Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Dadit Hidayat, Heather Gates, and Randy Stoeker  A University-Community Partnership for Addressing  October 19, 2011 UP640    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]    On behalf of those organizations