In the spring semester of 2019, I conducted an internship with the City of Austin’s Community Engagement Division of the Communications and Public Information Office. The following report will serve to describe the organization and practice in this division, introduce engagement projects which I participated in, and how critically integral an anthropological perspective and approach is to bridging the divide between the community and The City government. The Community Engagement team works to facilitate or otherwise use engagement platforms which are meaningful, collaborative, relevant and accessible; through a holistic, community-informed decision-making process, the engagement team works to incorporate the traditionally disenfranchised and underserved community into the greater conversation regarding The City and its practices.
At the heart of the Community Engagement Division’s function lies two questions: “why don’t community members engage with local government?”, as well as, “how may City Government best engage community members who are historically disenfranchised or who do not traditionally engage in governmental practice?”. In consideration of these complex issues each party faces in exchanges between one another, the Community Engagement Team operates by several standards of practice in its mission to better include the community with their government: the first and foremost standard is to make clear the information and ensure there are ample ways in which the community is able to engage in decision-making processes. Within this standard, equity and respect, accessibility, and inclusivity inform how information, meetings, agendas, or guidelines can be made to be consistent and predictable. The City of Austin, as a steward of resources, uses the Community Engagement Team’s anthropologically-informed perspectives to better balance its commitment to provide accessible opportunities for engagement, as well as to equitably deliver City services and to use City resources responsibility, and, equitably.
In terms of the divisions organization and to address the discrepancies between the community member and the governmental body, the Community Engagement Division is comprised of four members who work as consultants, with one member of the division specializing in language accessibility services. I worked most closely with the two leading members who manage the division and serve the division’s main consultant. The office of the Community Engagement itself was situated in East Austin, a traditionally disenfranchised part of Austin where people of color have been historically relegated in terms of policy, representation, and access to City services. In the East Side Office, the Community Engagement Division shared its office space with the Equity Office of The City of Austin, which allowed for an office atmosphere where a community of practice regarding equality and accessibility was able to be experienced and shared. The location of the office as well as its suitemates allowed for a distinct insight into how The City works for its traditionally underserved through these governmental bodies. Often the manager and primary consultant of the Community Engagement Division would spend significant time at Austin City Hall in the Communications and Public Information Office (CPIO) as well as with City of Austin leaders to work on various engagement issues, projects, and to oversee meetings between staff and the community.
Outside of the CPIO office at City Hall and the Community Engagement office, the manager and primary consultant would attend committee meetings, town hall meetings, and other small-scale and semi-informal gatherings where The City disseminated information to the community regarding various initiatives, policy changes, as well as to discuss development and zoning topics. The Community Engagement Team could be found implementing their skills sets at various platforms and locations, where they would inform, for example, the best organization strategies for a city staff and community meeting at a middle school; where ever engagement strategies were necessary for a successful exchange, the Community Engagement Team could be found — virtually and physically.
Community Engagement Team Member:
Coordinating Logistics and Facing the Divide
As an interning member of the Community Engagement Team, I was encouraged to participate in my areas of interest, and at my own desired capacity: I could choose between a few different engagement opportunities, wherein I would lead the coordination of logistics on both technological and in-person platforms. In these chosen areas, I was able to take on as much or a little responsibility as I desired. Given my personal background in journalism and my interests in bridging the knowledge economy, or in other words, how to make information accessible, understandable, and accurate, I chose to take on coordinating a semi-formal networking and engagement event for journalists who report on local issues most pertaining to people of color or otherwise report on underserved areas of Austin. For this event, called the Community Journalists’ Conference, I had various obligations which required a varied skill set; as the coordinator of the event, as per my manager’s advice and guidance, I selected a theme of the event which the Community Engagement Team found to be most pertinent in the interests of disseminating important information from The City to the community: Safety Outcomes and Emergency Operations.
I edited a previous database of community journalists and updated it by calling journalists to ask for feedback on previous years’ conferences as well as to inquire what they might light to discuss at this year’s conference. Editing this database of journalists local to Austin was done over the course of my internship, as the industry suggests a high turnover rate, where positions change and journalists may move to different publications. For this event, I was to coordinate the entirety of the logistics, from securing a location of the event, to selecting City staff members for panel and speaker positions, as well as selecting panel discussion topics and authoring questions for discussion.
