Organizing for Delight

“How do you rethink the relationship folks have with city government? … How do you start to feel welcomed even if you’re going to pay a parking ticket? Or get a death certificate, or a birth certificate, or get married? … How can you do that with a little bit more delight?” — Sabrina Dorsainvil

In The Move’s latest podcast episode, Sabrina Dorsainvil, Civic Designer for Boston’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, highlighted the office’s role in facilitating candid conversations around creating delightful and welcoming services and places. Similarly, the Partnerships for Parks (PfP), a joint program of NYC Parks and City Parks Foundation, a non-profit, envisions itself as “civic broker,” organizing the necessary people and stakeholders for maintaining the city’s neighborhood parks.

Before coming to MIT to study City Planning, I served as an AmeriCorps member at PfP, which connects park users, civic and environmental stewards, local grassroots organizations, and the agency that administers New York City’s most public of public resources to carry out its mission.

The role of civic broker only emerged after many decades of disconnect between NYC Parks and the public. New York’s parks, particularly those in low-income communities of color, experienced significant decline and disinvestment due to the city’s bankruptcy and resulting cuts in public services.

In order to reclaim these spaces, communities across the city came together to beautify these parks and to advocate for their improvement. Volunteer-led improvements in the city’s parks proved useful both for the public servants at Parks and for the communities that benefited from revitalized park spaces. And so, PfP was created in order to encourage a more collaborative relationship between the agency and a diverse and increasingly engaged body of park stewards and advocates.

Fostering a real understanding between a public agency, a well-resourced non-profit, and New York’s park communities involves managing challenging relationships. Relationships between a community frustrated with the poor condition of a cherished playground, and the cash- and time-strapped public servant. It involves, as Sabrina poignantly articulated, creating spaces where people can “scream and holler” and heal, where understanding the needs of diverse publics and stakeholders can happen, and where asking difficult questions is encouraged.

Creating these spaces and fostering these understandings involves some of the difficult work of emotional labor on behalf of PfP’s staff. In a position where you are assessing and anticipating people’s needs, harmonizing relationships, or facilitating these conversations, you find yourself struggling to accommodate your own emotions and needs throughout these difficult moments.

But at the heart of these efforts, brokering these public relationships is about joy. What matters most to PfP and its staff is the creation of beautiful, enjoyable parks and open spaces where folks can enjoy connecting, playing, and celebrating with one another. As Sabrina mentioned, public services and places should be more “delight” and less “civic chore.”

Photo courtesy of Partnership for Parks.

Originally published at themove.mit.edu on September 20, 2018.