cc >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome,
everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the Biotechnology
Center at UW-Madison. I also work for UW Extension
Cooperative Extension. On behalf of those organizations
and our other partners, Wisconsin Public Television, the
Wisconsin Alumni Association, UW-Madison Science Alliance
and PLATO, I'm delighted to be able to welcome you to another
Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday
night, 50 times a year. This year is the year of the
Wisconsin Idea here at UW Madison, and tonight's work is
a particularly good example of that, of engaging communities
from all over Wisconsin in the life of the university, and the
ways that the university is engaged in the life of
communities all over the state. We have three speakers.
The first one will be Dadit Hidayat.
Dadit is a PhD student here in the Environmental Resources
Program of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
Dadit has volunteered with The Natural Step Monona
since the fall of 2007. His work with The Natural Step
Monona is largely driven by his interest in addressing a serious
gap between academic and local community, and how to address
environmental programs and problems.
Dadit believes that working with a grassroots community
organization will build a strong partnership between academics
and the community, which can then solve a variety of
practical ways to resolve problems of our environment.
The second speaker is Heather Gates.
Heather is the executive director and co-founder
of the grassroots organization nonprofit The Natural Step
Monona, which educates about, advocates for and promotes
sustainability. It's beginning in 2007, Heather
has helped the group become a catalyst for change and a major
driver in moving the city and its residents onto and down a
path toward more sustainable future and help to grow beyond
Monona to support a wider network of members,
clients and collaborators throughout the region.
The third speaker is Randy Stoeker.
Randy is a professor here at UW-Madison in the Department
of Community and Environmental Sociology.
For those of you who have been here a while, that used to be
the Department of Rural Sociology.
He has a joint appointment in the Center for Community and
Economic Development which began in July of 2005.
In the last six years, Randy has focused his work in
academy-community partnerships and community leadership
development. He's continuing to work to
amplify the community voice in service learning, and to provide
strong information technology support for nonprofit
organizations. Prior to coming to UW-Madison,
Randy was at the University of Toledo for 17 years.
So please join me in welcoming the three of our speakers
tonight to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
[APPLAUSE]
Dadit Hidayat: Well, thank you, Tom, for the introduction.
It's a real honor to be here. As you know, this will be
a collaborative presentation. Heather Gates, The Natural Step
director, she knows really well about her community.
Randy Stoeker, the professor, the expert on campus about
service learning, community-based research and you
name it, that kind of thing, and I'm here.
I think I'm just lucky enough to get paid to introduce them!
So I'm here and try to get the fruit of that money.
Well, I'm graduate student, so what can I do?
I need that money for paying my study!
[LAUGHS] Anyway, we would like, the
outline of this presentation will be, I will address briefly
about how we see, how we view environmental problems, and then
Heather will share a story about her community groups in Monona,
The Natural Step Monona, and how they decided to start
The Natural Step Monona, and what they accomplished
in the past four or five years. Then, Randy Stoeker will share
a story about what is it about academic-community partnership,
and especially how we can benefit from that kind of model
for addressing environmental problems,
local environmental problems. Then we'll share a story about
our collaborative works, which is two capstone courses
that we ran. One of them, we already did this
past spring and then this fall semester we are in the middle
of one. Then each of us will share
about what kind of lessons we learn from this partnership.
So from my point of view as a student, from Heather's point of
view as a community group leader and from professor perspective.
So ecosystem services and human well-being.
If we talk about health, and I would argue, this is my opinion,
human well-being is basically, to me, the measure of how
successful we address any problems, and I mean any problem
means not only environmental problems, not only even health,
but any problems. When we talk about health,
the W.H.O., the World Health Organization in 1948,
they defined health as a state of complete physical, mental
and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease,
or infirmity. So physical, mental and social,
not just disease, not just the absence of disease.
So when looking at this graphic, health is really at the center.
When we have four components of health--
I really like this graphic. I just found that recently,
just because it has the right components there, I may have
some question about the arrow's direction, but that's not really
an issue here. But what I like about this
graphic, is because it has the material aspects, there are four
components of health: material, and then social,
freedom, and security on the green circle.
On the yellow circle, now we have those processes
in our environment which is provisional, about food, water,
how we provide food and water for the humans,
then about supporting, and then about regulation,
and also about culture itself. I also like this because these
components are what made our environment, how they
interconnect with each other, how they affect each other,
to affect the environment where we live now.
That's what also influence the quality of health
that we have as a human. This graphic was first
introduced in the '70s, '73, the daily triangle it is called.
It's an early idea of sustainable development.
Again, human well-being is on top.
