Update on Project Activities
Last Friday, our team met in Palo Alto with Diane and Lisa, one of the main leaders in creating and managing the Green Challenge websites for multiple Bay Area cities. During our meeting, we learned about Lisa’s specific vision behind the Green Challenge and used Lisa as a sounding board for our website suggestions. In addition, we began to discuss social media strategies and methods to motivate users to stay engaged with the site in the long term. This week, we began formulating survey and interview questions for students and teachers. We were able to have our weekly conference call with Diane, and were able to talk with her about the type of information that would be most useful for her to have. Areas of importance, to be focused on in the survey, include: residents’ familiarity with climate change and the Menlo Green Challenge, actions that are feasible and attractive to complete, features that make websites appealing and easy to use, and prizes that motivate users to take on the Challenge. We also began preliminary work on the Household Success story by creating interview questions and writing a brief newsletter for Diane to send to the site mailing list early next week. What We Observed and Learned Before going over our suggestions, Lisa outlined her previous work with the Palo Alto Climate Action Plan and how it contributed to the creation of the Green Challenge. Specifically, she discussed how she channeled her passions for activism and climate policy to lead a neighborhood sustainability effort and the strategies she tried during this period. For example, she advised us to promote discussions regarding the impacts and actions people choose in order to help them visualize their carbon footprint and encourage competition between teams. As these discussions became more prevalent in her neighborhood, it became difficult to track their process without a metric. Therefore, Lisa created an online platform to gage a city’s specific carbon footprint and estimate personal energy use while also involving an aspect of competition. Since Lisa crowdsourced her website through each stage, she wanted us to give feedback on a few of her future updates for the site. First, she mentioned the addition of new options to sort the grid categories by preference, such as allowing users to filter out actions they would never pursue. Her two largest proposals, however, were the addition of a student-specific action category for students and younger participants, and the rollout of a community submission page with a status feed and like/comment features. The goal of the latter is to prompt people to post pictures of their own actions, encourage friendly competition amongst household teams and facilitate the creation of a Green Challenge mobile app. Next, our team was able to make thoughtful recommendations to improve the user-friendliness of the site. Lisa explained to us that the difficulty levels combine time and money considerations, and that the survey is missing some energy and travel averages that would facilitate the process for students unable to contact their parents for help. We believe that these clarifications and tools should be made available on the site in the form of a question mark or alternative pop-up bubble. Unfortunately, we realized that a few of our suggestions are not feasible. For example, adding source citations to all the action pages, or filtering actions based on the survey answers provided would require structural changes to the website that are extremely time intensive. Unfortunately, Diane also alerted us that the City of Menlo Park does not necessarily endorse Menlo Spark’s 2025 target for climate neutrality, and that the goal cannot be publicized on the Green Challenge website. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward As this week comes to a close, we assess that we are in a good position in our task timeline heading into Week 6. We have come up with a draft for surveys we’d like to hand to students and residents of Menlo Park. We also came up with important questions for the teachers that have run the Challenge before in their classrooms, and we’ve reached out to these teachers to set up interviews. Moving forward, we’ll send the survey and interview questions to Diane so she can look over them and give us feedback, and we’ll look forward to setting concrete dates to meet with teachers at La Entrada Middle School and Menlo Atherton High School. Assessing Future Housing and Transportation Patterns in the City of Palo Alto | Week 5 Reflection10/27/2017
Project Update
This week, our team finalized our transportation and housing surveys. After meeting with Hillary last Wednesday, our team updated our written and online surveys to better reflect the concerns of people rather than researchers. Our questions were often too impersonal, and made the reader feel as if he or she were a number rather than a voice. This input, as well as the feedback given from numerous test-survey takers this past weekend allowed us to produce our final survey. We recently emailed Adina and Elaine on our survey progress, and they were thrilled to see the changes we had made in the past week. Our survey is 23 questions long, split into two sections. The first section is comprised of simple, multiple choice housing and transportation questions, as compared to the ladder section, containing more open ended, preference questions. We are realizing that the slightest variation in word choice can make or break a reader’s ability answer a question. Over the past two weeks, we have been refining our question types to eliminate any ambiguity or confusion. We recognize we cannot