Purpose
In this activity, you will identify the community's concerns about current and future shocks and stressors.
Why?
At this point, you likely have identified a wide range of information about historic and current shocks and stressors, future risks, and the characteristics that could potentially enhance these risks. Sharpening the focus of your analysis from global-, national-, and state-level resources to the local level through community insight will provide the best foundation for action and implementation going forward. Also consider completing Activity 4 at the same time during this stage in the planning process.
When?
After the core project team has undertaken initial data and information gathering efforts and key stakeholders/experts have been identified. Workshop planning can take several weeks, but requires substantial lead time and communication to ensure that your core team and advisory committee are prepared, and to ensure that you effectively garner community attention and input.
Tips
- Consider developing a draft vision, goals, and guiding principles during this activity. If you choose to host a workshop specific to identifying key concerns, start with an exercise to develop a draft vision, goals, and guiding principle statements.
- Prepare to be surprised. Engaging with community members often yields insights that may be surprising or that may fly in the face of what you may think you already know. Preparing to work with a mindset in which both top-down scientific knowledge can be integrated with local expertise is critical to future resilience planning efforts.
- Nurture key stakeholder relationships along the way. The process of identifying key concerns can provide the foundation for new and continued engagement with key stakeholders, local leaders, and experts on critical sectors. As you reach out during this process, continue to find ways to make sure that these valuable community assets can be brought on board for future efforts in the resilience planning process.
How does my community do this?
- Solicit community input on key concerns. Refer back to the community engagement plan you developed in Step 1, Activity 4 to determine how you would like to solicit community input. There are a variety of tools, methods, and approaches to doing so including:
- Surveys, targeted at specific sectors, an array of sectors, the community in general, specific industries, or other types of groups (e.g. healthcare professionals, elder care facility operators, advocates, and organizations dealing with poverty and homelessness, etc.) can be conducted online, via mail, or in person at community gatherings. Refer to a sample Community Survey template.
- Interviews with key sector leaders, experts, community organization representatives, or other key stakeholders can expand upon survey results, uncover new insights and observations not accessible through other methods, and allow for deeper dialogue on specific issues, risks, and the local dynamics of how stressors and shocks interact.
- Focus Groups bringing together small groups of community members, sector leaders, experts, or organization representatives can also provide valuable insights on how your community discusses and understands different issues. These can also provide a valuable site for understanding how findings from surveys and interviews play out in a group setting and are interpreted across different points of view.
- Workshops, like focus groups, bring together an array of stakeholders to solicit input on critical issues, albeit with the added framing of developing specific products or findings. These can be utilized as sites for synthesizing information gathered through other methods, to develop draft lists of key community concerns, or to identify future work plans based on findings gathered so far. Access a sample visioning and goals workshop exercise.
- Track your effort through the Community Engagement Plan template in the workbook.
- Draft key community concerns and solicit feedback from your core planning team and advisory committee. Identifying and quantifying key concerns is an iterative process. This means that after an initial round of work has been completed to solicit information from community members and experts on their key concerns, a draft list or outline of these concerns should be developed and presented to those same community members, experts, or sector leaders for further feedback to highlight gaps that may not otherwise come to light.
- Finalize the key community concerns list. Once you have additional feedback from your community partners, you can begin to finalize the list of key concerns. Although this list will likely evolve, it should be used as a foundation for both discussions on the project as a whole and as a focusing tool for soliciting new engagement, planning efforts, and continued research.
Community Call Out: State of the Rockies Conservation
Now in its 11th year, the State of the Rockies Conservation in the West Poll is a polling program run by Colorado College. Through phone call interviews with thousands of residents across the Rocky Mountain West, it seeks to find information on how locals are thinking of critical natural resources, climate, and conservation issues. Published annually, its poll results provide a unique picture of how Coloradans and others in nearby states are engaging with these and other issues of central importance to resilience and adaptation efforts.