It is actually the ultimate needs--
ultimate ends of these graphics with the economy and technology
as the intermediate means and intermediate ends.
One thing that was missing, in my opinion, is because the
ultimate end, the human being does not--
We don't have a loop from the ultimate ends as a human
well-being to the ultimate means.
So meaning like it doesn't show how much responsible
are humans to the environment, to the thing that they get to
develop those intermediate means and intermediate ends.
But that was, what, almost 30 years ago.
This is what we have now. This is a graphic that was most
commonly seen these days, and actually comes from
this simple graphic. Three pillars we call it.
This is when we introduce sustainability.
We have three aspects: environment, economy and social.
The cooler graphic is on the left side,
where we have global system, social system and human system
and how they are interconnected to each other.
I think you are probably familiar with this already.
So promoting human well-being, I consider that as a complex
problem as well, which is in the middle, complex problem.
Promoting satisfactory human well-being need to be seen as
a result of the interaction of these three aspects and
how we address them together as a whole,
not individually. One will affect the other,
and while at the same time affected by another, as well.
There was this story, I first heard this from
Professor Jonathan Patz from the Population Health and he also
has his joint appointment with the Nelson Institute.
So he told this story about this Peruvian Amazon jungle.
It's a forest, one of most degraded forests in the world.
And according to him, the government tried to control
human population, because of the continuing growth
of the human population. So they tried to control
this human population. What they did was, they tried
to limit the deforestation, which is obvious, but then
they also tried to reforest, increase the forested areas.
What happened was that it also increased the malaria-carrying
mosquitoes. So the human population
is good. They control it now, but at the
same time they also get more mosquitoes, which also increase
the malaria risks. So this is a good example
that even if we want to address one thing, we could have
easily missed another thing which is also as dangerous,
well I don't know, maybe as dangerous as before.
Like what happened if we have overpopulation, but now we have
limited population, but they have more risk because of these
mosquitoes. So this instruction of these
three aspects and we really need to take care of that.
Recall earlier when I said about human well-being
is essentially the measure of how successful we are
in trying to address these problems.
It applies to environmental problems as well.
It's far too long that we have focused on the science part.
I'm not saying that science is bad, but I mean,
we need some balance. Science has been successful
in trying to identify or trying to explain what phenomena
we have, especially in these environmental problems, what
happened with our environment. But then I believe
that we do not try, we haven't tried hard enough
to understand what happened with humans in that cycle,
in that system. I don't think at the time--
Well now we have a better answer but at that time I don't think
we had an understanding how much humans are affected from these
problems, environmental problems and how much actually humans
are affecting these problems, as well.
So it kind of works two ways.
This means humans, like apart from scientists, politicians
and government officials, because they did create this
policy, but then how much they understand the actual
problems in society. How much they understand,
to the extent of what kind of suffering of our society
to these environmental problems. Again, I'm not underestimating
their roles, but I'm saying that by engaging other humans,
which is us, lay citizen, and I'm talking about lay citizens,
we believe that we can have much better understanding
about what is going on. What are we facing?
What kind of environmental problems, what kind of
complexities that we have. Especially in this case,
on micro-level, locally, because we don't have this modeling.
We don't have this cool computer software to address with human,
to talk, to communicate with human, and therefore
we can only do local area. But then when we say
only local area, that we have more understanding,
that computer software will not be able to address,
will not be able to understand that.
So now we have these questions. When we have environmental
problems, whose problem is this? Who is going to do something
about it? Then who can we ask for help?
Who is paying attention? Who else cares about these
environmental problems? Let's say, if we have
a contaminated drinking water, whose problem is that?
Who will suffer? Well, scientists often say
the community, a number of communities.
But do they know that some of the community also,
even in a different situation than the scientist themselves?
Scientists know that this is contaminated water, so maybe
they avoid already. But what happened with those
people who don't have access to that kind of information?
If a house is not located inside the city,
like city transit network, how far, how long official
will find out if that house, like minority groups,
or low income groups, actually reside in that house,
meaning that they may have some problem with access to jobs
and then access to healthy foods and that kind of thing.
These are the kind of questions that's traditionally
not seen by scientists, and I say "scientist," meaning
hard scientist, because they work with just basically,
they work in different area, not necessarily that they have
to address that, but it is just not their area of expertise.
They are not trained for that kind of question.
So this is when collaboration becomes important.
Then before we answer that collaboration, we also have
these questions about community science.
Whose knowledge and opinion counts?
Who is the expert? What type of expertise
is needed? Again, this is when a
collaboration among disciplines of natural/physical sciences,
and social sciences, humanities become very important.
