On the Park Bench - Equity-First: Resilience for Everyone

hi everyone we just opened up the webinar so we see folks are coming in and we're going to give it a little bit of time before we get started but i wanted to welcome everyone we're really excited about today i think everyone's getting custom to this zoom thing of you wait in the waiting room you come in so um it's always exciting from our perspective to see the numbers start climbing just going to give it another another half a minute or so till the numbers stabilize well welcome everyone uh to our next edition of on the park bench um i'm lynne richards i'm the president and ceo of the congress for the new urbanism and we're really excited to be here today to present equity first resilience for everyone today we're going to be hearing from barbara brown wilson tate we means and anna clark mallory batches will be moderating but i wanted to jump on at the very beginning to talk a little bit about cnu membership so you probably didn't realize that cnu does a lot of work um outside of the congress and a lot of that is funded and supported by your membership so for example on the park bench this entire series which we're so pleased to offer free and open to anyone is is directly funded by cnu membership and you know we think it's really important to kind of highlight a member so tonight today joining us is dan baisden and joshlyn gibson two members representing the kind of newer generation um to talk a little bit about why they joined cnu and why they think it's important to be a member so josh lynn do you want to talk a little bit about your experience that's right thank you um so my first experience with cnu was at cnu 22 in buffalo and my department was getting recognized for a form-based code but i was also there because i was writing for an urban news source at the time and um given that i was writing about the congress i had a great excuse to just go up and talk to people and ask the panelists and then just ask different people about the work they were doing and um i ended up writing an article about ben hamilton bailey so i had the opportunity to get lunch with him and spend part of a day with him um it was really just sort of i i just kind of felt when i was there like i was in proximity to a lot of really great ideas people who are really doing innovative things you know while we were getting lunch enrique penalosa sat down with us for a while mayor of bogota and so i was just kind of in heaven um and then fast forward to a few years later and we started a chapter in the midwest and i still feel that way about our midwest chapter um we just have so many really smart interesting people doing really interesting work and i just feel very lucky that i get to be around them at our chapter events and i get to be sort of constantly learning from them so um i sort of you know since since going to that first congress in 2014 i've kind of been a member ever since and um i've gotten a lot out of it and i think i'm a better professional for having you know for being part of cnu so um i'm joined here with my co-chair of the cnu midwest chapter dan in and so dan i am curious what first got you interested in cnu yeah i was uh i first heard of cnu when it was in dallas uh and then i wasn't able to attend at the time but um it was in detroit the next year and so uh you know three hour drive from where i'm located at in northern indiana and i uh uh packed up in the car drove to detroit and um it the reason i went and the reason i even got involved in cnu was because it talked about um communities and urbanism and good good communities to live in and and and how to interact and so um i had no idea going into it what cnu was and then i got there and uh instantly just got hooked by the people and the conversations we got to have and the and the relationships and the friendships i got to build and a few of the people i met right away um were on cnu staff and then also jocelyn and you of course and then a few other people that are involved in our cnu midwest chapter so it was a really great opportunity dan and jocelyn so much has been written in the press about how the the millennials as a for example aren't joiners right so if you're talking to a friend or a colleague you know we have to wrap up so the real con the real the real webinar can begin but if you're talking to a friend and colleague what's the one sentence that you would tell them to join cnu i would say it will you know being being involved in the organization whatever you're consuming whether it's the webinars or you know the publications i think it will expand expand your mind about your profession that's what i would tell them i think and dan that's so hard to beat that's a really good one i would say um it's a great way to connect with like-minded people who care about similar things that you do and that's so hard to find sometimes in professional organizations but cnu allows you to do that on a daily basis excellent well thank you jocelyn and dan and for everyone else who's who's here with us right now please join cnu so you can continue to support um programs like the on on the park bench and that we can continue to offer it free and open to to anyone so scott shields our membership manager standing by go ahead and give them a call at 973-714-7204 or go ahead to www.members.cnu.org and of course you know do it simultaneously while you're listening to this great webinar so mallory i'm turning it over to you to moderate this amazing panel that you put together and thank you dan thank you jocelyn and thanks to everyone else for joining us today mallory thank you thanks so much lynn so yes we're finally ready to start off our our webinar today after that um after those um great reflections by jocelyn and dan today's webinar is entitled equity first resilience for everyone and i'm really excited about the three women who are going to be speaking today barbara brown wilson is an associate professor of urban and environmental planning at the uva school of architecture and is co-founder and faculty director at the uva democracy initiative center for the redress of inequity through community engaged scholarship aka the equity center her research and teaching focuses on the history theory ethics and practice of planning for climate justice and on the role of urban social movements in the built world dr wilson is the author of resilience for all striving for equity through community-driven design and co-author of questioning architectural judgment the problem of codes in the united states her research is often change oriented meaning she collaborates with community partners to identify opportunities to move our communities and the field of urban planning towards social and environmental justice anna clark is a journalist who lives in detroit she is author of the poison city flint's water and the american urban tragedy which won the hillman prize for book journalism and the rachel carson environment book award anna's writing has appeared in the new york times the washington post l politico the columbia journalism review next city and other publications she's also edited a detroit anthology a michigan notable book and is a contributing editor at wax wing literary journal anna has been a fulbright fellow in kenya and a knight wallace journalism fellow at the university of michigan finally tateway means tateway is from the siciton wapaton dakota nations in south dakota she and her two children live in rapid city south dakota she grew up in kyle south dakota on the pine ridge indian reservation she received her bachelor of science degree from stanford university in environmental engineering with a minor in comparative studies in race and ethnicity she