The Community Sustainability Plan moves on

After two consecutive nights of three hour-long sessions under the fluorescent lights of the Jasper Activity Centre, even Ron Hooper, chair of the Jasper Community Sustainability Plan (JCSP) Working Group, admits that goal setting and brainstorming is “hard work, demanding and requires a lot of thought.”

But, much to the credit of the facilitators, come the end of the second session on Feb. 12, the 50-or-so Jasperites that had turned out to the workshops seemed high-spirited, awake and looking forward to the event in March, when they get to turn their dreams and aspirations into reality by working out how Jasper will reach its goals.

Everyone in attendance had the opportunity to read the background papers, which were four to eight pages long, on each of the eight themes of land use; tourism and local economic development; natural environment; culture, recreation, health and well-being; housing; water, energy, waste and emergency management; transportation; and governance. Elisa Campbell of Elisa Campbell Consulting, called these “lenses” to look at the community through. Four themes were addressed each night. 

The reason for the workshops was to set goals that “un-bundle the broader vision and principles” of the JCSP, Campbell said. She and the facilitators pointed out these sessions were not about “how you’re going to get there” but instead the “ultimate condition desired.”

Each of the eight themes came with a set of example goals to help lead discussion and suggest wording. According to Campbell, the goals had “come from Jasper itself ... come from [people] that have participated thus far ... to get you under way with discussion.”

First Pecha Kucha, now Dotmocracy

Each night participants were put into four groups that rotated around the room visiting the four categories being discussed. At each category  participants talked for 20 minutes to establish goals for Jasper. 

While some participants seemed confused by the idea of a goal and how to generate one, the facilitators generally helped people to work back from their desired action to the goal and, if all else failed, would put the action on the board so that it could be worked into a goal later on.

“One of the things with planning is that it’s a human tendency to jump to solutions,” Hooper explained. “People really want to sink their teeth into substantive matters that are important to them. The fact people go to actions isn’t that problematic because from the action you can relay back to the underlying goal.”

Participants had more to say about some topics, with about twice as many goals produced for housing and tourism, for example. When the 20 minutes were up, participants used dot stickers to rate the importance of the generated goals. 

Where to next?

At the end of each session it was clear there were mixed opinions on many of the themes. It’s up to the consultancy agency to start making sense of them, according to Hooper.

“What they will do is take the goals that we have written down and the number of votes that people put and start amalgamating them. What we’re getting is a lot of goals that could be subsets of one another so they could be collapsed or modified with a couple of wording changes,” he said.

Now that the goals of the community are known, the consultants and professional planners will work on indicators and measurements of each goal. 

“A goal is a future success or direction and the indicator is how to measure whether you’ve achieved it or not,” Hooper said. “It’s quite a technical process of identifying what are the measures and targets. For instance, if a goal is ‘to improve water quality’ an indicator could be the amount of phosphorus or specific elements that come into a waste water treatment plant.”

The consultancy group wont be working alone, Hooper said, as it will contact people within the Jasper community that have a specific interest in each goal. 

He stressed the importance of the indicators noting that they make everybody more accountable because “if you can’t measure it then it’s not going to get done.”

For all the cynics out there

With a realistic view about the task set before him, Hooper acknowledges that there has been cynicism about the community consultation. “As a Working Group we’ve recognised that there will be cynicism because of [previous] experiences where they were less than satisfactory... [we] understand the basis for cynicism, it’s why we try to have a different feel to this process and try different mechanisms.”

For that reason Hooper and his team have adopted any new suggestions that have come to light through out the JCSP consultation process. “We really tried to encourage. I think all of us in the Working Group spent a lot of time talking to people in the streets trying to work out what’s working and what isn’t and we were fully aware that some things wouldn’t work ... We’re not afraid to try things, but we need the feedback from residents.”

According to Hooper some of the Working Group members have spent over 180 hours working on the plan. “I personally would not be wasting my time working on this if I believed it was a cynical process,” he said.

The next JCSP workshops will be held March 25 and 26.