They will complement each other. They will have different
approaches. They will have different ways
of finding those answers, and that way we will reach
potential solutions. Not necessarily the exact answer
but potential solutions that will increase some of the ideas
in how we can address that kind of environmental problems,
and that kind of question, as well, that led me volunteer
with The Natural Step Monona. I tried to remember whether
it was 2007 or 2008, but Tom mentioned 2007.
I was thinking about 2008. But I started to volunteer
with The Natural Step Monona, because I liked to learn
what happened in the grassroots level.
Something that I've been missing in school, because at school
we learn different stuff. Then, for this kind of thing,
I think I have to go down to meet the people who actually
work on that problem. The people who face local
environmental problems and how do they respond to this issue of
climate change or environmental sustainability.
The Natural Step Monona, and that's when I met Heather Gates,
the executive director of Natural Step Monona.
Heather Gates: All right. Hi, everybody.
I'm Heather Gates, thank you. So that button?
All right, my purpose for being here is to share a little bit
of the background of The Natural Step Monona,
so you know where we fit into this collaboration.
The Natural Step Monona is a charitable organization
that rose from the grassroots, people working to make their
lives and community more sustainable by effective
education, community action and collaboration.
Although our organization's name reflects our mission
to advocate for, educate about and promote sustainable Monona,
our valuable programs reach beyond our city's borders
and have grown to support a wider network of members,
clients and collaborators. The organization began
in 2007 after two other Monona women and I got fired up
by participating in a study circle on the natural step
framework which is a robust science-based description
of what sustainability is, and it's focused, like Dadit
was describing, on the system and how the system works,
versus the individual parts in that system.
So our initial goals were to spread awareness as widely
as possible in Monona while making hands-on change, as well.
We did so in a very participatory process.
We began by offering more study circles like the one
we'd been in, and they have had 136 graduates.
We then spearheaded the sustainability section
at the Monona Public Library, which has expanded twice
since opening in 2007, and by helping homeowners divert
more than 94 tons of waste from the landfill
through using compost bins. As our ranks grew,
we could do more. We produced award winning
green holiday ideas videos that starred 43 of our members.
We began a newspaper column in the Herald Independent,
our local newspaper, and began the green Tuesdays
and Thursdays films and lecture series, which
has grown to be a collaboration with three grassroots groups,
two colleges, the Nelson Institute, and
a municipality, and which now offers films and presentations
in eight communities. Last winter, we also produced
our very first voter guide to the local elections in Monona,
with our members writing and choosing the questions
for the candidates. We had 100% compliance
in responding. As part of our participatory
process, we conducted visioning with our members about where
The Natural Step Monona should focus its energies.
The three core goals that emerged were that people
become aware of The Natural Step Monona,
have a good understanding of sustainability and/or have
participated in sustainability training; and two, that they
have actually taken steps toward a more sustainable future
and have measured that progress; and three, was that the city
itself would adopt more sustainable practices and
policies with city staff being trained on the natural step
framework. So many of the efforts
I've described here have been about the first two goals.
To reach our third goal of helping move the city of Monona
forward, we partnered with the city on numerous efforts,
such as the energy independent communities program,
this spring capstone class survey, the six
energized Monona forums, one is going on tonight,
and the upcoming water conservation challenge.
As you might have figured out, our vision is much bigger
than what we can accomplish with our current resources.
There's a big gap between where we are and where we want to be.
So while the capstone class collaborations have not by any
means erased that gap between where we are and want to be,
they are helping us begin to close that gap.
Without the UW's help we wouldn't know--
Oh, I missed that beautiful slide.
You need to look at it, because it's really pretty.
That's artwork from one of our members and those are all little
words. Okay, I'm sorry.
So we wouldn't know what was revealed with last spring's
survey. For instance, that 22% of Monona
residents are aware of us from seeing us at
the Monona farmers market. Or that 57% of Mononans hadn't
heard about us at all before the survey came to their door.
So the collection of statistics we got from our spring survey is
helping us redirect our focus. For example, we learned that the
issue that's important to citizens was clean lakes,
followed very closely by clean drinking water.
And that has inspired our increased efforts to address
water issues by expanding our planned water conservation
challenge to be part of a larger "2012 Year of Water,"
just proclaimed by our mayor on Monday night.
Without the current capstone class, we would not be able to
even consider reaching out to the number of community groups
that we will be reaching for the Year of Water.
Our greatest needs right now are operational, meaning
building our capacity to follow through with all of our
ambitious plans, which means more staff, more interns,
more fundraising, greater communications capacity,
measuring our outcomes, increasing the size of our board
and more. Another need is having the
resources to achieve our second visioning goal of knowing where
Monona residents are on sustainability measures
and working then to improve those numbers.