received a jd with a concentration in human rights law from the university of minnesota law school and a masters of arts degree in lakota leadership and management from maglala lakota college she served as attorney general for the lala sioux tribe on the pine ridge indian reservation in south dakota she also served as a german martial fund marshall memorial fellow in 2015. in 2018 she sought the democratic nomination for south dakota south dakota attorney general the first ever indigenous woman to seek the office of a state attorney general in the united states she's currently executive director of thunder valley community development corporation an indigenous non-profit organization in the pine ridge reservation seeking liberation for lakota people through language life ways and spirituality quite a distinguished panel today so i'm going to start this off by handing it over to barbara brown wilson barbara um can everyone see my screen we we made the switch successfully thank you so much mallory for that i'm really excited about the conversation um so excited that i probably have too many slides but i'll try to go through them really briefly so that we can get to the um to the good the good part because i'm honored to to be on this panel with these amazing women um so when i think about um uh resilience i this the you know right now the gulf coast is uh getting hit by another storm at the moment um in fact it's come to my my yard too um and uh and i think about this amazing piece of graphic advocacy um produced when i was getting my doctorate so i'm like deep deep in thought about where my part of this you know um of this work in this field should be how can i contribute and um and they this group is using a um a slogan that is a south african um movement slogan it's a disability rights slogan and they're they're using it actually um to push back on a designers planners like myself like um others who might have been involved through cnu with coming in from outside the region saying oh you know you were just hit by this horrible hurricane katrina we're gonna we're gonna make a good plan for you um and they said nothing about us without us is for us and um you know they often um continue this conversation we are the ones we've been waiting for if you're not um at the table you're on the menu these really poignant phrases that i wasn't hearing in my own professional um groups at the time i think that's changing and i'm really excited about that and so um so i'm trying to do my my part to help us get the tools we need and the frameworks we need to keep keep learning down down those uh those ends and i'll try to say big picture since we have two people that are really really knowledgeable about um you know place-based work happening after um so you know over 50 years ago now uh sherry yarnstein gave us this you know heuristic of this of this ladder um and i did a study with you know self-proclaimed community engaged um designers about five years ago about the methods they use and they're still pretty much all in this um in this consultation range and you know for the most part people were using other types of of ways to share power and to figure that out in their work but but you know on average what they're really doing is um is is what sherry arnstein would still refer to as a form of tokenism and so thinking through how we get to a version of shared power became a minor obsession of mine and um and i really wanted to engage with the language of resilience in particular partially because i really think these issues of climate um and justice need need to be in partnership and um and resilience can be thought about three ways it can be thought about as something that's more of an ecological mindset right that's where the language originally came from and that's often about um absorbing shock a good a good wetland right of absorbs um the shock of hopefully what's happening right now hurricane zeta um and ecological or excuse me an engineering mindset where we're bouncing back right um but those are not appropriate terms when we're talking about um systemic racism when we're talking about the disproportionate impacts that have been happening to people of color for generations and so figuring out what uh the language is that should be used that then informs our mindset right then informs the ways we make decisions in um in our in our professional discourses and how we share power towards those ends how we share resources how we break things open um so i did a survey with a couple hundred practitioners um again another round of surveys of people trying to map out the terms in the field really just because when you write a book you're trying to like help people understand and place themselves and at first i was like do i get a glossary together do it you know but um language is fluid and instead i wanted to represent through this work what people thought about the continuum of um of who's driving the project is it a professionally driven project or a community driven project in terms of who gets to make decisions and then um and then is it a product oriented right what's the goal of the product is it or the project is it a product is it a is a really beautiful parklet um or is um is the goal actually of the project about building capacity which i think is a you know self-determination right like i get to choose if my neighborhood improves and my property values rise i get to choose if i stay or if i go how i participate in neighborhood change um i get to choose what that neighborhood change looks like right that that is to me um where you know where the the field can be going if it's inspiring to engage with equity with civil rights um and so uh it's this bubble that concerns me the most um when we could do a whole thing about the civil rights movement and the ways in which um planning and design have have participated in the past um but for now i'll just point out that what i do actually think is really really useful in the resilience framework that really comes from ecology is this thinking about adaptive cycles and i feel like uh people used to look at me like i was a little bit crazy when i would talk oh oopsie got a little excited with my mouse there and when um when i would talk about the uh the the sort of cycles and thinking about how we may be in a time of of conservation where we've increased our standardization and increased the way we codify things so much that actually we're not very adaptive to change and we're not very good at um at you know reorganization and redistribution um but i think we all feel like we're in a bit of a back loop right now there has been destruction and sadness and um and you know uh a lot of um of pain that we are all feeling and there's a there's a moment of creative destruction that we're in right now and i hope that we can work towards pushing ourselves towards what regeneration looks like and actually think um there's a lot of knowledge from the indigenous community world of thinking that um that should be leading in in those realms so i'm super excited to learn um i'll just say that in all of the projects that i looked at when i was doing this book project they they are all very different but the thing they share is that they aren't one one organizational effort right it wasn't just like a savior planner or or designer who came in and made great decisions and solved all the problems um and so when you see these projects that work really well from a ground up perspective where people are you know sharing power and they're sharing decision making and they're sharing resources and they're building self-determination and capacity um to choose it happens partially because they're doing it um as a constellation of actors