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Monday Mailing

Year 24 • Issue 14 18 December 2017 1.

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How Cities Can Harness the Flood-Fighting Powers of Urban Parks Engaging Citizens: A Review of Eight Approaches to Civic Engagement What Makes a Complete Street? A Brief Guide 5 Low Cost Ideas to Make Your City Wealthier An Agricultural Community That Embraces its Artistic Side Oregon Community Foundation's Community Grant Program Cities Turn to ‘Missing Middle’ Housing to Keep Older Millennials From Leaving Rural Aging in Place Toolkit Webinar: Fostering Community Partnerships to Advance Health Equity - January 9, 2018, 10:00-11:00am PST Young People Returning to Farming 8 TED Talks To Help You Focus On What Really Matters

1. How Cities Can Harness the Flood-Fighting Powers of Urban Parks In April, the National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) released a survey suggesting that while parks are key in the fight against climate change — municipal parks’ agencies create bike paths, protect green space and implement water diversion tactics — funding challenges often thwart greater environmental engagement.

Quote of the Week: “Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” ~John Muir Oregon Fast Fact: The Oregon Trail is the longest of the overland routes used in the westward expansion of the United States. The Trail used from 1840 to 1860 began in Missouri and ended in Oregon. It was about 2,000 miles long.

Now, in partnership with the American Planning Association and the Low Impact Development Center, NRPA has released a more technical guide outlining the nuts and bolts (or rather, constructed wetlands and bioswales) of green stormwater infrastructure, including finer details, like how to engage local communities and, yes, secure funding. Taken with NRPA’s other 2017 releases, it reads as a call-to-arms for parks agencies that want to take on the wet, hot and increasingly unpredictable problems of a warming world in their own backyards, one flood management strategy at a time.

Save the Dates. Here’s a sneak peek at the upcoming webinar series. All webinar times are Noon - 1pm.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Engaging Citizens: A Review of Eight Approaches to Civic Engagement Twenty years ago, Robert Putnam wrote about the rise of “bowling alone,” a metaphor for people participating in activities as individuals instead of groups that can lead to community. This led to the decline in social capital in America. The problem of individual participation as opposed to community building has become an even bigger problem since the invention of smartphones, the Internet as the source of all information, social networking, and asynchronous entertainment. We never need to talk to anyone anymore and it often feels like an imposition when we ask for an answer we know we could find online.

Putnam posited that the decline in social capital is a cause for decline in civic engagement and participation in democracy. If we aren’t engaged socially with the people around us, we don’t have as much incentive to care about what is going on that might affect them. Local elections have low Page 1 of 5

voter turnout in part because people aren’t aware of or engaged in local issues.

In an attempt to chip away at this problem, platforms that attempt to encourage people to engage in civic life with government and local communities have been popping up. But how well do they actually engage people? These platforms are often criticized for producing “slacktivists” who are applying the minimum amount of effort possible and not really effecting change. Several of these platforms were evaluated to see how they work and to determine how well they actually promote civic engagement.

To access the full story, click here.

3. What Makes a Complete Street? A Brief Guide Many cities have streets that make life difficult for pedestrians in ways that are not always obvious – uneven and disconnected sidewalks, dangerously long crosswalks, and pathways too close to fastmoving traffic, to name a few. To remedy this, a movement has emerged to encourage a new way of designing urban roadways called “complete streets.”

The concept of complete streets places the same priority on pedestrians, bicyclists and public transport users as on motorists. The initiative aims to improve the quality of life for all users by designing streets that are both safe public spaces and enable high-performance, sustainable transportation networks.

The U.S. states of Oregon and Florida were among the first to elevate the needs of cyclists and pedestrians during roadway projects in the 1970s and 80s. Later, the Federal Highway Administration and U.S. Department of Transportation included elements of complete streets in its guidance. The National Complete Streets Coalition was founded by a coalition of advocacy groups, as well as the AARP, American Planning Association and American Society of Landscape Architects. They launched the complete streets movement in 2004, to promote the development and implementation of relevant policies and professional practices.

To access the full story, click here.

4. 5 Low Cost Ideas to Make Your City Wealthier Today I'm flying home from my last trip of the year. Last night I spoke in Panama City, Florida to a large and enthusiastic group of people in a community struggling with some large development proposals. Their core frustration is a common one. There only seems to be two choices available to them: either build something completely out of scale with their community or build nothing.

During my visit, we talked a lot about why this is, why local government so often delivers this kind of false paradigm despite the strong desire from nearly all players — even many within local government — to do something different. This conversation echoed another dialogue that happened earlier this week in Pensacola, Florida, where I delivered a follow up to October's Curbside Chat. We all know that it makes more sense to work incrementally, to make many small investments to shore up and strengthen our core neighborhoods. How do we do that when every mechanism we use to deliver projects — from funding sources to regulations to the project advocates themselves — pushes us into a few large endeavors we hope will trickle down to something resembling success.

To access the full story, click here.