This would mean creating a baseline of where they are now,
taking some efforts to change those behaviors and then
following up to see what changes have been made and what methods
help them reduce the barriers to making change.
For example, how many square feet of rain gardens
do we have in Monona? What methods can we use
to encourage more people to make rain gardens in their property?
When we look back, what methods work to help them make those
changes? So knowing answers like that
would be enormously helpful to taking more efficient steps
toward making a resilient community.
So The Natural Step Monona could use help from some of your
enormous UW alumni brains. Our organization would greatly
improve if a few of you here tonight, I don't know
which ones, were inspired to work with us.
I ask you to contact me-- See, I'm skipping all these
pretty slides again. [LIGHT LAUGHTER]
Our members having fun and doing a little work too.
I ask you to contact me about volunteering to help with any
of our needs, including board service.
This is our web address, www.tnsmonona.org,
and our email address, info@tnsmonona.org
I encourage you to think about how you might help us
accomplish our goal of greater sustainability for our
community, our region and our future.
Randy Stoker: It's a long story.
It's a story of trying to work together for quite a while now.
Almost two years. It's a story of a
community-academic partnership. Those of you who know this
Wisconsin Idea thing, what we normally talk about the
Wisconsin Idea is that the boundaries of the university
are the boundaries of the state. A bunch of us have actually
looked much more deeply into where the Wisconsin Idea
comes from. The actual origins of the
Wisconsin Idea were to create a just, self-governing citizenry.
So building the capacity of people to govern themselves.
So our partnership is a partnership of trying to engage
people in the process of governing themselves with
a sustainability consciousness. But it means us getting off
campus and actually working with a community, and that's really
hard, because our current model for doing that,
is we think I'm the professor, I have a curriculum to deliver.
I have to make sure that my students learn what the
textbooks say they're supposed to learn.
I'm a sociologist, I must teach sociology.
We're working with environmental stuff here.
That's a stretch. We also, if you've heard these
words, "service learning" or "community engagement," normally
that has been about how we give our students a social conscious.
So we impose our students on people like Heather, and we say,
learn from her. We too seldom ask people like
Heather, and what would you like out of the deal?
Then we say, and oh, by the way, it's only for one semester,
and then we're gone. We're out of here.
So we have some problems with our current model.
So, thank you.
I've been trying to figure out how do we do this differently,
and how do we do it better, because actually we've been
hearing some of those folks like off campus out there
kind of complaining about us. So, we've been working to see,
can we do this differently. So there's a model
called community development that a couple of us have been
connecting to this idea of professors and students
working with communities. So it starts with actually
understanding how the organization operates,
what its issues are, what its needs are,
and it starts out there rather than in here.
It also focuses on community outcomes.
So it's asking questions about what are the issues
in the community. It's asking questions about,
how do we build community capacity to, not necessarily
depend on people like Dadit and I, but to actually
solve their own problems with us supporting when we can.
Then we start thinking differently about skill
and expertise. We're no longer thinking about
how do we get the students to understand this bucket
of knowledge. But instead we think about it
as professional development. We don't send students
out into the community to learn. We send students out into
the community who have already learned, and can then work like
quasi professionals with the community to develop the skills
that they already have. And this idea then of what we
bring, Heather and The Natural Step Monona have very deep
expertise in the community of Monona, and they have very
deep expertise in sustainability issues in Monona.
What I and Dadit bring is knowledge of sustainability,
community groups, community development,
from a wide variety of places. We pull together our
broad knowledge with Heather's deep knowledge.
The other thing we do is a lot of times when we, the kind
of traditional model of sending students out, is we take a
student, we say, okay, you go spend 20
hours with that organization. Go learn something.
The poor organization is going, oh, man what am I going have
this student do for 20 hours? So instead of doing that,
we've shifted to a model that emphasizes projects.
So we sit down together, and we say, what can we do together?
What kind of goal can we try to achieve together?
And what can we do in the time and with the resources
that we've got? So what we do then is we use
this model of looking at a community issue in terms of
trying to diagnose that issue. Who's got this issue?
How badly do they have it? How much do they have it?
Then we take a step and say, so what can we do about
this issue? What kind of work can we do
to try and deal with the issue? Then we actually implement it,
and then we evaluate to find out how it's actually working.
This is really hard to do in one semester.
So we often do it over a couple semesters, a year,
or even longer, to manage all of those things.
Hidayat: So this is when the Community Environmental Scholars
Program comes in handy. It was just,
I think it was just started two years ago, right?
Yeah, two years ago, and then the Nelson Institute
for Environmental Studies. This is part of the
Nelson Institute, so they realized about the needs of
students, basically, well this is for undergraduate students.