working together towards a shared a shared goal the main things if um just to give you like the summary of the book in um in a singular slide um is really about this this sort of building of coalitions participating in um in collective material work um in the bayou bayou project in east biloxi they actually really honor um the the role that the oyster plays as an asset in their community and so they built these gabien walls that could be easily recreated um with women that were learning the you know job training skills of ecological restoration but also with community members that that wanted to participate and they kind of did this barn raising of the um of um of this work using those um oyster shells as the as the mode of um of of sort of craft um but for lesson two i'll just point out when i say value i mean like value like actually pay people for their time um this is a this is one that we can't wrap our heads around but our budget should reflect our values and so if you value people's effort you should pay them um for that effort and and this is just a big challenge in our field in general we're very um white affluent male set of fields and um and that doesn't mean that we don't have really important roles that um that white affluent male and female people can play in um in all of the solving of these problems but we do have a responsibility to um well we're missing out right as if we're a heterogeneous field that means that we are learning together we have a lot of different ways of knowing at the table um and so uh whoops um so and i'll just say that part of that is because um we have been really really bad at sharing wealth in um in this country and so we since the civil rights movement uh this is all urban institute graphics but um but we have actually had seen the you know the disparate impacts and the sort of rise of affluence in the white community um and and that's partially because of the ways in which we participate in a whole bunch of systems um that perpetuate um you know affluence for for some and and really at the harm of others and so figuring out how we we look towards systems change i think is a is a big part of the work of designers and planners because how we accumulate wealth in terms of land is um is just an enormous uh part of um you know of who uh who who participates in in all these systems um and these inequities are actually making us sick so the social determinants of health are such a huge percentage of um of you know how someone uh is able to stay healthy and resilient if for lack of a better word to issues like um the pandemic that's hitting us all right now so um you know your own choices in terms of clinical care or access to clinical care is a whole debate in its own right um in terms of of who has limits but uh but certainly um the role that the built environment and and other types of you know manifested racism play it just has a huge effect on how healthy we are so um it hurts us all um and thinking finally i'll close uh with with just a you know a call towards systems change there are places like king county washington um that have been thinking about health equity and and the entire um stream looking upstream and if you look upstream in these graphics a lot of them are about the built environment and you know knowing that your zip code matters for how healthy you are there are ways in which governments have already been enacting these changes and we can be a part of that work um it's now long-standing um and this is a bad version of this slide but there's the iceberg metaphor is commonly used these days and so i would just leave us and i'm going to pass the baton to anna next but i would just leave us with with a thought about looking at um the you know not only the patterns the disproportionate impacts but also um the systems that uh cause these patterns um to uh to be maintained in the built world um and i will pass the baton hi everyone my name is anna i really appreciated hearing um barbara's presentation which um i think in what i'm going to uh the stories i'm going to share i think you'll see a lot of those big picture concepts you know manifested very much on the ground in flint which is where i've spent a lot of time thinking and um learning and being just generally obsessed um okay so i'm gonna share my screen real quick uh [Music] there we go um okay so so flint michigan um just to give a little bit of a macro perspective we're we're we're in the midst of the great lakes we're in the mix of some of the most abundant resources of water on the face of the planet there's more than one-fifth of all the fresh water that you'll find on earth is in these five great lakes and inland um you're never more than six miles from a natural source of water it is our abundance it is our blessing it is our beauty you can see little annal over there falling in love with it at a very young age it's a very crucial part of our lives and yet we a great lake city um just 70 miles from the shores of lake huron um 70 miles also in another direction from saginaw bay a river town has become the face of a drinking water crisis and it wasn't because of a natural disaster it certainly wasn't because of scarcity it wasn't even because of some corporations being obsessed with profits and mishandling public resources this is a man-made man a series of man-made decisions that uh put people in in peril and i think you'll see a lot of like well i'll just get to it i'll just show you so um before you go on anna i think you're in presenter mode if you could swap it over we'll see the slides more fully oh i'm sorry that's okay it happens to all of us truly is this better thank you everyone um so when uh we're talking about flint i i sometimes feel troubled when um it's only described as a city of loss you know it's lost so much people it's lost public services it's lost jobs you know flint as a birthplace of general motors has frequently um become uh sort of the face of deindustrialization and um uh words like resilient and gritty get applied to the city a lot which is true and beautiful in many ways but also when it's the only way people know about it i don't know it sometimes feels a little bit uncomfortable right like like the the one like where where where the where a kind of like fetishization of just people surviving hardships they never should have had to face in the first place so when i talk about flynn i do try to give a little bit of picture of what actually is there the people there it is the city of about 100 000 people there are four colleges there it's a county seat it is um a city where there's really lovely neighborhood cafes that are effectively hubs for community life there's a very vibrant public library there's people building playgrounds and taking care of each other every day every day and it's um it's a place that deserves to have a future it's also the place where this very infamous um uh press conference happened some years ago where the where the city was uh when the city was switching its drinking water source now it had been getting water from um lake huron for more than 50 years through detroit's water department the city was at the time of the switch was under emergency management which meant a state-appointed administrator had been sent to the city to have the full political powers it was considered a city that was like in such dire straits that they needed this like outsider to come in and have full authority over all decisions made so the power that a mayor would have in a city council would have instead went to this emergency manager and they also had additional powers besides that no elected official has they were under a series of emergency managers for three and a half years and all of the