Planning to Thrive
In 2022, I was part of a collaborative team of engineers, community leaders, city and regional planners, university faculty, consultants, and faith-based leaders who launched an initiative to re-institute equitable and integrated planning to the state of Colorado. The mission of the Planning To Thrive network is to Establish equity and justice as the umbrella for Integrated Planning & Decision Making in Colorado. It is our basic belief that we have all we need, and that shifting the essential mindset of governance from having to do too much with too little -scarcity 101- to experiencing an abundance of assets and resources is far from impossible. It is very much doable.
We hosted a day-long event mid-year in June with attendees and presenters both from a wide spectrum of community leaders, state and city officials, academic thought leaders, affected and vulnerable neighborhood-level organizations, and community-oriented consultants. The Planning To Thrive Symposium presented and discussed the basic guideposts of comprehensive and integrated planning in a framework of equity and justice -that is, in our minds, a planning framework that includes all voices, holds an eco-system awareness, is led by the knowledge and needs of those in frontline and disproportionately affected communities, is based in the best most comprehensive data.
We attempted to balance the day and bring the assembled community along with us from the macro to the micro and then back again, but with a different sense of how it all worked together. Nothing we propose is pie-in-the-sky but rather all very practical. It simply takes a leap of faith.
· Module I: Looking at Colorado with an Equity Lens
· Module II: From Incrementalism to Integrated Strategies
· Module III: Changing the Paradigm: Planning to Thrive
Our development team was from many different disciplines and had members from just about all stages and iterations of professional life. I was representing Together Colorado, an interfaith statewide community organization that supports faith in action. As the only pastor around the table, and because we knew we were asking people to trust us not only that day but also to take this leap of faith, I was asked to moderate the day’s events, and to provide the final wrap-up presentation.
You can watch my presentation, which is at the end of Module 3 and follows Reginald Milton at time stamp 23:55, and if you have time, watch all of Module 3. Reginald and I compliment each other’s message well, in a way that supports simply making different choices in what we value yielding different results.
I came to the Planning To Thrive network and development table as a minister of climate justice concerns, an arena in which I have worked for about 15 years. As a pastor and theologian, I often address a theology of scarcity and abundance, in which I believe much of our current ailments and challenges have their basis.
In 2023, the Planning To Thrive network helped craft, promote, and advocate a statewide land-use planning bill in the Colorado statehouse. It ultimately ran out of time, as Colorado is only in session 120 days a year, and many complex bills cannot survive the House-Senate reconciliation process that simply takes more time than we have. But the conversations were generative and fruitful, and many more connections were made. Most importantly, the concepts of integrated planning are being re-seeded in Colorado communities.
In years past, Colorado was a leader in comprehensive planning efforts. From 2001-2003, I lived in Denver, having arrived from Memphis, TN, with a newly minted Master’s degree in city and regional planning. By the fall of 2003, I was in Chicago, but in the 20 months or so that I dove into Denver life, I experienced a robust regional conversation about transit and access and justice and the community voice, the greater good. What we now call (again) the Commons.
But when I returned in 2013, everything was different. I barely noticed at first, spending all my time as a fulltime chaplain residency at University of Colorado Hospital. But it didn’t take more than a year for me to realize a culture of fear and scarcity had taken over the Colorado landscape of possibility and collaborative power I so loved. It took me some time to suss out what and where had shifted, and of course no one ever knows a complete or total story for this kind of thing, but Denver and the other places where I visited felt more siloed and segregated -not always racially- than ever before. For a masterful overview and analysis of what happened, how it happened and what it all meant for Colorado, please watch Dr. Rocky Piro’s presentation from the Symposium.
The Planning To Thrive network is ending the year with a series of professional and community-based presentations. We are preparing to engage the Colorado APA statewide conference held this fall and other such ‘industry’ events throughout 2023. We are preparing to ‘take our show on the road’ in a series of community-based educational sessions in houses of worship, public libraries, and community centers statewide from this summer through the spring of 2024.