They realized that undergraduate students need to be trained
to work with local community, with community organizations.
How to connect them so that their skills can be developed
further, just like Randy said earlier.
This program trains undergraduate to work
with communities specific on environmental organizations,
of course, like the kind of skills that
they, things for example, like simple skills, simple
skills that they don't learn on campus, or maybe they do
learn, but they don't realize that it's important, just like
some basic skill, like how to collaborate.
There is no class for that, like how to work together.
The set up of this academic is somehow to make them
individuals. Like the assignment, like we
have to work on assignment individually, well of course
there is some group work, but I think they gear it
to be independent as a student. I think that will be one thing
that will decrease-- not decrease, but I think
it's just inconsistent with how we want them to work
together with other students. How they appreciate others'
ideas because far too often they find this from research
and then they think this is good so I'll just find it myself,
and then this is my discovery, so I'll just claim it
for myself. Well anyway, that's not really,
I'm not saying that it's a bad thing, but there is some
disconnection in there, when it comes to skills needed
for this kind of work. CESP also, one of the things
that they do is they tried to provide this capstone courses
for students, especially students in the final year,
senior students. This capstone is required,
but our class, which is one of the capstones, is not required,
because they have a set of options.
We were able to secure two capstone courses from this.
I'll explain later what are those.
But the idea, again, service learning capstone courses,
just like Randy said earlier, they want students to work with
communities to provide service, and then they learn what happens
in the local community, what kind of local environmental
problems face in local community.
So, when I talk about service learning commitment,
communication and compatible idea, actually that summarized
what Randy explained earlier. I didn't know what he was
talking about, I mean before I'm here.
[LAUGHTER] I'm sorry, I know what he was
talking about! When I worked on this
presentation I was thinking like maybe Randy will say something.
But now it's easier for me, because then I just summarize
what he said. Commitment, communication
and compatibility. So that's the point of his
explanation. Commitment is the most
important. And by the way, these three Cs,
we call it three Cs. This is what we learn based on
our interview which is actually maybe four years ago,
when I was in his other class, community-based resource class.
We had interviewed 67 community-based organizations in
Madison, and we liked to learn from them how we can improve
service learning programs on campus so that we can better
meet their needs. This is what we found,
the three Cs, commitment, communication and compatibility.
They suggest that they do not guarantee a success program,
but they convince that this is among major ingredients
if you want to have a successful service learning program.
Commitment is the most important according to them, because
without commitment then we will not be able to--
Well, this is what I meant. commitment is that when we think
about institutions, we think about professors and students,
then we will think about also how to run the
service learning class, meaning that how to meet our curriculum,
how to meet our theoretical stuff that students need
to understand that's just, again, like Randy said earlier,
but then we also need commitment to work with community,
commitment to help this community to develop further
as an organization. At the same time, we also need
a commitment from community that they will work with us.
It's not just they accept whatever we bring and then
when we leave, they will accept something, but it's that we also
need them to be able to do what we will do together,
and they can do independently in the future,
so that kind of commitment. It's a lot of work for Heather.
Heather has been volunteering as an executive director.
Now we just brought another staff to volunteer, extra work
that's unpaid work. Then the second C
is about communication. Randy mentioned a few times, we
send students, and what happened is that professor, well in the
past, I don't know now, but in the past professor send students
with that professor communicating with
community-based organization. So students were sent out
and just tried to learn by themselves, like how to work
with community. They'll figure out what
happened. But then in this case we need an
intensive communication between professor, students and
community organization, and they will work together
what are the things that we, those three, can do so that
all of them can benefit from this kind of collaboration.
Compatibility is also important, because what if we want to study
food, but then the community organization
doesn't work on food? I mean, that's very obvious.
But then the kind of compatibility, how the needs
of this higher education and community can be met.
That's very simple, but it's often difficult to address
if we don't have that commitment and communication.
So when we found out about CESP programs,
I talked to Randy about this. Randy, there is a possibility
about this collaboration. Then I remember his response
was, well, I mentioned about The Natural Step Monona,
and then he mentioned, well, it's not up to me.
Go talk to your community. That was not what I expected,
because I thought he would say, oh, yes let's do it.
But then, go ask your community.
Okay. Then I talked to Heather and
I think we first talked in this education team meeting.
Heather was there, a few other members of that team,
education team, was also there. Also, I'd like to remind,
as well when Randy suggested me to talk to Heather,
why not Randy talk to Heather? Because I already know Heather,
and that's important, because when we know each other,
then there is this trust that has been developed,
has been built between us. So when I talk to Heather,
offering about this idea, it's not like just kind of this
student who is going to take something from our community
and just leave us somewhere. But since I've been with her
so I get this trust that I believe
she believes in me that, okay, this is something serious.