decisions made in the course of this water switch happened in that in that context so that's really important to um remember a lot of times when people say shorthanded as flint switched its drinking water you know we can poke at that a little bit like did flint actually have decision making power here they did not they did not in any form and but anyway this switch was happening um and and it was celebrated in many ways there you can see in this image the the emergency manager the mayor who only had as much power as the emergency manager gave him city council members environmental quality official public servants right um and the idea is that this is going to be a good for the city because it gives them more local control of their water like their idea was like they're going to switch their drinking water source um treat it at their rebooted plant for um for a couple of years using their the the flint river and then move on to a larger new uh regional water source that was a water system that was going to open in a few years but of course things went very poorly now one of the myths of the water crisis is that the flint river itself was so polluted and toxic that it inevitably poisoned people that it's not true the flint river does have some issues with it but it is um in much better shape than it has been in uh decades past it um it's after being treated effectively as an open sewer like urban rivers all over the country um the clean water act had a tremendous effect in improving its condition as did you know a bit with some ambivalent de-industrialization in the city as well as you know a lot of people who have been working very hard in environmental restoration and remediation there so um the flint river was a more complex drinking water source to treat but it was not so polluted it was going to poison people the the key issue here was the infrastructure and what was happening or not happening at the water treatment plant so the um the the rebooted plant did not have the uh staffing or resources needed to treat the water properly um and most seriously they didn't treat it with something called corrosion control which is what you put in the plant put in the water at the plant so that when it moves through what is almost universally old and deteriorating infrastructure it helps protect the water from from from the metals that might corrode into it okay and this is this is federal law and not doing so was a violation of that um and it's especially serious because uh most many of our pipes in this country are made out of lead which is one of the world's best known neurotoxins zero amount zero amount is healthy for people is safe for human consumption none um so corrosion control doesn't entirely get rid of that problem really we need to be getting rid of our lead-based infrastructure but it does help and it didn't happen not for a short time but for a long time and every day that people weren't believed when they noticed that something was off with their water is a day that this problem was worsening so without corrosion control the pipes actually corroded right this is these are some actual pipes from flint you can see how they're literally breaking down um the when you saw images of people holding up brown or rust colored water it was literally rust it was corroded iron the lead was not visible to the human eye but was very present as was a number of other bacterial issues um and including uh one a waterborne bacteria that caused a two year outbreak of legioneers disease which is what actually killed people and this is how we end up with a great lake city a river town that learns that water is a threat that water will hurt you even kill you now to backpedal a little bit um i wanted to when i was spending some time writing about this i really wanted to put in context how a city becomes precarious like this to be in a position where any of this happens this is a picture of flint in the 1960s it had twice as many people 200 000 people is growing very very fast this is why they hooked onto the detroit's water system in the first place huge company town with just tens of thousands of gm jobs there that was drawing people from all over the world and it was also one of the most segregated cities in the united states it was uh by one measure the third most segregated and the most segregated in the north corsus is reinforced by redlining by restrictive covenants by a number of um ruthless policies at the public and private level that kept people of color restricted to two neighborhoods as the population was growing this was becoming increasingly impossible to manage as well as being immoral so began a fair housing movement in flint that was pushing back at this um and it took a lot of different forms sleeping on city hall a 5 000 person rally that was actually supported by governor george romney a republican mitt's dad and one of the early secretaries of hud um it was um something that was building out of a tradition of community organizing that flint is famous for in addition to being the birthplace of gm it's effectively the birthplace of the united auto workers um this is from these are images from the sit-down strike in the 1930s that changed the course of the 20th century these are stories that are passed down generation to generation you could see it again with a fair housing fight and you could see it in more recent years um with the water organizers who well before the nation and world was paying attention to them or anybody was taking them seriously were trying working very very hard to make themselves visible when again their local votes were completely disempowered and this is a miracle happen um it's a very long story but um flint became one of the first the first community to pass a fair housing ordinance by popular vote this was a big deal this was 1968 on the national fair housing act seemed like it wasn't going to happen for ages it didn't end up being catalyzed until the assassination of martin luther king jr similar ordinances had come up and cities like seattle and berkeley and tacoma and toledo all failed it passed in this company town of flint one of the most segregated in the country that's a big deal and something to be proud of but it was bittersweet two years later the 1970 census was the very first that marked a downturn in flint's population um a down a a a depopulation that is trend that has continued to this day so you can what we end up with is this core city that is being um increasingly hollowed out both by uh economically with jobs and um also uh in the public sector with public services and with people and you can see mostly it's white people who are leaving right um it is uh today about 54 56 african-american about 40 percent white um and also has a pretty sizable um hispanic population as well now if you go to flint today you still see these like some dense neighborhoods you can see these gorgeous old homes the signs of the auto wealth of the past but you also see the empty spaces the remains of what people left behind right and this is what brings us back to the water story um the neighborhoods like this one tend to be white neighborhoods and officially were white back in the day these ones tend to be where more people of color live and very practically very literally the water was worse in these neighborhoods than these now everybody in flint everybody in flint was a victim of this water crisis but the problems showed up sooner and more seriously in these neighborhoods because when you have vacancy the pi the water is sitting in those corroded pipes longer right so it's getting more saturated with all those contaminants um it's not moving back and forth as fast it's covering longer stretches um uh so this is why these