Not Just A Stormwater Project: Incorporating Racial Diversity Into An Urban Retrofit Infrastructure Project

Lacking a landscaping team to take care of your native vegetation installations? Don't know how to reach people who are under-represented in your community? Struggling to recruit the future workforce? Want artistic elements to promote your capital projects? These are some of the challenges we face in public works departments as we try to react to the urgent demands of climate change and racial equity with limited resources and expertise. The City of Minneapolis looks for ways to align our work with resources in the community to meet these pressing priorities.
The first project we piloted in public works involved the retrofit of an existing stormwater flood surge basin to provide water quality treatment. The project's adjacency to a diverse high school provided an opportunity to incorporate outreach and environmental job exposure to students.
The city crews do a lot of heavy construction; however, the equipment and skills are limited when it comes to restoration and enhancement of the vegetation. Concurrently, entities in the community focused on environmental skills development in local youth approach us looking for meaningful projects. We know that our current methods of outreach do not always reach all affected by environmental issues and further do not engage these communities most affected by environmental injustice to develop skills that help them represent and connect their communities to contribute to decision making. We also do not always have the skill sets or resources to support racially diverse youth employment. Current trends in youth jobs training include urban agriculture, which means non-profits in the region look for opportunities to expand their reach and get involved in infrastructure projects with high visibility, larger scale, and direct applicability to water quality and environmental needs.
Minneapolis is making a concerted effort to diversify the city's engagement and find new, more successful methods to install vegetation in stormwater facilities. Re-evaluating how we structure our projects helped to identify a contract with a local non-profit. We looked at the parts of projects where we lack resources and set up an RFP to fill these gaps. The parts of the project we outsourced consisted of community outreach, engagement, installation of the native plants, and a two-year maintenance period for the native plants. The new structure allowed us to leverage an organization that fosters established relationships with diverse communities to implement an environmental project that provided important secondary benefits of more effective and modern community outreach and jobs recruitment without added cost.
This presentation will briefly describe the retrofit project and focus on the contracted outreach and native plant restoration work. We will cover the benefits of working with atypical organizations, the city's role, lessons learned, and how we plan to continue and expand more of this type of funded partnership to increase and broaden our community involvement and make gains in racial equity.