St. Louis River Alliance
Report date
January 2018
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
As the Design Duluth Collaborative, our three organizations began investigating the possibility of “Creating a Resilient and Equitable Future for the Saint Louis River Corridor.” Over a period of three years, the Collaborative has studied physical and community resiliency and speculated on the future of the St. Louis Corridor. Through the grant, the Collaborative created and supported a series of community engagement events at various locations in the Corridor focused on issues of history, industry, small business development, access to arts and cultural assets, education, healthy food, and transit futures. These engagements have helped to inform city planning documents, neighborhood initiatives, and brought visibility to areas such as the Lincoln Park Craft District which has experienced tremendous growth over the last three years supported by conversations as part of these events.
The partnership relies on the leadership and expertise of the grant partners who are trained in community development, facilitation, and engagement to ensure that the project is developed collaboratively. The process utilized community resources and capacities developed by Duluth LISC and the SLRA and engaged community organizations and stakeholders to assist in the implementation of new community initiatives through seed projects and events. This aspect of our grant work produced an additional feedback loop to gain insight into the usefulness of tools and information that went into the final publication on resilience in the St. Louis River Estuary communities and an opportunity to engage a more diverse group of partners in the process.
Throughout the grant we have completed three years of academic design studios that investigated resilient futures in the Corridor. This allowed us to reflect on and test the ideas emerging through community and stakeholder engagement and utilize the resources of the University of Minnesota, who provide additional capabilities in analysis, facilitation, community engagement, and creative visioning. This creative methodology, along with existing and new community networks, works together to ensure that the project is inclusive of all potential community stakeholders and resources. Proposals address education, food, energy, and recreation and access to the St. Louis River. The proposals are expansive and future-oriented and provoked discussion of long-term changes and larger ideas of climate adaptation, physical and social resiliency, and speculation on imaginable and unimaginable futures. Community Innovation Grants were created to support organizations using creative processes to develop effective, equitable, and sustainable solutions to future challenges. The student work functions as our “civic R&D, allowing communities to develop and test new solutions to community challenges.'
Key lessons learned
Clear and decisive communication is the key to positive progress. While we made many strides toward more effective communication, the collaboration inherent in our grant was hard work. All partners were able to bring unique resources to the table and clearly defining the value of those resources so that we could best leverage them toward the different phases and processes of understanding, generating, and testing ideas proved to be a large part of the successes and stumbling throughout the grant period. To communicate desired inputs and outcomes is difficult in engaged community work, but proved to be the key to producing a publication and engaging communities and stakeholders in a way we were all proud of when looking back over the term of the grant.
Having an adaptable framework to address shifting priorities in real time can make the difference between success and failure. Throughout the course of the grant there was turnover in all of our organizations and key stakeholder partnerships. Adapting to that shifting landscape as well as the shift in administrations at the City and Department level required us to revisit objectives and goals and focus on a framework to be able to adapt most effectively. To maintain the community relationships and feedback relationships that could continue our process of framing questions, projective futures, and evaluating outcomes required finding a balance between our three Collaborative partners and helping each other better understand the limitations and opportunities inherent in all our work. This allowed us to more effectively use our existing frameworks to create a resilient Collaborative framework that could support our diverse and integrated work toward completing the goals for our grant.
Another key to would be considering how each element of the process builds on one another and to celebrate success and identify failure at each step and be mindful of those as the work progresses. There were many aspects of the work done collaboratively that may have been lost in the shuffle as we moved toward subsequent questions. To find ways to revisit and re-evaluate those elements through new the lens of new discoveries is something that took a while to calcify as part of our process. That said, the impact of the changes caused by small successes throughout the grant has galvanized positive impact through this thoughtful development and creative partnership.
Reflections on the community innovation process
“This is not a linear process” is the single most important part of understanding how you can arrive at community innovation. While each step is paramount to a vibrant understanding of the work we envisioned completing, that nature of understanding issues at play and how to unravel them to engage with each step required flexibility and patience in finding a process that worked best for our collaboration. Understanding the resources we had within our core group, as well as the communities with which we worked, was not only a process of identification, but evaluation to help everyone understand their value to the process.
Progress toward an innovation
The culmination of our Collaborative work is “Resilient Futures: Exploring Resilience in the St. Louis River Estuary Communities”, a document we believe makes substantial progress toward addressing issues of resilience and equity. The publication is in three parts and progresses from a restatement of Duluth’s history to proposals for Duluth’s future and a consideration of actions being taken to ensure future resiliency in the present. This includes recognition of best practices and strategies for community engagement to best assist in the implementation of resilient futures. With community stakeholders and municipal institutions, we hope the document becomes a tool to help build knowledge around resilience and empower residents to identify opportunities to build resilience in their own neighborhoods. The resources, analysis, and projects are included to help residents, including new and underrepresented voices, participate in ongoing public, private, and institutional efforts for ecological and economic futures of the St. Louis River Estuary. Though it is shared as a physical document, the digital form is a living document and catalyst for ongoing collaboration and innovation.
What it will take to reach an innovation?
While as a Collaborative we may feel that the publication is an innovation and worthy of review and utilization, it can only be so with buy in from key individuals and stakeholders that shape the policy and development landscape in Duluth. In order for this to happen, engaging ongoing and new initiatives throughout the course of our grant in order to dovetail into pertinent conversations has given the work visibility within the larger stakeholder group. The work done to complete the publication has supplemented and enhanced community input with processes outside our Collaborative, especially through the use of outside perspectives and expertise to illustrate equitable and resilient futures and the means by which to evaluate them. This creates tangible examples that have been put to use by the City of Duluth and other partners to help define potential projects and outcomes related to our shared goals of capacity building.
What's next?
With the creation and publication of Resilient Futures: Exploring Resilience in the St. Louis River Estuary Communities, we have a tool to continue the community process and reference potential futures, current states of different aspects of resilience in Duluth, and advocate for innovative means of addressing more effective and equitable approaches to development, education, and access for residents and creating more collaborations to that end moving forward.
If you could do it all over again...
The challenge of collaboration lies in communication and that requires the establishment of roles and responsibilities, but also definition and collective understanding of what each partner brings to the collaboration. Finding better ways to build consensus around priorities and protocols for evaluating success and determining goals is paramount to success and something that took us a while to identify. Finding ways to share our definitions of successful outcomes and how we approach methods of arriving at an innovative community process earlier in the process through more robust and flexible communication would provide a touchstone throughout the grant period.
One last thought
Community Innovation is a steep charge to take on. For a Collaboration that was relatively nascent when we began, we are incredibly thankful that over the course of our grant period the resource of the Bush Foundation was not only a financial source of support but also provided the flexibility it requires to move through this nonlinear process of exploration toward innovation. Unforeseen changes in the moving pieces of government, organizational staff and leadership, and methodologies all played into shifts in the landscape of how we achieved our goals for the grant and having officers at the Bush Foundation that could understand and be supportive throughout that process was invaluable. The lessons learned by our organizations to be better communicators and collaborators were a direct result of that support and flexibility and without them, the success and continued viability of this work would not be as effective.