Tag: Amanda D’Souza Community Planning Workshop CPW Ashland Sustainable Transportation

Meet Our Amazing CSC Summer Interns: Amanda D’Souza

Posted on by Julia Havens

Amada DSouza Community Planning Workshop Ashland Sustainable Transportation

 

What is your name? Amanda D’Souza

Where were you born and where do you call home?   Technically, I was born in Springfield, Illinois, but consider home a mix of Mililani, Hawai’I and Tucson, Arizona.

What’s your favorite pig-out food?   If I could, I would eat burritos every day.

What is your favorite word?   Hullabaloo

In which graduate program are you enrolled?   I am enrolled in the Master in Public Administration with a concentration in social policy and policy analysis.

Describe the Community Planning Workshop (CPW)  project you worked on during the academic year:   My team worked on the Ashland Downtown Parking and Multi-Modal Circulation Project this past year. For this project, we analyzed parking and transportation usage in Ashland’s downtown core, an area that sees high demand for parking due to tourist draws such as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Our methods included two monitoring sessions, key city interviews, and two surveys sent to Ashland residents. We presented our Project Advisory Committee with a comprehensive list of policy recommendations, as well as provided our own recommendations based on our findings in the past 6 months.

What is the most critical skill( you learned from being engaged in CPW this past year?   One of my biggest lessons from this past year was how to adapt your own processes to work with a community. Ashland is a very strong, engaged, and dedicated community, and this impacted our role with our Project Advisory Committee. While our project work itself did not drastically change, our approach did as we shifted from guiding the committee through the policy-making process to serving more as a resource. This shift stressed to the importance of not only stepping back and gauging the strengths of the community you’re serving and but also adapting your work to complement those strengths.

What about CPW made you smile?   Beyond the knowledge and skills I have gained, I really enjoyed getting to know my team this year. We had the benefit of clicking from the very start, which allowed us to focus our energy on producing good work rather than spending time learning how to best operate as a group. We rarely had a meeting where we weren’t constantly laughing, which really helped us get through the most stressful stretches of project work.

What are your big summer plans?   My big summer plans are just to experience the Oregon summer. Coming from the desert, I fully appreciate the ability to actually go outside and enjoy the sunshine without the triple digit degrees. I’m planning on lots of hikes, lots of rivers, and lots of camping.

What is your ‘best-kept secret’ you’d recommend?   It’s not exactly a ‘secret,’ but one of my favorite websites is TEDtalks. It’s a perfect destination for when you’re in need of entertainment, humor, inspiration, or to simply learn about something you know nothing about.

Where can we ‘cyber-stalk’ you? LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/pub/amanda-d-souza/38/331/83a/

“You Have To Try The Water”

Posted on by Julia Havens

One of the most appealing factors that encouraged me to sign up for Community Planning Workshop was the opportunity to work with Oregon communities to help solve real problems. Therefore, having spent 3 weeks learning the details of our project, Ashland Sustainable Transportation, and the dynamic community we would be working with, my team and I were itching to get out, hit the road, and see what it is that draws those 400,000 visitors to Ashland, Oregon every year.

Ashland Sustainable Transportation Community Planning Workshop CPWOur day started out with a tour of the city of Ashland, including a drive along the city’s main streets and a walk around the downtown area (although I should not neglect to mention the great lunch we had at Ashland Food Co-op beforehand, nor the delicious natural lithia spring mineral water we all tried). We then met with Mike Faught and Bill Molnar, who work with Ashland’s Public Works and Community Development Departments, respectively, and are serving as our primary project contacts.

The highlight of our trip was getting to meet with our Project Advisory Committee (PAC) for the first time. The committee’s 23 members were handpicked by the Mayor of Ashland, and includes representatives from the Planning Commission, Transportation Commission, and local businesses.

Our main task for this meeting was to introduce the PAC to several parking management strategies that could potentially be implemented as solutions to Ashland’s transportation issues. Each of us made a poster highlighting one of the strategies, which included education, wayfinding, regulation, and transportation demand management (programs designed to get users out of single-occupancy vehicles). After splitting into five groups, the PAC members rotated through our stations, where we discussed examples of how each strategy has been successfully used in other communities, and subsequently, if there were any issues or opportunities for using them in Ashland.

Overall, I feel we got valuable feedback from this process. It is really motivating to be able to work with a group of people that are so engaged and committed to the project and the community as a whole. The committee members had a wide range of experience in working with transportation and parking matters, and were able to give us very constructive and practical insight into Ashland’s needs.

Based on how our first meeting went, I look forward to continuing to work with the PAC as our project progresses. Our next meeting is scheduled for March 5, and we have eagerly begun preparations for it. This time around, we will be presenting the results from the first round of surveys, which gathered perceptions about downtown use. With more responsibility, we are even more excited for the next meeting, as  it should turn out to be quite the learning experience!

Amada DSouza Community Planning Workshop Ashland Sustainable Transportation About the Author: Amanda D’Souza is a first year Master of Public Administration student at the University of Oregon. Calling Tucson, Arizona home, she received her undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of St. Andrews in 2010. Since then, she served a term with the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps, and spent the past two years supporting a social services nonprofit in Coos Bay, where she fell in love with the state of Oregon.