produce a perfect survey, that is both clear and unbiased. However, we believe that our final survey will at least provide usable, coherent data on housing and transportation in Palo Alto. Upcoming Plans Friday and Saturday, our team will head out to the Caltrain station and the Farmers’ Market to distribute the final paper survey. We plan on collecting the pop up park equipment from Elaine on Friday afternoon and setting up around the station 5-7PM. The following morning, we will setup at the market around 9AM. We are excited to finally interact with our stakeholders and community members, but are also eager to collect definitive data on housing and transportation preferences. We are also meeting with Adina and Elaine this Monday (30th) to discuss our surveying experience and begin to send the online surveys out on email servers. Predicted Issues Not everyone is interested in speaking to complete strangers on the street. In fact, their knee jerk reaction is often the opposite. Therefore, we are dressing and acting approachable to increase the likelihood of collecting data. This will include; pop-up park green spaces, Stanford shirts, and candy buckets. We want to come off as endearing and enthusiastic, rather than demanding or insincere. As our survey events progress, we will refine our tactics and develop a better understanding of engaging pedestrians. Even if we cannot collect physical data, we are interested in at least sharing our knowledge with the citizens and employees of Palo Alto. We will have information booklets summarizing the current housing and transportation situation around the city, as well as a reference to the Comprehensive Plan Update. When thinking about different demographics such as socioeconomic status and race, the specific areas where we are conducting our research may not be inclusive of these different groups of individuals. After our midterm presentation, we received feedback concerning the potential employment biases we were likely to encounter only surveying two sites. We are planning to survey people at the Palo Alto Caltrain Station and Farmers Markets on California Avenue. Individuals who ride the Caltrain typically are of a higher socioeconomic status, suggesting an inherent bias for higher income workers. Our team is working to find a way to incorporate the experiences and opinions of all individuals. A diverse input of opinions will be vital to making the City of Palo Alto more sustainable in regards to housing and transportation issues. Update on Project Activities
This week we made minor adjustments to our ongoing surveys as results started to roll in. First of all, we removed the requirement for surveyees to sign in with a gmail account in order to allow for increased access and thus a larger sample size of both business owners and employees. Since Julie could not officially release the surveys for business owners and employees until Tuesday via email, we do not yet possess a large enough amount of data to make conclusions. As of now, a total of 26 individuals (11 employees and 15 business representatives) filled out the surveys. We will make plans to convene with our community sponsor in the coming week in order to assess additional approaches to promoting the surveys and increasing turnout. What We Observed and Learned So far we cannot make conclusions about the impact of the minimum wage ordinance on Mountain View businesses and employees, but we do know that our current approach to surveys may prove inadequate. We did not account for the lost time making edits when we planned the surveys’ due date, so we will likely need to extend the survey period for one more week in order to amass enough data to begin our report. We may also need to explore the possibility of two more site visits in order to force the issue of surveying with more business owners. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward We made many necessary adjustments and updates to our surveys this week in order to work out the logistics of meeting Mountain View’s needs, but the lost time means we likely need to extend our surveying period for at least one more week (the original deadline ends today). We will also look to meet Mr. Andrade again very soon, either in Mountain View or on campus. Update on Project Activities
On Thursday, Jackelyn, Celine, and I travelled two hours south to attend the Alisal Vibrancy Plan Visioning Workshop, facilitated by the City of Salinas. It was held in a school auditorium. The workshop was meant to allow for residents (both in Salinas and in Alisal) to be involved in the planning process for the Alisal Vibrancy Plan. This event was our first official introduction to the Alisal community, and our first form of contribution to the AVP. We are scheduled to talk with Carol McKibben this weekend and Andrea Jany the coming week. Talking with them will prepare us for when we conduct interviews with residents. We will also be debriefing the Visioning Workshop with Jonathan over the phone this week and we will hopefully be receiving scanned copies of the documents created by the attendees in the near future. We also received the long-awaited HTMA document today, and will be working on reading, dissecting, and translating that document next week. What We Observed and Learned One of our worries was that there wouldn’t be any residents or only few residents at the Visioning session but there were actually many residents. Some not specifically from Alisal, some were from Salinas the city generally that had businesses in Alisal. There was pretty good representation of people, old, young, and disabled. They set up the workshop by three questions asked to the