This week I’m going to be co-facilitating a workshop at the Environmental Health Disparities & Environmental Justice Meeting.
I’m super excited to delve into effective community outreach practices for environmental justice initiatives!
While working on the workshop, with the incredible health experts Ana Pomales (Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry) and Barb Allerton (Pennsylvania Department of Health), I created a template on “Cross-Issue Project Planning.”
In other words, how can we implement projects that further the cause of multiple issues (e.g. health, youth development, and food access)?
I had the opportunity to work on a perfect example of a cross-issue project, which we called the “Soil Kitchen.”
Philadelphia’s River Wards area has significantly high levels of lead, lots of youth, and food access issues. We wanted to start a project that hit on all of these issues, so we finalized ideas for putting on the “Soil Kitchen” .
The Soil Kitchen was an innovative effort to test soil samples for lead contamination, while also educating children/families and finding alternatives for them to grow food using raised beds away from the lead contamination.
The 1st of hopefully many events happened in May 2013, and now organizations are considering how to expand this initiative across the country!
So how can you create your own “Cross-Issue Project Plan?” Let’s look!
The Cross-Issue Project Plan
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Key Issues
Challenge – what are the specific issues in your community?
As I’ve wrote about previously, we need to connect issues to a broader analysis. For this event, if we just focused on lead contamination, I doubt we would have been able to accomplish as much as did when we connected it to youth development and food access.
When developing your project/campaign/event, try to expand how you can propel forward change on multiple issues.
Here’s the “challenge” we aimed to address with the Soil Kitchen.
“The River Wards have significantly high levels of lead that can be dangerous to the community’s health. The River Wards area has a high concentration of kids and families who are more susceptible to the negative health impacts of lead. In addition, there are significant food access issues, but an interest in urban gardening.”
Opportunity/Solution
How are you specifically going to address the issue? Consider how you can address the root cause of the issue (and not just the symptoms).
Below is what we decided to do for the Soil Kitchen.
“The Soil Kitchen event will provide community members the opportunity to have their soils analyzed for lead contamination. The program will focus on making sure families understood the increased risks of lead among their children and how to promote healthy practices. In addition, the Soil Kitchen will host workshops specifically for youth and families wishing to grow food safe from lead contamination.”
Differentiate the Scope of SMART Goals
Just as a reminder, SMART goals are important to make sure you intentionally plan out what “success” means. SMART stands for:
S=Specific
M=Measurable
A=Audience-focused
R=Realistic
T=Time-bound
Also, make sure to break up your goals by time (e.g. long, medium, and short).
Below are a few goals we had for the Soil Kitchen (most of which we exceeded!!!):
Example long-term goal=The Soil Kitchen event will help initiate EPA involvement in addressing lead contamination in the River Wards communities by September 2013
Example mid-term goal=Through the Soil Kitchen we will analyze 50 soil samples by the end of the event in May 2013
Example short-term goal=Finalize details for 4 resident-led workshops by March 2013
Strategy
Depending on the scope of your organizing, you may need a more elaborate strategy than others.
This post won’t be getting into the specifics of how to create a detailed strategy, but for this just think about strategy this way “What’s the main process by which you will accomplish your goals?”
How are you going to make sure your actions form an intricately connect whole, instead of just many actions that sorta support each other.
For our Soil Kitchen example, we really wanted people to have long-term alternatives to reducing exposure to lead. So we outlined this first step of our strategy (remember there can be multiple levels to your strategy!) to hit on all these issues.
The Soil Kitchen organizers’ main strategy was to reduce the negative implications of lead soil by improving the community’s ability to have raised bed urban agriculture and holding youth-oriented workshops where parents learned about how to reduce their child’s exposure to lead.
Partners to Potentially Involve
Who are some community, nonprofit, business, or government partners who can help support this project?
Now are partners came together pretty quick because of previous collaboration, but most times you will have to think a little bit harder about who to involve.
If we did start from scratch without any partners, here’s what this part of the plan would have looked like.
Example partner
Name=New Kensington CDC
Reason/Goal for involving partner=To ensure appropriate community outreach and identify potential residents to lead workshops
Backwards Timeline of Tasks/Actions
Backwards timelines are just the same as long-term planning, except you make sure to start with what you want to achieve at the end and work back from there.
Backwards planning ensures that you set attainable goals, actions, and time periods for accomplishing your aims and do not have a lot of work to do at the end of your project/campaign to catch up.
Here are some key elements to consider when creating your backwards timeline:
What are the key areas to plan out (e.g. logistics, outreach, working with partners, etc.)?
What are some benchmark dates?
Who’s responsible for completing each task?
Example appreviated backwards timeline
Thank Soil Kitchen partners by May 15th, 2013 – Drew/Ana
Evaluate Soil Kitchen event for successes/challenges by May 11th, 2013 – Whole planning team
Soil Kitchen event on May 4th, 2013!!! – We created a separate full agenda since there were so many pieces for the day-of
So that’s it! You’ve got the steps you need to start planning your own cohesive cross-issue project!
This Wednesday I’ll be co-facilitating the workshop with Ana and Barb and there’s one section where we’ll be having folks create their own plans right then and there. So I can’t wait to see what people come up with!
If you want to follow how the Environmental Health Disparities & Environmental Justice gathering is going for me or how the workshop went, follow Organizing Change on Twitter to keep updated!