It was requested that I take and provide notes on a few meetings between City staff as well as during community-hosted Town Hall Meetings regarding Parks development project in Austin’s Holly Shores neighborhood. In these meetings, I was to examine the exchanges at a discourse level, as well as at a locational level, to inform my team’s strategic approach to the power dynamics in informational meetings. In every aspect of a meeting, be it between city staff or between staff and community members, hierarchy is articulated through the location, the language used, as well as the positioning of meeting members in that particular space. In one meeting in particular wherein three particular ordinances disproportionately affecting people experiencing homelessness were discussed among my team and various city leaders, I took notes on the nuances of the dialogue exchanged between city staff. In this particular instance, a was able to observe the discrepancies as well as the commonalities around the language of homelessness, observing an awareness of all meeting members the difficulty and caution experienced in discussing such complicated issues. What my team brought most to this instance was to make visible that nuances of how something such as fear is not only differentially experienced but articulated: fear is not experienced on either side, it is instead a complex emotion of which the meaning contains multitudes; the address the nuances of experiential fear as it pertains to those experiencing homelessness in this particular meeting was greatly informed by the Community Engagement Team’s experiences and their holistic thinking, as well as their suggesting that in order to navigate the discomfort of addressing the complexities of homelessness, a common language is necessary.
Part of my responsibility was to draft various correspondence between my team and various City departments regarding the coordination of the Community Journalists’ Conference. In these communications I was able to engage in meaningful transactions with Austin’s governmental leaders regarding the City’s Safety Outcome goals as part of its new Strategic Direction. Throughout my internship, I was able to gain important insight into just how many moving parts there are in the governmental organism — sometimes even more than I could keep up with. Having access to the language around governmental practice, understanding better its various roles and actors gave me critical insight into how necessary the Community Engagement Division is: the breadth of government reach can be disorienting, let alone navigating its services as well as knowing its points of access. Communicating with various City staff members clued me into the organization of the City and its department significantly. Still not fully in familiarity with all of Austin’s governmental organization, to my benefit, I was also to draft questions for the Community Journalists’ Conference (discussed further below) to engage various City leaders as panelists in critical discussion of how the City not only engages in practice informed by its Safety Outcomes, but also how it works to be visible and accountable to the community. For example, one drafted question, “How might City of Austin Departments develop consistent, ongoing training to develop knowledge and skills across all City departments and partner agencies for emergency preparedness, response and recovery?” would serve to inform journalists and thus the community how it works to maintain a critical self-awareness in the wake of Austin’s expansions. I also sought to allow for City leaders to articulate their engagement efforts with the community through these panels, allowing for a greater transparency, as well to address the notion that City government doesn’t care or think about its citizens: it is by this initiative that the City is holding itself and its practices accountable, ensuring their compliance and fair administration, so allowing community members to hear these strategies first hand will directly narrow the divide.
The Community Journalists’ Conference:
Sometimes Projects Take Months, and Sometimes They Fail
Coordinating the logistics of the Community Journalists’ Conference was a main focus of my internship. In my team we discussed that through inviting active and local journalists who use their various media platforms to share pertinent information with the community at large, it was hoped that this conference would provide a meaningful opportunity share in the responsibility of disseminating of information from The City to the community. Through this conference, it was to be discussed the Safety Outcomes Initiatives of Austin’s Strategic Direction 2023, an initiative which seeks to amend and address the disparities and inequalities in Austin, hoping to tackle the common notion that the City of Austin is not fully managing critical issues which will ultimately determine its future. Part of this four-to-five year plan is to address safety outcomes, where issues of population growth, racial inequalities, traffic congestion and climate change effects are further complicating and making difficult to foster trust between public safety services and the community, as well as identifying the greater impacts of these challenges on emergency responses. The City’s strategies are ambitious and the desired outcomes are certainly unobtainable without compliance from the community, accountability from the city, and further, without a shared sense of responsibility in emergency situations.
