Join us
Tuesday, November 12th at 5pm
for Green Drinks at
Elliott Bay Public House & Brewery
- located right in the heart of Lake City. Happy hour lasts until 6pm and features tasty brews with delicious bites!
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During Green Drinks we're featuring a public Think Tank and we want to hear
your priorities
for the region and how we can best align our sustainability work to address those needs.
We'll be facilitating a group work session and collaboratively address the following prompt:
What are your highest priorities in terms of sustainability in our region? Who is currently addressing this issue? How can S2 support you and advance these initiatives?
We're using this convening as a concentrated effort to engage our community into the 2020 programming of S2.
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Sustainable Seattle Events
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Our latest Depave project location was specifically chosen by the Georgetown Community Council, as it sits on a very busy stretch of road in the Georgetown neighborhood. This green space project is part of a larger effort of reintroducing natural spaces to Seattle’s most industrialized landscapes. Come out to watch or participate in putting native plants in the soil! There will be light snacks and refreshments to stay energized throughout the planting. We're honored to partner with the amazing team at DirtCorps for this urban restoration project.
Located in Georgetown, next to the west end parking lot of the Seattle Design Center (4th Ave S between S Orcas st. and S Mead st.)
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Sustainable Thoughts,
a reoccurring series that focuses on meaningful topics impacting our communities. Keep an eye out for future Sustainable Thoughts from our S2 staff, and community members!
Refreshing the Sustainability Indicators
By Sustainable Seattle Engagement Strategist,
Jacqueline Sussman
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Approaching the last decade of the 20th century, the Pacific Northwest’s economy was soaring. It was the heyday of Ken Griffey Jr. and Edgar Martinez, and the love for PNW grunge had Nirvana and Pearl Jam blaring on car stereos everywhere. In 1989, while most of the U.S. was struck with recession, the Seattle metropolitan area led the nation in job growth. Yet with rapid growth came a surge in inequality and rising concerns about the social, environmental and economic well-being of the Seattle community and greater Puget Sound region.
A group of activated community leaders convened with a shared vision that sustainability should be at the forefront of Seattle’s future. In February 1991, the Sustainable Seattle Network gathered a group of 30 volunteers to develop a set of indicators that would measure the collective health and prosperity of Seattle.
Members of the Indicator Task Team held a diversity of expertise and lived experiences, representing a wide array of civic life, including social activists, students, local officials, educators, business owners, scientists, and artists. They met regularly and together drafted a list of 29 potential key indicators, but soon recognized the need to involve the greater Seattle community to provide a wider range of perspectives on indices of a healthy city across the economic, social, and environmental spectrums.
As the organization was barely a year old, members of Sustainable Seattle knew that they wanted to bring together visionary leaders and citizens to define the city’s measures of well-being. Using the power of social connection, they invited 300 community leaders and grassroots activists throughout the city to participate in a four-part participatory workshop series over the span of six months, with the goal of developing consensus on key sustainability indicators that would translate sustainable practice as a complex urban effort.
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As the first organization to create regional indicators for sustainability, Sustainable Seattle has a multidecadal history of engaging citizens to co-create sustainability goals and values for their communities. Whether or not it was explicitly stated, Sustainable Seattle was using the tools of participatory democracy to determine the criteria for a sustainable city and better define sustainable urbanism around the world.
With roots in Indigenous communities, worker and consumer cooperatives, and Ancient Greece, participatory democracy comes from a set of traditions in which community members deliberate and debate on matters ranging from domestic organizing to public health to foreign policy. PD engages citizens in an organized process of public discourse around policy⎼providing a means to influence policy making as well as strengthen community cohesion.
Participatory democracy allows all of us to contribute to the decision making process of societal life. Unlike the hierarchical systems of more traditional institutions, PD requires a sharing of authority and power among the collective group. In its essence, it is a tool that empowers citizens to take action.
After six months of dynamic and intentional collaboration, all Civic Panelists were given the option to join the S2 Indicators Task Team for the next step: to whittle the list of 99 indicators down to a set of 40 that would provide a “whole systems” framework of sustainability.
The results of this iterative process was a heightened awareness and value of sustainability that influenced both the City of Seattle and King County in developing their own set of indicators. King County Executive Ron Sims declared, “This is my textbook. I think I will have been successful if at the end of the year, we’ve moved all of these indicators up.”
The nation’s first
Indicators of Sustainable Community
served as a model for similar citizen projects in over 90 cities in the U.S. and numerous cities around the world. The indicators serve as vital signs for the overall health of a society, revealing trends towards a more sustainable future, or a disconcerting shift away from one.
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These are the origins of Sustainable Seattle. What came out of those workshops was not just the set of sustainability indicators. It was a collective vision of the Puget Sound region’s values and where to invest for a more socially, ecologically, and economically vibrant future for all.
“The indicators a society chooses to report to itself about itself are surprisingly powerful. They reflect collective values and inform collective decisions. A nation that keeps a watchful eye on its salmon runs or the safety of its streets makes different choices than does a nation that is only paying attention to its GNP. The idea of citizens choosing their own indicators is something new under the sun⎼something intensely democratic.”
⎼Donella H. Meadows, author of The Limits to Growth.
We’re currently in the process of establishing a new set of participatory action indicators to reflect the collective goals, values and vision of those living in the Puget Sound region for 2020 and beyond. We hope that you’ll join us in this process.
What does participatory action look like in the 21st century? This is one of the key questions we’re putting on the table.
Each month, we’ll convene community around one of the priority areas, feature leading frontline community experts who can share their knowledge on the topic, assess where we’re at and where we want to be, and mobilize collaborative discussion and planning to realize those visions for our communities.
Between these convenings, we will amass the technical expertise and capacity of Seattle communities in taking action to move the needle on material change for greater environmental justice and resiliency in the Puget Sound region.
Together we will bring the indicators out of theory and into practice. Together we will bring the indicators to life.
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Tuesday, December 3rd, 2019
Giving Tuesday is right around the corner, but you don't have to wait to give back. Please consider supporting Sustainable Seattle today, as events like Green Drinks are not possible with out your generosity!
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