residents. Each overarching section had three parts they wanted to address-- strengths, weakness, and possible strategies to address the weaknesses. There were two facilitators per table and they seemed very well versed on how to facilitate discussion. They asked the questions in a way that wasn’t leading toward a certain answer. They accepted all answers and wrote them down on the large sheets of paper displaying was what said. The residents were pretty participatory and sitting with them gave us a lot of insight into their needs and wants. It was interesting to hear actual stories put to the general issues we had read about. For example, crowding was an issue we read about but sitting with the residents made it more real as one talked about how crowding was a big issue with many families living in a home and their kids wouldn’t have a place to do homework. Another example was a story of how one of the resident’s friend’s landlord continued to up their rent and that it had gone up from $1,900 per month to $2,100 per month over the course of three months. One of the biggest issues they focused on was the lack of rent control and the need for policies to control this. They also emphasized the need to inform the residents of their rights. This was a general issue as well of residents not knowing where resources are. Speaking to one of the residents one on one, she told me she got most of her information on community programing through Facebook and flyers. A younger students told me she learned about opportunities through school. They are required to complete a certain number of community service hours to graduate and this is how she got involved in many of the youth councils in the city as well as internships. Knowing this information, we know in what forms our infographic would be most useful. Some of the other things they focused on where getting youth involved with different programs and with businesses in the community to gain mentors and financial assistance. Keeping the youth focused and expanding their leadership capabilities would keep them from spending time on the streets and would therefore reduce violence. Another issue was the lack of childcare facilities. It was interesting to see they focused most on the housing and the youth. It seemed that it was a general consensus that caring for the youth would eventually result in the lowering of violence and poverty. The Visioning Session was a good experience for us, not only because it was our first experience with the community, but because we were able to each establish relationships with different residents, some parents, some students, some community leaders, watch their collective thinking process as teams, listen to their ideas and see the ones that meant the most to them. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward As our next steps moving forward, we plan on meeting with Carol McKibben and Andrea Jany to get more background information and insight on how to conduct interviews with the residents. Each of us made connections with some residents and gathered contact information for the interviews. We will be working as a team to refine our interview questions and methodology, such as using video or audio recording when we speak with our interviewees. Celine took photos at the Visioning Session that we will use primarily for our presentation. We will review the photos and assess what other kinds of photos we want, such as photos of parts of neighborhoods in the Alisal. We were unable to get a tour of the area due to circumstances regarding the high amounts of traffic we experienced on the way to the session, but we hope to get a chance to explore a bit more of the area. Since we finally received the HTMA document, we are excited to comb through this information and identify any discrepancies we see, at first glance, from our experiences working with residents. We are now waiting for documents from the Visioning Session, including notes from each team’s table, to be sent to us. Once we have these, we can make more accurate comparisons with the HTMA document. Next Tuesday we will have a conference call with Jonathan to debrief and identify ways this community forum will be implemented in future planning for the project. One of the things we enjoyed about the meeting is that the forum seemed overall very well-structured. Residents were seated at different tables to form small teams and work on answering questions together. The majority of tables were “Spanish-only” that composed of many bilingual residents and some monolingual residents. A few tables were designated as English-speaking so other residents could also participate. The majority of the event was run in Spanish and translations were always provided, even the main questions were asked in Spanish. This approach seemed very effective as monolingual Spanish speakers were given the power to express their thoughts and discuss these ideas in a low-pressure environment. We noticed that language barriers still persist, as ideas like “rent control” and “grants” were terms that bilingual speakers, who were often more highly educated, could not translate to Spanish. As this is something we will come across when we translate the HTMA document, we want to identify ways to best translate these ideas so that monolingual Spanish residents can be empowered by having the language to put towards these ideas. We want to hear about other ways residents are involved besides semi-formal settings like these. We noticed that there was an issue expressed by many residents about the means of spreading information, such as community forums, to the community. We want to know how much pubbing is done in schools, local businesses, neighborhoods, and places commonly frequented by Alisal residents such as super markets. We would also like to identify who was and wasn’t present because of this issue. A few families were present, but we noticed that many adults participating were community leaders, people who work in different nonprofits or welfare agencies. One participant was a Salinas resident who is a Stanford graduate. We want to ensure that more of the general public, including the working class and undereducated demographics, are getting information about these meetings and are able to attend them. Update on Project Activities