To select appropriate city staff and leaders to the event, I explored the various departments in The City of Austin, such as Austin Public Health, the Austin Police Department, and the Watershed Protection Department. Overall, I selected various management or leaders from Austin 311, Police Oversight, The Austin Public Library, Austin Energy, Emergency Medical Services, and in considering non-governmental organizations which work in first response and share in the responsibility of emergency management, from the American Red Cross. Each leader selected would be able to contribute to a productive and highly informative dialogue regarding the Safety Outcomes of Austin’s Strategic Direction 2023. Additionally, my team and I invited Austin’s City Manager, members from the Communications and Public Information Office, and our own language accessibility consultant to discuss these initiatives. Each panelist was selected because of their leadership position and their ability to engage in a cooperative and pertinent dialogue to best inform how The City operates in circumstances in emergency: who does what, what exactly an emergency activation is, and how the city works to close information gaps.
For this conference, I invited community journalists from the assembled database, as well as various City leaders and officials to network and share a dialogue at a typically inaccessible space: The Homeland Security and Emergency Management Center. This highly secure location is where The City operates from in emergency operations and during emergency activation, such as in cases of natural disasters, or such as in recent memory, water boil notices. This space is not typically accessible by a person outside of emergency response or systems management, so allowing for community journalists to engage in meaningful dialogue as well as to listen to city leaders discuss how they manage these desired outcomes and how they operate would have been invaluable.
I used various platforms to invite and engage community journalists to the event, such as GivePulse, an online engagement tool where events can be created and people may register for them and also see all other registered attendees such as panelists and speakers, as well as invited participants via email and phone call. Throughout the engagement process a low level of interest was expressed by community journalists. In recognizing this, my team referred to its experiential knowledge: throughout planning the event, we thought reflexively and sought to engage newer members of the journalism community who used alternative mediums for journalism, such as bloggers, Facebook news groups, and other media platforms who might only report in non-English languages.
Ultimately, the Community Journalists’ Conference was cancelled due to low interest by community journalists. However, in this I find an endlessly valuable lesson: sometimes projects, such as the conference, which seek to engage the community, fail; this experience exemplifies what can happen, though this failure was seen without great detriment — financially or otherwise — to an initiative or other governmental project, where instead a potentially critical platform to connect city staff and Austin community members was simply missed out on. This conference not coming to fruition also allowed for a critical self-reflection in my team, an essential aspect of engagement practice: as a team, we considered perhaps that our methods of outreach were not as well received as previous ones. Perhaps, also, interest in the conference as an organizational body was lost, and its usefulness as a networking opportunity among journalists and to connect them to city staff had been lived, leaving room for a new, more effectual platform to take its place. In light of the cancellation, my team and I discussed a networking opportunity in place the Community Journalists’ Conference, this time more informal, perhaps in a more well known space. My team and I also discussed that perhaps it was the topic, Safety Outcomes and Emergency Operations, where perhaps interest had been lost.
Instead of the Community Engagement Division deciding on the topic or theme for discussion as this proposed, more informal gathering, I implemented a survey tool where invited guests were able to freely share what they want to discuss, with such phrasing as: “What opportunities would you most benefit from in order to better connect with the City of Austin?”. Informing future conferences, networking opportunities, or otherwise, can be made most successful by using feedback and sharing ideas across that divide which is so often identified; both governmental bodies and the community share a responsibility in making exchanges successful, meaningful, as well as ensuring reciprocity for all stakeholders.
Such an experience points to why the questions, “why don’t community members engage with local government?”, as well as, “how may City Government best engage community members who are historically disenfranchised or who do not traditionally engage in governmental practice?” are so critical to consider and reexamine; as proposed opportunities which would not obviously benefit community members by participating, still necesitate stakeholder participance, the Community Engagement Team must come up with strategies to garner and promote invested stakeholder interest.
Concepts: In City Government, Everything is Language
Anthropological concepts, approaches and perspectives were abound: not one aspect of my work and the Community Engagement Division’s work was not informed by anthropological practice. One critical concept which was most relevant and discussed at length was mobility justice. This framework informed critical approaches in accessibility of information, how information is disseminated, as well as how engagement does or does not happen at micro, meso and macro scales in the public sphere. Mobility justice framework informs a governmental practice which accounts for the diverse vulnerabilities that individuals carry with them through the public sphere, where “embodied differences in class, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual identity and physical ability influence accessibility and interact with the mobility regimes and control systems that reproduce uneven mobilities” (Sheller, 2018).
