engagement with city government and other agencies have historically been tactical and fragmented, and there are no large-scale community-led strategies for economic and social change emerging from the grassroots.
As historically Black neighborhoods on Atlanta’s Westside continue to experience rapid demographic shifts, there is increasing concern among low-income Westside residents that the current redevelopment plans will succeed and that success will mirror uneven impact and displacement seen elsewhere in the city.
What Can We Do About It?
Within this context, there is an urgent need to create a truly meaningful and inclusive civic engagement practice that allows a broad group of residents to align around common interests and voice their shared concerns. Through the support of the Living Cities City Accelerator program, with the help of neighborhood-based organizations and private partners, the City of Atlanta is creating strategy and resource based toolkit for broad and impactful engagement from all of its citizens. We will work in partnership with community residents through a series of community narrative projects to co-develop engagement strategies and community resource documents. The hope is that through a more open-ended, narrative-based approach to engagement, we can bring a representative set of voices, that includes both current and emerging leaders, to the table and model a more culturally rooted, participatory and inclusive approach to civic engagement.
How Our Process Differs
To begin to address these problems, we will cast a wider net to engage a larger base of residents to voice their ideas about how they want to participate in the creation of development plans and how those plans can reflect their views of how the neighborhoods should look in the future. We want to understand the stories that root the five neighborhood community and begin to identify common ground between neighborhoods. We also want to productively engage and build where there is no current common ground. We will integrate different narratives — from oral histories to social media; from long-term residents to youth; and from city staff to private agencies and corporations to find out how and when residents would like to be engaged, what strategies have been successful both in the Westside and citywide, and what opportunities and tools are out there that could be utilized by both residents and city departments.
Laying the Foundation
Since July we have been laying the groundwork to start implementing our narratives project to meaningfully address the problems outlined above. We focused the first six months on identifying key people and organizations and past engagement processes in the area. From the data collected during this period, we created a database of the various municipal departments, organizations, leaders, initiatives and projects that have been the most active in these neighborhoods. We are speaking with leaders from our project team about their lessons learned through engagement in these neighborhoods, meeting with neighborhood leaders and listening to their perspectives on the challenges and possible solutions, and speaking one on one with residents who are typically outside of the community engagement process. These initial steps will help us structure the community narratives project over the next six months in a way that honors and builds off of the collective experiences of project partners, community leaders and residents while aiming to broaden participation and help neighborhood residents formulate more cohesive grassroots strategies.
Stay Tuned
When we turn to stories to support civic engagement, the intersection of narrative patterns and the foundation in social and physical histories can teach us key lessons about how individuals, small groups, and entire neighborhoods relate to one another. Stories show how people make sense of past experiences or express hopes for the future. As we continue to have collaborative discussions, co-produce, and move into implementation, we will update this blog series with our progress and lessons learned in understanding how a diverse set of narrative-based methods can inform community engagement practices.