folks who lived in these neighborhoods were more vulnerable um to um what was a a crisis that again didn't have to happen so i think i will leave it there and pass it on to taywi and uh look forward to talk about this more later with everyone thank you wow um means greetings relatives i shake each of your hands virtually um with a good heart um my name is tatewi means um my full name is actually tattooed i was named after my paternal grandmother and um it means in the lakota language it means the woman that stands with the four directions um yes it's my entire first name so imagine having to fill out ect bubble sheets and all of those kinds of things it was a it was a lot it was a lot to learn but it is really an honor to be here with all of you and to share this space with this really esteemed panel i learned a lot already and i just wanted you both to keep going um i can just be an observer by all means but um i'm really proud to um bring an indigenous voice and perspective to this conversation and appreciate the opportunity to do so so often as indigenous people um we're invisible to the the broader communities across this country um you know and even in thinking about in both of the presentations of course appreciate all of the information but and all of the data that was presented indigenous communities were left out indigenous representation is is not included in a lot of those spaces um and you know and talking about flint's history i was thinking where were the indigenous people in that um in that process um you know who was advocating for them and with them and so i just really appreciate the opportunity to bring visibility to our communities and some of the strategies that we have found effective in um in resilience and regeneration um so as mentioned in the introduction i am the executive director um for thunder valley community development corporation i'm going to share a piece of our home and and our community with you today um we're a nonprofit organization that began in 2007 so we're just over um 13 years old and definitely feeling the growing pains of the of a teenager or adolescent we take a whole community approach through eight different initiatives um and it's it's really important that um you know i speak about the work um from a liberated point of view there was a lot of conversation earlier around self-determination and for indian country for indigenous communities that it has a legal connotation as well um you know self-determination is defined in many federal laws and policies that pertain to indian countries specifically so there's an indian self-determination and education act that is particular to tribal nations in this country and sovereignty sovereignty is often associated with indigenous communities and one one pushback that we have you know from our perspective is sovereignty self-determination liberation those aren't things that are housed within institutions or within governments they they first start with the self self sovereignty self liberation is the beginning of that ripple effect it's the beginning of the movement that we are trying to create and the very first step of liberation you know liberation is our vision at thunder valley cdc um is healing and so what is tied to this work is at the foundation healing and all of our work is really rooted in our language our lakota language our spirituality and our life ways we really try to stay away from the word culture in the lakota language we don't have a word for culture that doesn't that doesn't mean anything um the way that we say is which is a life way a way of life i was just on a webinar presentation yesterday and the title of the presentation was practicing culture and that is something that is also foreign to us because it's not something you practice it's not something you think about after the fact or add on um or check it off a list it's a way of life it's a way of being and it's a way of thinking and so on this liberation journey that we have in our community is really about changing mindsets um you know our people are have been in such a state of persistent poverty systemic poverty that um it's it's become survival um you know on this topic of resilience for all we are tired of living in a state of perpetual resilience and survival it is time for our communities to thrive it is time for our communities to regenerate so one component of our work at thunder valley is the actual construction of a regenerative community development and we have 34 acres a feast simple land within the reservation boundaries on the pine ridge indian reservation and that is an important distinction as well because for many of you that may not know indian country at any given time there are three jurisdictions that apply to indian country the tribal jurisdiction state in given times and then federal federal jurisdiction so tribes in the federal system have concurrent jurisdiction that's civil and criminal um in a lot of instances and so um you know with us having fee simple land it's not in tribal trust um so there are state tax implications that result for our community right so all of these things are important considerations when you're building or designing and developing in indian country there are tremendous amount of infrastructure issues so i can appreciate you know the struggle and the fight um in flint around those around those issues and so you know at thunder valley on our 34 acres it really is not building from the ground up but from below ground up you know and access to federal resources is limited obviously it decreases year after year and um a lot of the work at thunder valley is really around shifting narratives about how our communities are presented how we're portrayed and how we are discussed and a lot of it is educating funders funders and partners and allies to our communities and so one specific example when we were applying for the usda rural development loan for the infrastructure development they refused to include road paving as a part of our loan and grant package because they said this is the reservation there are dirt roads everywhere why would you need to pave right and so it's just the level of um uneducation miseducation or ignorance around indigenous communities is really profound um it's inherent in a lot of the federal systems and programs i mean the very nature of having a bureau of indian affairs a federal office to manage the affairs of indians is completely racist and insulting you know and when you grow up in this country and you experience all those things and you learn about things in that way whether implicitly or explicitly you develop a bias against indigenous communities and that notion that indigenous communities and people are inherently incompetent right and so the work that we do at thunder valley is constantly pushing back against those negative narratives those deficit narratives about our communities um you know we we pretty much wrote the book on resilience how to how to survive how to bring back um renewal after a crisis after trauma and um like i mentioned we oh and the primary mechanism and the way that we've done that is through our spirituality the fact that we are able to hold tight to our teachings and our language and our spirituality over hundreds of years of colonization is the is the reason why we are still here today is the reason why the resilience is strong it's genetic for us in our communities but like i mentioned in the beginning we're tired of living in that state we want regeneration we want to renewal we want to rebirth and red redefine who we are in today's times as lakota people as indigenous people so this is just a rendering of how our 34 acres will take shape i mean we've already began development