Concordia College, Moorhead
Report date
March 2021
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
The six meetings of the Moorhead Community Resilience Task Force were essential in enabling us to make progress. 34 different people from the 19 member organizations participated in the meetings. These meetings were important for continuing to build relationships and a shared vision of what we hope to achieve. The extensive notes taken during the meetings helped to capture insights. Helping the meetings succeed was an egalitarian atmosphere that encouraged open sharing combined with a carefully structured plan for each meeting. Also, the task force’s thematic working groups dove into explorations of specific areas of community resilience: Social Equity and Governance, Health and Wellness, Ecosystem Services, Infrastructure, and Economic Resilience. Each group spent part of the year completing a Resilience Assessment. This task involved settling on a description of what resilience would look like in their area, understanding current strengths and weakness in Moorhead, and identifying specific indicators of resilience that could be used in developing strategies for increasing resilience. The community resilience lens provided a new perspective for thinking about issues in Moorhead.
Concrete resilience-building projects became a more consequential aspect of our work this year than had expected. While we had originally planned to focus primarily on information gathering and analysis, the pandemic spurred us to become more action-oriented. During the summer we launched and completed a community gardening project and an initiative to build greater capacity in the New American community to respond to the coronavirus public health threat. In the summer and fall, we took specific steps in response to the call for action to address racial inequities. And into the winter, we developed a demonstration project (for 2021) oriented around the goals of increasing ecological health, providing environmental education opportunities, and creating a new site for community gatherings. While these projects all have resilience-building attributes, their true significance lies in how they helped us learn. Indeed, in 2020, we learned by doing. As members of the task force have collaborated to conceive and carry out projects, the groundwork has been laid for future actions to create a truly Resilient Moorhead characterized by collaborative and inclusive approaches to problem-solving.
In order to make progress in a year upended by a pandemic, we ourselves had to practice resilience by being flexible and adaptable in the face of changes and challenges. As originally conceived, the grant project envisioned that we would develop an in-depth resilience assessment and then use that to determine priorities for future resilience-building work. As the pandemic hit, we moderated our expectations in this area and endeavored to understand what we could do in the short-term to be helpful to task force members and the broader community. By focusing in supporting one another and being responsive to expressed needs, we built a stronger foundation for the project and demonstrated the relevance of the task force. Similar to the effect of the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd created a helpful sense of urgency, a desire to learn from the events swirling around us and to determine what positive actions we can take right now even as we look beyond the short-term. Overall, by trying to model an approach marked by inclusive collaboration and a high level of responsiveness, we prevented the project from stalling even as people became busier and more stressed than ever before.
Key lessons learned
Our experience this year helped us realize that the process is as important as, or even more important than, any final outcome or product. While we are used to thinking in terms of specific deliverables – a plan, a new facility, a data set, and so on – the process followed in trying to achieve goals generates its own outcomes along the way. What has made the project meaningful so far are the relationships that have formed and deepened, the conversations, and the open explorations into the various dimensions of resilience. Especially in the wake of the pandemic’s onset, ensuring that the journey we are on with this project as rewarding, meaningful, and enjoyable has become just as important as achieving a specific outcome by a specific date. Indeed, you can only build a resilient community by following a process characterized by the features of a resilient community, one that is inclusive, infused with trust, flexible, and so on.
We learned more about how to modulate the extent to which we highlight climate change as we carry out this project. Whereas climate change is the problem that drove the development of this project, the pandemic has highlighted how community resilience is needed because we face a range of issues as we move into the future. Whereas there are certain kinds of climate impacts that call for specific responses, many of the measures needed to become more resilient to climate change are also needed to become more resilient in the face of other kinds of stresses, shocks, and uncertainties (whether economic, political, social, or biological in nature). Although some people are energized by discussion of and references to climate impacts, others are turned off. With this in mind, we need to be judicious and strategic about when and how to frame our activities as a response to climate change. Moreover, we have learned that people move quickly from understanding climate impacts to the task of building resilience and that the vision of a Resilient Moorhead is what gets people excited, not a dwelling on the details of climate change.
Reflections on inclusive, collaborative or resourceful problem-solving
One of the overall aims of our project is to promote collaborative and participatory approaches to community problem-solving. The resilience task force is built around the idea that bringing together stakeholders from across the community of Moorhead is essential if we are to move from generalized concern about climate impacts to specific actions to increase our resilience. Our progress this year was made possible by the willingness of task force members to give their time and to struggle together to think holistically about community needs.