It is not just that we are all sharing a common space equally, as everyone carries with them varying vulnerabilities with different embodiments in these spaces; one vulnerability, though perhaps similar, does not equal another. Notably, these spaces are often carved and positioned by the unfavorable memories of history, where traumas arising from the historical relegation and disenfranchisement of Austin’s people of color are most acute and are lived in the every day of many community members. Fully acknowledging all manners in which one may experience a public space not traditionally designed for that individual, the Community Engagement Team looks at every aspect of embodied practices among all members of interaction, including themselves. The Team identifies that positioning and planning of a meeting, for example, between city staff and community members is always critical to the success of the meeting for all stakeholders: from the positioning of the hosts of the meeting, to the size of the chairs (for example, having a meeting at a middle school, one must consider that the seating is appropriate for adults), as well as they way each staff member self-presents. Everything is language: location, the way one wears their hair, common vocabulary instead of formal governmental address — all aspects of a meeting communicate relationships of power, such as who has a seat at the proverbial table, and whether or not they are able to or feel comfortable participating at that table — all of which make or break a successful and meaningful exchange.
The Community Engagement Team most significantly informs its platforms and those who consult with the team through the acknowledgement of how mobilities, or one’s means of moving through space and time, “are uneven, differential, and unequal, and come together through these combined lived experiences that are both physical and meaningful” (Sheller, 2018). Through this informed approach, one implemented anthropological framework of many, the Community Engagement Team identifies the seemingly innocuous and tedious details in the articulation of language, location, and all other nuances of communication, as it is in these details a recipe for not only higher rates of engagement, but situations of engagement which are more meaningful, where every voice is heard and every hand touches the governmental pen. Advocating for an awareness and consideration of both the nuanced and profound experiences of those who may choose to engage leads to a more successful practice of the City’s governmental practices.
Thinking through this framework informed my day-to-day office experiences as well as my efforts to coordinate the logistics of a networking and conference opportunity. As such things sometimes don’t meet their potential or otherwise don’t come to fruition, I more deeply understand the endless difficulties of not only finding a middle ground, but securing it through thoughtful engagement approaches and incentives of information and reciprocity. In each area I observed and participated in, I found a holistic and diversified perspective fundamental.
Final Thoughts on City of Austin’s Community Engagement Internship Experience
Reflecting on the Community Journalists’ Conference as not a failure but as a fari and grounding experience in such projects, as there are many projects which the Community Engagement Division expressed a desire to get back online, or to be redressed, but each having their share of difficulty in either governmental process or in the community’s low expressed interests. The Team must be innovative and inform their efforts with the needs, desires, experiences, and embodied practices of the community, as without these, platforms would surely always lack meaningful use. In looking at my experiences of my tasks, I am now more fascinated and compelled to understand how the Community Engagement Team manages a multitude of projects, initiatives, and consultations than I was going in to the experience: the Community Engagement Division relies on feedback to create and facilitate platforms for engagement, and sometimes when there is no feedback to rely on, they must incorporate experiences and anthropological frameworks to ensure their work serves its purpose. Just as one project is resolved or ends, another begins: so just as our Community Journalists’ Conference met the end of its usefulness, myself and the team must think of ways to make engagement with City staff pertinent to everyone, where everyone leaves the table satisfied and compelled to return.
For those considering this internship, I highly suggest it as a means of experiencing the City at work — you will get out of it what you put into it, as the Team will tell you on the first day. One may take this opportunity as far as they desire, as there is ample room for assisting with research with language accessibility, as well as to assist in getting some online engagement platforms back into use. From my experience I would suggest this opportunity during a slower semester, perhaps in the summertime, where one’s schedule will allow for ample room to really explore every angle and opportunity this opportunity, as well as to get to know the endlessly hardworking and skilled Community Engagement Team. With this internship, one may choose to participate in more government-oriented situations or events, or one may decide to focus on the community side, however, one will find the greatest and more critical aspects of how the Team uses its framework where traditional systems of power are more greatly disseminated, as it is there where anthropology may best inform approach, both in observation and application.
Bibliography:
Sheller, Mimi. “Theorising Mobility Justice.” Tempo Social 30, no. 2 (May 2018): 17-34.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327385759_Theorising_mobility_justice