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5. An Agricultural Community That Embraces its Artistic Side Sierra Valley lies just an hour north of Lake Tahoe, but it feels a million miles away and in a different century. Tahoe is a recreational playground full of jet-setters and wealthy second-home owners. The Sierra Valley is rural and huge, stretching over 130,000 acres, yet only 1,500 people live in the entire valley. Now, this small community in Northern California is changing in a very big way.

Lately, it has been expanding from its cattle-ranching roots into a variety of creative outlets. There is now an on-the-farm Farmers Market at Sierra Valley Farms every Friday in the summer, and bikers and ranchers get together every June for the wonderfully named “Tour De Manure” bike ride, which benefits the Sierraville Fire Department.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Oregon Community Foundation's Community Grant Program The Community Grants Program is a broadly accessible, responsive statewide grants program. Its long-term goals are to strengthen the social fabric of our communities and improve the lives of all Oregonians. This program responds to evolving, community-identified needs and builds civic leadership and engagement.

Guiding Principles   

We believe that creative and sustainable solutions come from people who work in partnership to address common needs and aspirations.

We give high priority to investments that create positive, substantive change and attempt to resolve problems at their source.

We recognize and respect Oregon's diverse regions and populations, and we seek to advance equity, diversity and inclusion through our programs.

Program Details As a responsive arm of OCF, the Community Grant Program awards about 300 grants each year, mostly to small- and moderate-size nonprofits. The average grant is $20,000. OCF typically receives 400 to 500 proposals per grant cycle. Concerns central to OCF’s evaluation of proposed projects include:   

The strength of local support for the project The strength of the applicant organization Whether the project addresses a significant community need

Please review the full guidelines, which include tips on submitting a competitive proposal as well as guidance on capacity-building and capital requests. OCF will also consider how well the project fits the following list of funding priorities.

For more information, click here.

7. Cities Turn to ‘Missing Middle’ Housing to Keep Older Millennials From Leaving Cities and close-in suburbs looking to the future see a troubling trend: The millennials who rejuvenated their downtowns over the past decade are growing older and beginning to leave.

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The oldest are hitting their mid-30s, with many starting to couple up and have children. Meanwhile, the sleek high-rise apartment buildings built for them as single young professionals are no longer practical or affordable as they seek to buy homes with more space and -privacy.

“There’s been this huge wave of people in cities all over the country. Then they grow up. Then what?,” said Yolanda Cole, who owns a D.C. architectural firm and chairs ULI Washington, part of the Urban Land Institute, a research organization dedicated to responsible land use.

In an effort to retain these residents, some urban planners, developers and architects are reviving the kinds of homes that might be more familiar to millennials’ great-grandparents: duplexes, triplexes, bungalows, rowhouses with multiple units, and small buildings with four to six apartments or condos.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Rural Aging in Place Toolkit Welcome to the Rural Aging in Place Toolkit. The toolkit compiles evidence-based and promising models and resources to support organizations implementing aging in place in rural communities across the United States.

The modules in the toolkit contain resources and information focused on developing, implementing, evaluating, and sustaining rural aging in place programs. There are more resources on general community health strategies available in the Rural Community Health Toolkit.

To access the toolkit, click here.

9. Webinar: Fostering Community Partnerships to Advance Health Equity (Pt. 3) - January 9, 2018, 10:00-11:00am PST The 4-part webinar series is built around the strategic practices outlined in the recently released Health Equity Guide by Human Impact Partners. Each webinar will focus on a set of strategic practices that health departments can take to pursue a wall-to-wall transformation of how they work internally, with communities, and alongside other government agencies.

On the January webinar, we'll discuss:  Why fostering community partnerships is key to advancing health equity  How Alameda County in California engages in social justice movements to advance health and racial equity  How Kansas City shares power and space with community organizers to change policy  How NACCHO is supporting building community alliances to advance equity  Resources to help your health department foster community partnerships to advance health equity The Advancing Health Equity in Local Health Departments Webinar Series is co-sponsored by the Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE), the National Collaborative for Health Equity (NCHE), and the National Association of County and City Health Officers (NACCHO) Health Equity and Social Justice Committee.

To register for this webinar, click here.

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10. Young People Returning to Farming As Bobby Jones was getting ready to start his own farm several years ago in rural Georgia, he ran into an unexpected problem. “I thought I’d done a responsible thing. I had no student loans, no credit cards, lived modestly. And I had a zero credit score,” Jones said. Without credit of any kind, Jones faced difficulties securing capital to pay for land, equipment and supplies his family needed for their startup produce operation.

Jones and his wife, Chelsea, had significant experience and contacts in the region, having attended Georgia College in nearby Milledgeville. They were looking for a way to meet the growing demand they knew existed for fresh, organic produce. “But we had the same challenges as a lot of young people who want to start a farm. Access to land, a secure tenure on the land and access to capital to get going,” Jones said.

Eventually, Bobby and Chelsea Losh-Jones were able to find land and build a profitable farming enterprise. Their Babe + Sage Farm now provides weekly deliveries of fresh produce to 80 families in Middle Georgia.

To access the full story, click here.

11. 8 TED Talks To Help You Focus On What Really Matters It's easy to get caught up in the daily dramas of life. These talks can help you step back, slow down and appreciate the bigger picture.

To access the playlist, click here.

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