In the next two weeks leading up to the charrette, our team will focus on conducting more research on the health impacts that residents may face after a natural disaster. At the start of this project, the issues that immediately came to our minds when we first began considering the negative health impacts that can result from an earthquake were mostly things such as sickness from disease and physical exhaustion from the lack of food and water. But as we have continued our research we have come to realize that there are many other health related concerns we must look further into so that we may contribute to the mitigation of these other issues. We feel that the psychological health and morale of residents after a catastrophic event is a matter that we must be prepared to bolster during trying times. And though we are sure there are ways to do this both pre-event and post-event, we do not know exactly how just yet. To address this, we will conduct research and come together as a group to brainstorm problems and solutions to health issues that may come from declining psychological health and morale. Questions we currently want to consider include the following: What impact might fear and anxiety have on the immune system? How will living outdoors for an extended period make residents feel about the loss of physical security? Is there a way to rebuild a sense of security during this time? How can residents cope with minimal contact with family and friends? What are the varying fight-or-flight responses that residents might demonstrate after a disastrous earthquake? There are many matters and scenarios for our team to consider, and it is important for us to explore so that we can be prepared to share as much as we can during our presentation at the charrette. What We Observed and Learned Throughout our classes this week we encountered the complexities of tackling local issues under complex systems of power and resource allocation at different levels of government. This raised the question of where NEN sits within the matrix of power over city recovery in case of a disaster. This will fortunately serve as an important way to contextualize our meeting next week which will go into depth over NEN. We now are more keen on thinking through the kind of power NEN might have and how it might interplay with the city, region, state, and nation in making policy decisions for recovery. It will also help us pay more attention to possible limitations. We feel that in order to reach a better understanding of the charrette process it is good to have a broader understanding of the impacts of disaster. The issue of morale and emotional damage has deepened our understanding of disaster’s possible ramifications and will serve as yet another card to play during the charrette when attempting to elicit information. Physical survival is important but can often be limited if emotional capacity and morale is low. The upcoming meeting on NEN will be key on clarifying what kind of information can be acted upon based on NEN’s status in terms of a larger network of local influence. Additionally, we will continue our research on past disasters and these new lenses have granted new avenues for nuancing our understanding of disaster response. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward We have outlined a pretty ambitious plan that will require our team to pick up our pace of work in the time period following the charrette. Reflecting on some of the concepts we have learned about ethical service through our lectures and reading, our team has set a goal to get a sufficient amount of community input into the design for this project before it is released. We have included the necessary steps to get this done before the end of our quarter in the updated Project Plan that we have sent for review to the NEN team. In summary, it includes an extra community-outreach step after the Stanford Team compiles the notes from the charrette, which will be then considered in the final toolkit framework. We hope we could get some help from the NEN team for the community outreach step, as it has the resources and connections to get community input on the notes. We are also considering conducting research in our locale to get input on how this framework might be considered by communities in the South Bay and Peninsula areas. While we realize this may not be achievable with current resources, we hope that we can at least coordinate our efforts in setting up the infrastructure to achieve this before the Sustainable Cities course ends. These additions are open to discussion and change. We would also like to start organizing the Pre-Charrette meeting, and figure out if we would like to conduct it through a group call, or in person. Ideally, we hope we can figure out a time for which we can all meet in person sometime during the week of November 6th. Finally, it would be great to know if there are any other calls the Stanford Team can sit in on before the charrette as well. |
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