Tag: Casey Weisinger

The Secret to an Effective Meeting: Sweets by Casey Weisinger

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The Secret to an Effective Meeting: Sweets by Casey Weisinger

My Community Planning Workshop (CPW) team and I have been helping small communities improve their surface water quality and adhere to state and federal regulations. After each meeting we recap successes and opportunities, thinking of ways we can apply our CPW classroom learning to subsequent meetings.  We recently completed our third trip to Gold Hill, Oregon, since our first meeting in February. At this meeting, we put our reflection and theory into action and experienced…well, an effective meeting. Here are our quick tips for you:

  1. Develop relationships. Don’t just ask what your committee members’ roles in the community are or how many neighbors they have, get to know them as people. This way, you build trust and assurance in one another. We wanted to get know our steering committee and partners on a more personal level, outside of the formal meeting setting. Before our meeting, we had a picnic with them in a riverfront park and discussed a wide range of topics from hummingbirds to city events, and even played with a puppy named Dulces (Spanish for sweets). Building a rapport with our steering committee set the tone for a productive meeting where everyone felt more comfortable listening and sharing ideas.
  2. Always recap purpose. Reviewing the goals and vision for a meeting helps set expectations, proactively avoid tangents, and accomplish meeting results. We are developing a multifaceted water quality program. In the past, our goals got lost in all the material presented. So at the beginning of the meeting, we reviewed what we are trying to produce and why, addressing both the big picture and this particular meeting. This helped re-orient everyone for a productive and focused conversation.
  3. Feng Shui the meeting room. Okay maybe not literally, but setting up the room in a way that includes and stimulates conversation will allow for effective engagement and dialogue. In our previous meetings we noticed not everyone was able to sit at the table, which made full participation difficult. This time we moved the tables into a u-shape to facilitate open discussion and ensure that everyone felt included.

These tips are not exhaustive, but can produce a meeting with a clear purpose and results. By developing relationships we built trust in one another, by recapping purpose we proactively addressed recurring questions, and by rearranging the meeting room we created more discussion with different stakeholders than in previous meetings. With Valentine meetings, effective meetings, and dogs named Dulces how much sweeter can our project get?

Other posts by Casey here.

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Valentine Meeting Reflection by Michael Varien and the Water Quality Team

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SWMP… Surface Water Management Program

Valentine Meeting Reflection by Michael Varien and the Water Quality Team

A few weeks ago, I found myself in a van with my team members, KC McFerson, Alex Page, Casey Weisinger, project manager Rebecca Harbage, and adviser Bob Parker, traveling through the Oregon countryside on our way to Gold Hill. Through collaboration with the city over the next few months, our team will develop strategies and recommendations to help the city better address water quality issues in the Rogue River. Our final work products will include recommendations for incorporating low impact development (LID) into city code, a draft riparian vegetation management ordinance, and a strategic action plan detailing outreach and engagement strategies the city will use to address water quality issues within its jurisdiction. Our team was formed in early January and after several weeks of getting up to speed with the subject matter, we were finally ready for our first steering committee meeting… which took place on February 15th, the day after Valentine’s Day. Our anticipation leading up to this meeting was not unlike the uncertainty of Valentine’s Day, reminders of which appeared throughout the day.

As Rebecca Harbage wrote in a previous post, this project was our valentine. Two things happened over the course of the day to remind us of this. Our team met on campus in the early morning to carpool to Gold Hill (2.5 hours south of Eugene). As we waited outside of our minivan, we noticed a manila envelope on the ground. Inside was a lost and found valentine addressed to whoever was lucky enough to find the envelope. We then proceeded to the City of Rogue River for lunch at a small café where they were still set up for Valentine’s Day with reds and pinks and white linen. It was all quite charming and a bit out of place for our group’s agenda. However, it did seem to play out that our project was indeed our valentine and, like many first Valentine’s Day dates, we couldn’t be sure what to expect.

This meeting was the first of a series of stakeholder meetings our team will facilitate in Gold Hill. While most of us have participated in meetings through school, internships, or work, we rarely have the opportunity to interact directly with local government and residents to find ways of addressing issues affecting the community as a whole. Some of our goals for the meeting were to establish a common understanding of water quality, communicate our team’s role in the process, and create an environment suited for collaboration. The biggest unknowns going into this meeting were local understanding of water quality issues and the level of enthusiasm we could expect from the steering committee. Water quality issues are initially difficult to understand and harder still to evaluate. For example, how should a city address the pollution from fertilizers, car oil, and other substances that washes off of pavement and lawns on both public and private property during rain storms? However, action has to start somewhere and that is exactly what is happening the steering committee is doing in Gold Hill.

Our first public meeting went very well. Several city staff, council members, and residents convened around a long table at City Hall. We were initially worried about how to stay on track and cover all of the very complicated material in the allotted time, but the meeting ran smoothly. Rebecca introduced the project purpose and facilitated the process very well. A representative of the EPA Department of Environmental Quality presented the technical components of water quality in the Rogue Basin, followed by our team’s presentation on our role and project elements. We rounded out the meeting with a brainstorming session that really let the committee members’ creativity shine. Ideas flew across the room, including demonstration sites, free saplings and shrubs, and even improving salmon habitat.

We were fortunate to have found both a valentine and a receptive a steering committee on this day.  We will take what we learned at this meeting, integrate it with available resources for addressing water quality, and incorporate the insight and recommendations of the steering committee in our future work. At our next meeting we hope to present some options and recommendations for low impact development and community outreach.  From my perspective,  our first meeting was a success. We initiated a working relationship with the committee, established a common understanding about our role and the project process, and gained valuable recommendations from the committee to help guide this project forward. Not a bad first Valentine’s date!

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