um we started with 21 single-family homes um we are a net zero ready community so incorporating sustainable building practices and materials in all of the buildings um this is an aerial view of current progress so the 21 single family homes a 12 unit apartment building which is mixed income and a community center and bunk house we have a two and a half acre demonstration farm we have over 500 chickens so food sovereignty is is a huge component to our liberation journey um and you can see the design of the 21 single family homes here there are seven homes in each circle in each tiosh bayes so te osprey in our language means family or extended family so in each family circle there are seven homes and that's modeled off of the ochatisakowi um who is the original inhabitants of this land base here so mean seven council fires there were seven bands within the ochetishakka way the lakota were one of them and um this is how the traditional encampments were set up with seven bands in a circle facing the east to greet the sun as it rose and so incorporating these traditional components into our design implant is really important to us um even in the design of our community center with the the roof shape um to represent eagles um eagle is a very sacred animal to us as it carries prayers to the to the creator um you know there's stone around the base of many of our buildings to reflect the traditional home structures as tipis with the wood extending to the top and so um you know we're blessed to have um design designers and planners on staff many of them non-indigenous but have really done a lot of work at cultural competency and acculturation to lakota values and value systems um you know and when we work with contractors when we work with um those that are off reservation and non-indigenous companies engineering firms so on and so forth when we're doing all of this work we really hold tight to our expectations of what does cultural competency mean in our community so one example is we're currently building a playground that is based on our creation story and one of our fundamental stories as lakota people um in the black hills we have seven sacred sites that's our our spiritual homeland um and so every play structure on the playground represents one of those sacred sites so that while children and family are there they are also learning and remembering who we are as local to people um but the first drawings the first renderings of that playground we asked them to incorporate culture lakota culture and what they came back was with was a medicine wheel and a star pattern that in in all the years 30 plus years of working in indian country in south dakota with nine tribal nations in the state their extent of cultural competency was you know stereotypical images you see associated with indian country a medicine wheel and a star pattern um so of course that was not acceptable uh we gave them here are some books educate yourself educate yourself about lakota people especially if you're living here in our homelands and bring us back something better and so it took several um iterations of that process to finally get to the point where they understood uh what we wanted what we expected and the finished product is something we're really really proud of because it's a true reflection of who we are and so i think that's also important when you're working in you know marginalized communities communities of color is they know their we know our communities best right we are tired of having outside ideals and value systems and structures imposed upon us because what we know as indigenous people is that mindset and that approach does not work for us it is not something that is conducive to liberation right these solutions and these projects in our communities have to come and be community driven so community engagement is really important to us as an org because we ourselves are no exception to that we have to make sure that um we are truly reflecting the needs of our community right and not take that really um patriarchal approach to development and design that oh we know best so we'll do this for the community but really involving meaningful community engagement in this entire process um so um like i said we have a whole community approach um eight different initiatives net zero ready community we are currently in the process of a feasibility study for um renewable energies for the remainder of the development to determine how we can um ensure that we make our relationship right with mother earth with the environment you know i spoke a little bit about the healing and the importance of that in this liberation journey and healing our relationship with mother earth is a fundamental component to that you know our our word for um the earth mother is um or grandmother earth um and when you think about it in that way when you think about the earth in those terms as a relative it changes your whole interaction with with the earth right um one of our values as an org as a people is being a good relative so um you know in a lot of our work we just constantly questioning ourselves is are we being a good relative to our people in the work that we're doing in in the services and the programs that we provide um you know these are some of our young people that are in our lakota language initiative we have a total immersion montessori child care center where we're trying to create first generation lakota language speakers to preserve that aspect of who we are um so it's it's like i said it's an honor to be here to share our work at thunder valley cdc um and to share a bit of our home so pmia thank you all so much that was absolutely fantastic um i want to remind everyone who's listening that there is a q a button at the bottom of your screen that you can offer questions to this group um but i wanted to start off with a question builds a little bit off of tateawi with what you were just describing about you know the participation of designers and and thinking about most of the people who may be listening to this webinar um our work in the design field in planning or architecture or engineering or development itself and and i wanted to ask the group about this connection between design and community wealth and you know i know in barbara's work she's she's worked on the connection between green infrastructure and and community wealth and that there's an economic value to green space and healthy environments and there's also a public health ramification of of green infrastructure and and i thought listening to anna you know there's a connection between public services and community wealth and and tate you're you're talking about sovereignty and dignity and and self-determination and that the connection the the opportunity for community wealth that is you know intertangled in in those sorts of of basic human needs and i was wondering if you all i wanted to sort of present this to the group that if there was a reflection for the sort of of participants for the sort of listeners that the audience of this webinar might be that they're in the design field and they they have some opportunity to contribute to growing community wealth what each of you might you know recommend based on your work based on your your experiences and your background and and you know your your focus is i wanted to offer that up as a first question um i just wanted to quickly respond to that um i know i've done talking for a long time and so i want to hear the space but um i think my first question is what is the definition of community well and so the challenge i think for each of us and that do this work is to let the community decide what wealth means to them and it's not always in the context of the colonizer's