This week on Talking Headways we’re joined by Bridget Marquis, Director of Reimagining the Civic Commons. Bridget chats with us about connecting public assets, the importance of creating metrics that matter and better ways to think about community engagement.
Scroll down below the audio player for an edited excerpt of our conversation, or click here for an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the entire conversation.
Jeff Wood: A lot of the projects that you all work on in different cities around the country, you put together data and metrics about outcomes, and I’m wondering how that’s been helpful to you to kind of get the numbers behind things, and also kind of tell the story of the places that you’re helping out.
Bridget Marquis: Yeah, so we designed this measurement system when we started back in 2016 in part because when we went around and asked, as we were planning this initiative, different parks and recreation departments and library systems and things like what they were measuring, it was mostly sort of operational data, right? So a lot of parks and recreation departments, one of the key measurements was number of acres mowed.
Which, if you’re thinking environmentally, you might think that should decline, right? But if you’re just thinking about sheer amount of park land, you would want that to increase. So that one of your key metrics is something that you might not even know which direction you want to move in, right?
And then in libraries, it was, like, number of books circulated. You know, just data that was like, maybe it helps you with operationalizing something, but it is not telling a compelling story to anyone outside of your entity, right? And it’s certainly not making a bigger case for why to invest.
So we knew going in we wanted the system to be something that we thought would help tell these stories — help tell stories of impact and help make a broader case for why this stuff matters. So we took those four outcomes. We have a set of signals that were created underneath each of those outcomes, and then a set of metrics that we think, together, these metrics moving indicate that indeed the signal’s moving and then that together yields the outcomes shifting. And I think it’s been extremely helpful on a lot of different avenues.
First, we now have final, I’m going to call them “final” in quotes, metrics reports for three of our initial cities, Akron, Detroit and Memphis. And when you flip through them, you can see all these different changes, whether that be data points related to trust, data points related to social connection, data points related to diversity. Data points related to kind of access to nature and climate. So these issues that I would say, for the most part, we aren’t very good at measuring in this country at all. It gives you kind of these different types of reasons to make these investments.
Secondly, when we did the measurement work, most teams hired local residents to actually be data collectors on the ground. And I think that process of having local residents measuring their own neighborhoods and their own neighbors was really valuable. So there’s a really fun story from Detroit. So there was a woman named Stephanie Harbin, who’d been a local black club leader for many years. She was very engaged in the community. She signed up to become a data collector, and when they were early on in the design phase for McNichols commercial corridor, you know, bike lanes were on the list of things. And she wasn’t really big on bike lanes. But as part of data collection, she did observation mapping. So she went out there and stood on different corners of McNichols to do bike and ped counts and try to understand how the street was being used.
And what she observed was that, indeed, she thought none of her neighbors biked, right? She was like, this isn’t for us. We don’t need bike lanes. But what she saw was, like, there’s actually a lot of people in this neighborhood, in the adjoining neighborhood, that bike, and this street is so unsafe for them to bike. Like, there is nothing, and it was, I want to say it was four lanes, you know, fast moving vehicles, and people were going, you know, 55 or 60 on this street, and it’s supposed to be a commercial corridor, right? So she changed dramatically because she was the one out there doing the counting and saw it with her own two eyes that indeed her neighbors needed a safe place to bike.
I think by engaging the residents that happened. She also later on was part of this ULI panel when they did an event in Detroit. And she stood up and, you know, was part of this panel and was like, “our” data, like, she claimed that measurement work as hers. And I think that’s really powerful.
They saw over the course of the project, an increase in trust in local government. So it doubled from like 12 percent to 30 percent over the project period. And also on the opposite end, the percentage of people who said local government can almost never be trusted. fell from 39 percent in 2017 to 13 percent in 2023. so that distrust moved significantly. I think part of it is engaging those residents in this data collection. It’s a huge trust builder, because they’re the ones collecting it. They understand it. And I think oftentimes that’s not how we would see it, right? We would think that would be a burden.
You know, they got paid. It wasn’t free. It wasn’t volunteer labor. But them owning that data, I think, did nothing but improve the transparency with local government and that relationship building.
I think there’s a lot of reasons to measure, but that one I found particularly powerful.