So we talk about it, and then they are very excited.
Then I said, yes, I got funding.
Well, maybe, maybe I got funding.
[LAUGHTER] >> Stoeker: He's just in it
for the money! [LAUGHTER]
Hidayat: Yes, to get funding. So we talk about it.
Then they're excited, and then after that, Randy followed up
with a phone call to Heather before we submitted our
proposal. That's the communication part,
because, well, maybe we're friends already, I think
she trusts me at that time. But I think the fact that Randy
followed up at that point, then it's kind of reassuring
for Heather because, oh, the professor called me,
so this is a serious thing then. That's what he did.
Once we had that, then we developed a proposal together,
three of us, and then we shared notes.
This is what we expect. That's what we expect, so we
submit it and we got approval. Community-based research,
at that time what we called it, because at that time, Heather
had the first response that Heather and other education
team member was, how do we know that we are moving forward
about this group, The Natural Step Monona group?
How do we know that? So I think doing an evaluation
would be, could be, not would be,
could be an answer for this. Then having these two capstone
projects also, by accident, coincidence, not by accident,
because when we are in the middle of planning
this community-based research, and remember we also had that
one semester is probably too short, Randy mentioned earlier,
so when we are in the middle of the community-based
capstone class, then there is another project.
We can apply for another capstone project.
Now that we have this community-based research, we can
implement what we will find from this community-based research.
So that's where we designed community organizing
capstone project class. That proposal was also approved.
Before that too, we were in a situation where,
how do I get funding for the second year?
Then we realized that it is not really up to me,
although I get the funding, it is really not up to Randy,
as well, because, again, we need a commitment from community.
So the decision, at that time, the decision that we applied for
the second capstone project was actually The Natural Step
Monona decision, because it really requires a lot of work
from Heather and other members of The Natural Step Monona.
And we don't know how much they, we know how much they spend
on work, but we don't know how much hours they need
for other things, other than the capstone classes.
So that was the moment where I really learned how
we can value this collaboration, how we can value
community groups in making that kind of decision, because
we cannot just go by ourself. Do you have something to share
from that moment?
Gates: Okay, thank you. Yeah, I would just say
that when we started the collaboration, the
education team was very enthused about what we could do to learn
if the things we were doing were making any difference
in our community. You don't want to be spinning
your wheels and thinking you're doing good, you want to find
out if you are. This was a great opportunity
to be able to do actually that. We developed a survey with
the students and our members, and actually, are you going to
talk about this? Am I stealing your thunder?
Hidayat: It's all right. >> Gates: We went door-to-door
to 3100 households, and delivered the survey so we
could learn what we needed to. We also brought the city in
on that so that the city could ask some questions as well
about what people knew about they were doing.
It was really even beyond what you see here.
It was teamwork. It was the city coming in on it,
and it was a great thing. I'm bowing to you both.
Hidayat: Thank you, Heather. So one thing we realized, too,
that now we have professor. We have community groups.
We have CESP to provide funding for this.
We have projects, at least for the first capstone class,
we know what we want to do, but we don't have students yet.
I was, we were really curious how much this will be, how many
students will be interested in this kind of stuff, because
the first thing that I'd like to say if someone asked me
about community-based research, I'd like to say that this is not
the most fun thing to do, because it requires flexibility
of your schedule, like meeting someone like Heather,
it will be much easier if we meet like 6:00 at night or 6:30.
Again, that's not the kind of thing that students or
professors, it's not the normal working hours for academic.
So that's one thing. We also that put in our kind of
promotion about this class, that it requires a lot of flexibility
on your part, students, and we know the goal, but we don't know
how we go there, like the kind of structure that we have,
we don't have the kind of structure that we need because
we don't know the kind of skills that students have.
At that time, we were really anxious about how many students
will be interested in this class.
But then, luckily, we have 12 students, which is maximum of
that class. When we asked at the end of
the class, when we asked about, was this really
your first choice? No, this was really the one
that met our schedule. So it was not really their first
interest, their first choice in this class.
Again, that was the kind of thing that we realized it will
happen, especially from students because we know that this is
not a regular class, this is not a normal class,
but this is different. Would you like to say about how
we carry out the projects? >> Gates: We actually
now have two very long stories, but if you're looking at your
watches, they're going to be like really, really
tiny short versions. >> Your mic is off.
Stoker: Look at that. No, it's on.
But the battery is out, or something.
So here are the two very short versions of the story.