language right and so a lot of the work that we do at thunder valley is pushing back against those um the words that they use you know i heard power used a lot today again we don't have a word for power for for us it's all about balance right because anytime you have power it's a struggle because somebody has it and somebody doesn't somebody wants it somebody takes it back when you strive for a balance everybody and everything has a place right we aren't at the top of the the totem pole the type of top of the hierarchy we have to find our place and bring that to balance and so i think in building community wealth like for us that will look very different than um even other tribal nations than the dna nation in new mexico and arizona wealth to us means very different things you know through our housing and home ownership initiative where it does a lot of community education those are a part of the conversations and making it relevant and resonate with our community because building a savings of 10 of your income every year to help towards a down payment for a home is not going to be a priority when it comes to summer time and we have all of our ceremonies because one of the greatest values that we have as local people is generosity you give away the leaders of our communities were the ones that were poorest in the colonizers terms because you gave everything away to the people for the benefit of the people and so i think it's so important to have those clear definitions and not impose them on the communities that you work with that's a pretty incredible answer so it's hard to add anything it feels like it stands alone um i will say that um to use the biloxi example um or no actually i'll use the portland example just to bring in a different part of the country but um they so there's a living kohli project that is actually about using green infrastructure as a anti-poverty anti-displacement tool um and that is about making sure that the community has development rights on their parks um but also then um opportunities to learn and benefit financially from um the development of those parks and um and so just really thinking through uh how we seek balance um and and also self-determination in places where maybe the urban stressors are um some of them are actually about uh being pushed out of your home if you're not accruing enough wealth to you know to pay your uh rising tax bill and all those sorts of things i'd finally just add to that um i feel like we're coming we're in a year where every community has had to reckon more literally than um some have ever before with what is essential right what are essential services and it turns out to be um the stuff of life right it's water it's food it's shelter it's health it's safety these are these are some of the essential services that if nothing else a community needs to provide for each other right and rely on um you know in a give-and-take relationship so um i just want to put that out there as something that might be some useful context for some of the what the others are saying too that's great um it leads me well you know barbara you brought up urban stressors and and i'm sort of thinking about that that terminology and and wondering if each of you might want to sort of extrapolate that on that in terms of what it means for your own work um you know the much like community wealth and much like this topic of language and what certain words mean and and how the how what implications they have for your work uh thinking of how each of you are are coming to this webinar from very different say professional practices um but but the term urban stressor may have very different implications in terms of what you're looking at in terms of what you're studying in terms of what you're uh responding to or supporting so i'd like to offer that up as well i can be brief since i brought the term up um since my fault um but the for me the reason i stay with that vague term is because i'm trying to make connections between the things that happen across a lot of different types of places right even though the stressors might be really different they have some shared themes and honestly i love um the way that tate we spoke about about being a good relative um because in many senses it's it's related we've um at least you know in the communities i've come from we don't think about it as poetically but certainly when you look across the you know the united states at what we when we do this well it's because there are redundancies in terms of our social ties like because we're strong i'm using the word redundant because it's like ecological terms but it's the same um you know we we have uh it's funny because we call it redundancies and weak ties um but actually that's not what they are right it's like it's the connections between um between people between you know uh animals and um and that seems to be what keeps you um strong and able to heal which i agree is a critical piece um and despite whatever stressor is coming away you're talking about like coming from different vantage points which i think is one of the interesting things that i'm enjoying hearing from other people um today i i think just as a writer and as a citizen right you know i live in communities that i write about i think i've been thinking just a lot about um just the potency of where the built environment and the natural environment meet um and as a writer i've spent um i write about many things but i've come you know over the years i came to see myself as somebody who wrote like mostly about cities about especially disinvested cities especially cities that um where uh concentrated poverty and austerity are like making so literal these crucial questions of what the common good is and what it means and what's at stake and all that and one thing that i kind of came to envelop me over the last few years especially while um focusing so much on flint's story was like how being a city writer isn't this opposite of being as being an environmental writer you know how it's how we're writing how it's the same thing right and um and just and and and also how like our built environment and the natural environment like make so literal like we're never working from a blank slate ever you know like the the weight of history is is is made manifest in our landscape and so whatever choices we're making whether people are practitioners and in this sort of urbanist world or um chroniclers of it um or just people just citizens in it um i i think like all our choices like come in that context and i think having some intentionality with that is um um certainly important but also you know is more beautiful and joyful and you know like just it it gives a sense of connection even in places that i think have um been made to feel very alienated well and hannah oh sorry tattooing please go ahead yes i would love for you guys um when i think about that term or condom of urban stress stressors i just think about um you know the need for us to to think about our connectedness to one another what is done in one place whether it's urban or or otherwise always has an impact on those of us that are in rural areas um and especially indigenous communities you know the demand for fossil fuel and other extractive resources um definitely harms indigenous communities and exploits the resources that we have um in our land bases and so you know pipeline struggles that you know make the news from time to time but those are everyday realities for many indigenous communities um because of the pervasive state of poverty you know those are really difficult questions for many indigenous communities and people to answer for themselves on the choice between employment or you know protecting the environment