Ensuring that our work is inclusive of those most vulnerable to climate impacts and those who are most often not given a voice in community decision-making is central to our work. Social equity is a foundational part of any resilient community, and early on in our work we decided that equity concerns should permeate everything we do. During the first part of 2020 we sought to bring in smaller organizations representing New Americans in Moorhead and to reduce barriers to participation. We are continuing to bring in more voices, to gain input and insight from community members from diverse backgrounds.
Ensuring that our work is inclusive of those most vulnerable to climate impacts and those who are most often not given a voice in community decision-making is central to our work. Social equity is a foundational part of any resilient community, and early on in our work we decided that equity concerns should permeate everything we do. During the first part of 2020 we sought to bring in smaller organizations representing New Americans in Moorhead and to reduce barriers to participation. We are continuing to bring in more voices, to gain input and insight from community members from diverse backgrounds.
Other key elements of Community Innovation
Yes, two other key elements are relationship-building and the practice of “living into the situation.” Relationship-building was, and will continue to be, a central part of our community process. This facilitates the development of mutual understanding and trust. We know that a community in which people and groups trust each other and are knitted together by relational networks is a stronger and more resilient community. Moreover, we have endeavored to generate trust in the process – to try to ensure that people view and experience our community resilience project as an honest, open, and bottom-up endeavor rather than as a top-down initiative with several dominant players.
The second aspect of our community process that is worthy of note here is its intentional adaptability and flexibility. The pandemic forced us to embrace the idea of living into the situation as it evolves. We realized that our pre-existing plans were no longer fully viable and that a pivot was necessary. Happily, we were able to understand that this was an opportunity to practice resilience in real time, adjusting as we go along and making the best of the situation.
The second aspect of our community process that is worthy of note here is its intentional adaptability and flexibility. The pandemic forced us to embrace the idea of living into the situation as it evolves. We realized that our pre-existing plans were no longer fully viable and that a pivot was necessary. Happily, we were able to understand that this was an opportunity to practice resilience in real time, adjusting as we go along and making the best of the situation.
Understanding the problem
Our project was designed to facilitate exploration into an issue that is both expansive and complex. We intentionally framed our project around a big goal: to become better prepared to weather the impacts of climate change by increasing community resilience and collaboration. Our conversations this year have led to more clarity about the issues and needs present in our community. Of course, part of what it means to attain clarity is to appreciate more deeply the complexity of the issues. It is clear to us now that we need to narrow our focus to the areas and issues within which the task force can have the greatest impact. Separately, our work this year has highlighted the need to pay more attention on how to bring about change. That is, what lever, pressure points, and strategies are needed to move from conversation to changes in policies and standard operating procedures. Simply getting powerful people around the table is not enough. It has become clear to us – and this is exciting – that we can play a role in greasing the wheels for the kinds of transformative change that are so difficult to achieve.
If you could do it all over again...
It’s difficult to think about this because the pandemic changed the situation, altering both our plans and what was within the realm of possibility. For example, it made it impossible to do the community engagement activities planned for 2020, but we still would have intended to do that. We had difficulty in doing a robust and information-rich resilience assessment. Certainly the pandemic caused us trouble in this area, but this may have proven too difficult even in normal circumstances, lacking a full-time staff person to do the work. Given this, the advice would be to aim at creating something less than a full-scale resilience assessment and action plan. It seems more appropriate to focus less on trying to create stand-alone resilience goals and more on infusing resilience thinking into other community processes. In fact, we now have an opportunity to do this, as the City of Moorhead launched an 18-month Comprehensive Planning process in January 2021. The task force is poised to contribute to this process even as it continues to work in other areas.
One last thought
Cognizant of how conditions have changed since the start of the project, in January 2021 we decided to undertake an extensive review of our project, going beyond what would typically be expected. We formed an internal grant review team made up of eight people from the task force. This team met for a total of three hours for the purpose of evaluating work to date and discerning how we should move forward in 2021 and beyond. We also contracted with a community organizing expert in our region to conduct an external review of our project. Lastly, all individuals on the task force were invited to complete a survey. These activities generated a rich set of recommendations and insights that we will use to shape our work going forward.
One other aspect of our work that deserves a mention is our effort to promote conversation about, and understanding of, community resilience in the broader Moorhead community. When the pandemic forestalled planned community engagement activities, we decided to launch a Facebook/Instagram page titled RESILIENT MOORHEAD. We are using this to share stories of resilience in Moorhead, publicize relevant events, and connect people into the project.
One other aspect of our work that deserves a mention is our effort to promote conversation about, and understanding of, community resilience in the broader Moorhead community. When the pandemic forestalled planned community engagement activities, we decided to launch a Facebook/Instagram page titled RESILIENT MOORHEAD. We are using this to share stories of resilience in Moorhead, publicize relevant events, and connect people into the project.