The first is in the spring. So we sit down with
The Natural Step Monona and these 12 students, and if
you remember taking classes or if you are taking classes,
you walk in, the professor hands you a syllabus, and it
says here's what we're going to do week one, week two, week
three, week four, week five. Well, our students walk in
and we say we're not exactly sure what we're going to do.
We're going to do some kind of study and we're going to work
with The Natural Step Monona to figure it out, and then we're
going to do something with it. The students were a little
anxious, but gradually over the weeks, they became
comfortable with the fact that we were doing a project,
and projects don't happen in a syllabus,
projects happen as you pull people together.
What happened in that project was we created a survey
that could be done in just a few minutes.
People could do it online, or they could do it
on a piece of paper. So we gave people a
self-addressed stamped envelope, and we went literally
door to door. And Heather brought us 12
TNS, was it 12 or 14, TNS Monona residents
to work with our 12 students. So we sent people out in pairs.
We'd get together on Saturday at City Hall and Dadit drew
little maps all over Monona. We'd send people out to these
sections of the map. Then they'd go out.
I remember Heather said 3100 doors, and we did this
in just a few weeks, because we had 14 residents and 12 students
going door to door. It was mostly just dropping them
off, but also talking to residents and encouraging them
to turn the surveys in, and then also we had a community event
at the end of the semester, and we had about 50-60 people
who turned up at that event. We showed them all the survey
results, and then we kind of asked them their ideas about,
and their thoughts, and reflections on those results.
Then in between during the summer we took those reflections
and those thoughts, and we sat down with Heather
and the leadership team from The Natural Step Monona
and we planned out the fall, well, kind of.
As best you can, given that we're not exactly sure
what we're doing yet, but we decided that this water thing
was going to be the thing to work on.
So we kind of decided that one of the ways
that The Natural Step Monona can maximize its impact is to
get other people to do its work. So we thought if we can get
other organizations in the city of Monona to do things around
water, to say we're going to do this project around water,
we're going to get our members to use less water, or we're
going to get the Boy Scouts to rake leaves, or get a school
group to clean out the drains, or whatever, but things that had
a water theme and that The Natural Step Monona could
then be the kind of coordinating group for all these other groups
doing things around the water for the year the of water
in 2012. What our students could do
is then talk to those groups, try and recruit the groups,
educate the groups about water issues.
So we're right in the middle of that process now.
So our students are just at the point where they put together
a PowerPoint presentation, and they're just about ready
to start calling community organizations in Monona to see
if we can get them to sign on to the Year of Water.
That's the up-to-the-minute details of what we accomplished
this past Monday. >> Hidayat: I would like to say
as well, that the reason why we decided to work on water,
is because one of the questions that we asked in the survey
was what are the top community issues that they think
is important. So the top two
are lake and drinking water. That's what we learned
from that survey, water is obviously the most
important issue in Monona, so that's why we decided
to work on water. It's also interesting,
we met this class every Monday. Then last Monday when we met
we talked about, so are we ready to go out
conducting communities? The students said,
I don't think we're ready yet. Okay, let's meet again
next Monday and discuss about this strategy.
So what surprised me at that time was how unstructured this
class so that even next week we don't know whether
we want to meet or not. I think our students
now get very, well not very,
starting to get comfortable about not knowing what they
need to do next week, or even tomorrow.
I think that's also one of the things that most
of our students really realize how to work with communities,
because we learn by minute, like this is something that we
will do, but this is something that looks like this is not
going our task that we will need to do as part of this project.
What can we learn from this? As a graduate student, we learn
how much limited resources that The Natural Step Monona have.
Sometimes that discourages them to do things, but they still
have this passion that they need to do this, but they realize
that they don't have enough. They don't have the kind of
resources that they need in order to do these certain
tasks. I realized that oftentimes
that has been misunderstood by, let's say, those people who have
power, government officials, politicians
who create this policy. They think because communities
have the limited resources and perhaps sometimes communities
are passive, for example, like they don't do something,
apparently they actually know something, they want to do
something, but they just don't know how to do that sometimes.
These limited resources led to those who have power to
leave them out from the process, because they think that they
just don't know about this stuff so why don't we just make this
decision for them. That's when I realized, I think
I read that in theory about how they leave this community out
from the process, but now I have a much better understanding
that this may be one that makes them think that way, that
community limited resources, but then now it is actually our
responsibility to meet the gap, that they have this limitation,
now how can we provide that so that what they need to do
can actually be done? We will help them, but we will
also learn about stuff that I just learned what I mentioned
earlier, how we can have a better understanding in how
they usually act on something, how they usually address
on some of the problems that they face in the community.