and so you know those are choices we shouldn't have to make um and so it's it's really about that need for you know that broader education and willingness to see each other as connected in these spaces so that marginalized and indigenous communities don't bear the brunt of some of these decisions well that was perfect because it ties up to something anna had just said that i had seen a thread between all of your comments which is i think you know sometimes we're maybe a little bit a little bit cliche in describing storytelling and the importance of storytelling as you know sort of a tokenizing approach to personalization and and um and uh you know the i think anna it was you that described you know our fetishizing of the struggle as a as a nation of this this focus on you know that the struggle is some you know unique aspect of of what makes us who we are and and and yet i think the personalization is actually the important part we what you were just describing about the the understanding of the connectivity between the urban and the rural between communities that are quite different um in in built environment and how they interact with each other and their decisions impact each other and i wonder if um each of you might have some thoughts some deeper thoughts about that that inner connectivity and and the role of understanding each other in in better being able to to to serve that inner connectivity i have a thought on that just off off the bat um there's uh the writer chimamanda ngozi adichie talks about the danger of a single story um she's a lovely ted talk about it actually if people want to see it and i think that's kind of a key issue here it's not that stories of struggle are inherently bad or wrong you know or untrue it the problem is when it's the only story we're telling and we're telling it over and over and over and over and over again to the point where um it is like people it's just like almost like a fill in the blank thing um and i think that um so i think uh you know the way to counter that tenancy is um is of course like a multiplicity of stories um and that includes you know voices from and within the community um and uh the community that's being chronicled and so by outsiders so often but also just like just like just a wider breadth and range you know i mean like i mean i i like do people like if people are thinking about like the single story of flint like you already know it um but like do people also know about like you know these other forms of community life that are part of people's like day to day um or do they know like these like historic stories do they know these like funny stories do they know that you know like the full range of the human experience like needs some room to breathe in these stories so both as storytellers and and and consumers of story i think we have some responsibility to make sure that we're not you know falling into the um like slipping into like the single story um which even when it heroizes you know folks for surviving or whatever can still be quite dangerous and and effectively erasing um i'll just add briefly that um i think today we brought in the kind of uh need to educate people on moving from a deficit based mindset and um i feel like that's inherent in your comments anna is this this notion of reduction of flattening um of our communities and it's just a really easy thing to do even i study social movements and there are so many movements where you like if you tell the story of the civil rights movement it's a story about martin luther king and like he was an incredibly you know dr martin luther king was incredibly important a visionary human being but he was part of a constellation of groups that you know evolved over time and right and um so i think uh i just i think that focusing not only on reductive stories that are positive or negative but also making sure that we're never falling into a deficit space trap which our profession is just really good at like i use the language of vulnerability in the resilience for all and i um i will i have said many times and will continue to say i really wish i hadn't done that because i was just lazy of me like we shouldn't be talking about communities as vulnerable because that is a deficit-based mindset and we just we should be better than that like there's no need to to put people in and those sorts of flattening boxes i would absolutely agree with both of the comments that um it makes us one-dimensional beings and when you see people or you only hear about people in a one-dimensional way it's easy to dehumanize um you know and that's and that's what we see a lot of times in our communities is that dehumanization continues and continues um and so it's it is um you know in everyone's responsibility to tell a whole story from many different perspectives and to educate yourself about the whole story if it's not immediately available right the things we hear in the media they tend to do that one-dimensional approach and so you know the challenge really for each of us is to take those extra steps to learn about the whole person the whole community thank you all so much i think that's a sort of a a really poignant comment to to end this on and really speaks to you know what i was so grateful about this collection of women speaking today and i knew you all would would bring that sort of diverse and and and uh personal and yet holistic uh approach to what we were discussing to resiliency and and so i'm very grateful to you all today thank you very much um i want to remind everyone listening uh that we have three webinars coming up um as you can see here on the screen the first is welcoming cities uh that's going to be coming up on wednesday november 4th and um it's going to be a discussion on planning for in-migration and a welcoming way to under under unique and ever-changing circumstances to do so uh quite a big topic for us these days um the the next will be coming on tuesday november 10th and andres dwani will be speaking um a bit about the cnu charter and we'll have more details about that soon and the third on the docket is tuesday november 17th entitled architecture in the city this is a new um series that we're going to be hosting through the on the park bench webinar and it's an author's forum on urbanism uh this will be with author michael dennis and interviewer dan solomon so the link at the bottom of the screen as you can see is your uh opportunity to to check those out we always get the webinars up within 24 hours after they've completed so if you would like to uh listen to this again uh i certainly will because uh some of the comments and and lines and some of the slides were just fantastic so i'm gonna have to go back um you can do so on our website we also want to hear more feedback from y'all about what you would like to see on the park bench and so there's a link here on the screen the tiny url is backslash otpb feedback so if you would like to add your thoughts about what you'd like to see or hear in future sessions please let us know and again i want to thank everyone for joining today i want to thank you i want to thank jocelyn and dan who and and of course lynn richards who spoke about our membership drive and again if you uh would like to become a member need to renew your membership uh or in any way i want to check in with scott he's a pretty good guy um i would recommend giving him a call the number there is 973-714-7204 you can do this online at members.cnu.org as well uh so again thank you all uh tate we means thank you anna clark thank you barbara brown wilson thank you it was a pleasure to get to do this today and and listen to y'all um have a wonderful discussion and we'll see everyone at the next webinar thanks so much