Plan With, Not for People
Community residents bring lived experience to planning. Their stories and insights about how their neighborhood works will, at least, ground the cool corridors plan in local realities.
At best, when given the tools, language, and opportunities, community residents can and will become both advocates and active stewards of their newly-planted trees.
Starting Lineup
Owners and renters
Recruit "ambassadors" to engage their neighbors
Start the Dialogue
Meet people where they are
- Neighborhood congregations. Ask clergy and lay leaders. See if they’ll put you on a program or if the pastor will speak on your behalf from the pulpit or church meetings.
- Elementary school PTAs. Some 32+ million children are enrolled in US elementary schools. Their parents are among the most likely to show up at PTA meetings. Start with the principal to learn how you might introduce students and parents to your planned tree equity programs.
- Community-wide events, farmers markets and festivals. Opportunities range from signage (perhaps with QR codes to link to your web materials) to table tops and booths.
See the neighborhood through residents' eyes
Discussion starters
One way to draw people out is to start a convertation: Ask how they feel about trees in their neighborhood, and where they want to go that could be made more accessible by creating cool corridors.
Remember! Heat isn’t measured in degrees Fahrenheit. It is a phenomenon we each experience differently depending on our age, health, physical condition and the activities we pursue. What some might consider hot, others would call comfortable.
Walk the Neighborhood
Planning a neighborhood "walk"
Before the walk, select a large healthy tree and use “My Tree” to calculate benefits.
The complete i-Tree suite of tools can provide detailed information about the state of your communities forests — health, extent of canopy, value of ecosystem services and more. It’s free and intuitive.
Find a host. Folks are more likely to attend if they know who’s inviting them. Who you choose to host will determine who’s most likely to show up. For example, the local elementary school PTA president will attract other members – and possibly teachers and students as well. Likewise, local pastors and clergy may be willing to help organize a congregational activity.
Recruit an ambassador to join as co-host, then invite people to walk the neighborhood to get a sense of what trees might do to improve it. The aim is collaborative learning – achieving common understanding of what’s possible and what neighbors expect, need and want.
Invite local officials. Not only can they contribute to the discussion, they’ll have an opportunity to listen. Hearing directly from residents on their own turf can help officials assure that plans are developed in concert with people, not by the local government for people.
A note about naysayers. If there are people you already believe will oppose the plan, it’s best to deal with their objections in a different setting.
Where to stop
- Dying or dead tree — Important as places where helpful insects and birds can live.
- Street without trees — Do people feel more or less comfortable on streets like these? Why?
- Trees near houses — Would people like to see trees next to their homes or apartments? Why?
- Trees in school yard or school yard without trees — Are more trees in schoolyards better than fewer trees?
- Trees (or absence of trees) on key walking route to public transit, schools, or community facility — Are there times during the year when the weather might make walking uncomfortable? (Rain or snow, of course, but what about too hot or cold?) Enough so you’d find another way to get where you’re going?
- Bare pavement without trees. Parking lot or streets and sidewalks — Ask whether the heat is worse here during the summer than elsewhere in the neighborhood. (For example, in parks or where there are many trees). Review the impacts of climate change.
Large Groups
See the neighborhood through residents' eyes
Learn with your neighbors
Communicating benefits was more about involving residents in community-wide conversations about trees, whereby tree information could be shared, rather than “preached”. … Peer-to-peer communication (and informal education) was critical to this long-term process. Local conversations needed to occur first to strengthen the social scaffolding and leadership necessary to motivate more formal transfer of knowledge and skills.
Shaping insights into action
They generally involve intense and possibly multi-day meetings involving municipal officials, developers, business owners. In brief: everyone with a stake in the neighborhood’s future. When successful they promote joint ownership of solutions and defuse potential conflicts.
Success lays in managing the details. Check out these resources to learn more.
The Department of Energy published a handbook aimed at energy conservation strategies. But it’s a comprehensive resource that explains all steps of the charrette process — with templates, outlines and timetables that will help you put it all together.
Planning tools
Planning tools
One lesson shared by all: creating cool corridors requires adroit planning, multi-agency collabortion and significant funds. Below we’ve listed some tools to help you meet the challenge.
Culled from the experience of major cities across the world, the C40 network provides tools, tips and case studies describing how many have tackled issues of extreme heat.
This UN Environment Programme guide was among the first to catalogue diverse strategies for “beating the heat.” Case studies of successful initiatives can inform your plans.
The platform offers opportunities to engage with world-leading experts across a diversity of disciplines to plan, fund, implement, and measure heat resilience actions. Updated regularly by the Atlantic Council.
The Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ (PIRS™) for Heat is an approach communities can use to integrate heat mitigation policies into different plans and to better target policies to high heat risk areas. Includes detailed and ready-to-go worksheets, and case studies from five US cities.