So that's first. The second thing,
Randy mentioned and Heather mentioned about a lot of skills
that we need to learn. We also heard a lot
that passion is important, but then I now learned
that passion is not enough. You need passion,
but you also need skills. Those skills are,
a lot of those skills you don't learn from school.
A lot of those skills you learn with the community, especially
in the area that we work. Of course, different
for scientists who need to work in the laboratory.
They have that. But, again, this is not
discounting other areas like discipline area.
I'm just saying that for the thing that we work,
the area that we work, we need more than passion.
We need skills. We need to learn those skills,
and how do we learn that? By realizing that we actually
need this kind of skill, skill for collaboration,
skill for listening. It's simple.
But that's also something that we learn with community.
Like how we try to listen carefully about the thing
that the community or community partner would like to do.
How we collaborate, how we realize that community
also has limitations so that we also need to
speak in a language that they can understand easier.
We should not talk about this theory stuff, but then
we also need to communicate in a lay-citizen, lay language.
I think sometimes people say that way.
So how do we do that? That's the kind of skills
that is also very important in addition to the passion.
Passion is it not enough. So that's the major two things
that I learned as a graduate student, as a student
in this university from this academic-community partnership.
Gates: And as the community organization director,
I learned that face-to-face interaction increases awareness.
I think the fact that people on the survey said they knew us
most from the Monona farmers market says that being able
to say hi, how you doing, means more than reading something
in the newspaper or getting an email.
Face-to-face interaction made a connection with Dadit and me.
Second, I would say university resources
make the impossible possible. We wouldn't have been able
to do this survey at all. We've had a struggle
just doing an internal survey of our own membership.
So I think this is really a great thing that has happened.
During the process of planning and executing the capstone
courses, I also learned how important it is to have
the brain power, experience and moderating abilities
that a Professor Stoeker can bring to, either stir up
enthusiasm when we need it, or to temper our enthusiasm,
whichever the case may be at the time, because that's
often needed too, okay calm down.
[LAUGHS] So at every step of the process,
his extensive background with communities was evident,
and kept this collaboration moving forward.
The third thing is that we have much more to do.
It's very clear from the survey results that we're needed, what
we do at The Natural Step Monona is needed.
Many people are not yet being reached with the information
from the city or us, and we have to ramp up and modify
our communications and the physical outreach effort
to make better and greater progress.
We learned that people need a lot more help and
encouragement to overcome the barriers
to making sustainable steps. They need more avenues of local
information, financing, in some cases physical help.
We had a number of people write on their survey that
they felt they were too old to do anything.
I would certainly like to reach people who think they're too old
to do anything. So in an ideal world, dramatic
change to more sustainable ways would put TNS Monona
out of business, so our unstated but underlying goal
is to not be needed.
Stoeker: And so for me, I've been trying to do this
stuff now for over two decades, and I keep learning lessons
trying to do it. The idea here of advanced
planning, we sat down for months before we did the first course.
Then we sat down for the summer months
before we did the second course. We made plan A, and then we
decided plan B would be better. Then when the course started,
we went to plan C. Then we adapted it
to plan D. Being able to really understand
the community, and thus fit the plan to the community, which
means you make it and you change it and you change it
and you change it. Also, figuring out
how to compensate for the kind of student skills
and knowledge issues. This is a university.
Universities, and Dadit mentioned this,
don't teach listening skills. They don't teach professional
problem solving skills. So what we have to do is
figure out how to train students in the things that they need
to work with communities almost on the fly, because they don't
come that way to us. We have to figure out
how to do that. And students don't have this
experience with actually doing beginning-to-end
kinds of projects. They are used to what's called
a banking model of education, which means that the professor
kind of lifts up the top of their head,
pours knowledge into it, closes it, and then
withdraws it on a test. [LAUGHTER]
Instead, what we're trying to do is actually apply that,
and it's a very different kind of learning.
Then the final kind of lesson that I learn again and again
and again, is really knowing your organization partner.
Knowing their limits, knowing that when I asked Heather
if she could get us a dozen or more residents
to go out with our students and distribute surveys
door to door, and she goes.. . And I go, "Please?"
And she goes, "Oh." I know I'm at kind of the limits
of the organization's capacity, and so that I know that I want
to make sure that we do a plan that actually works,
and that works for you, and not just for Dadit and I.
So the importance of that kind of honest conversation,
when Heather says "We stop here,"
I know we stop here, and that I'm listening
carefully enough to know that.
So that's our story. We have a lot of thank yous
here, and our thanks also to those of you here tonight.
We have a few questions. I guess they're going to turn
off the taping stuff, and then we can spend a little bit of
time just talking or answering questions if you want.
So thank you. [APPLAUSE]