Metropolitan Chicago's population is projected to grow by 2.8 million by 2040. That’s the equivalent of adding another City of Chicago to the region. The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) is in the middle of developing a new regional comprehensive plan that looks out to the year 2040. It’s called GO TO 2040, and for the first time this plan will look at a whole host of issues that residents of northeastern Illinois care about – transportation, health, education, water, energy, and much more.
CMAP began this process by reaching out and asking residents what they would like to preserve and enhance in the region. People said they wanted a seamless transportation system, equity across the region, and to preserve our abundant natural resources. Associate Planner Drew Williams-Clark expressed that in gathering all of this information, “At least one person at every meeting would chuckle when we asked what they thought 2040 should look like, because they knew in 2040 they would be long past retirement age.” Today the leaders of 2040 are in high school, and it became ever more important to CMAP that they find a sustainable way to engage youth in conversations on the future of the region.
CMAP’s Public Participation Plan identifies youth as a key stakeholders who should be part of the planning process. To involve the youth of the region, CMAP developed a program called Future Leaders in Planning – better known as FLIP. FLIP is a leadership development opportunity where high school students can contribute to a better future for northeastern Illinois.
The Program
To find their first cohort of students, CMAP created an application process by which students applied to be involved in FLIP. In order to reach high school aged students CMAP staff reached out to school systems in a variety of ways. Direct communications were made with local guidance councilors, school boards and superintendents in combination with traditional methods including mailings and email announcements. Students were asked to provide one letter of recommendation and write a personal essay on a regional or community issues of that was important to them and describe what strengths and experiences they could contribute to help solve these challenges. Lastly, students were asked to describe how they envision the region will be in the year 2040. At the end of the application period, CMAP received 42 applications from interested students and thirty-nine students ultimately joined the program.
Students met downtown at CMAP’s offices in the Sears Tower to talk about the future one Saturday a month for seven months. During each day-long session, students learned about CMAP, key regional planning issues, and valuable leadership skills. In addition to the seven Saturday sessions CMAP held an orientation for families and a one day retreat for participants.
It was important to ensure that all the students were starting off with the same base-knowledge of the region. At the retreat, students learned about the seven counties in the region and about the communities where each of the program's participants live. Because FLIP was made up of a mix of students from urban, suburban, and rural areas, it was important to emphasize the diversity of the region. In addition to learning about the region, students also spent time engaged in teambuilding and trust exercises to get to know each other.
Each Saturday session thereafter, students met and worked with planners and architects to understand and apply fundamental principles of coordinated planning and government. Through exercises and excursions, participants explored the benefits and challenges of a variety of planning issues including transportation, air quality, human services, land use, and water supply. Students were split into five different teams based on their interests. The teams were based on CMAP’s focus areas: land use and housing; transportation; economic development; human services; and the environment.
From here student teams began by exploring the existing conditions of their theme across the region. The transportation team got an insider’s tour of the Union Pacific rail yards and learned about the importance of freight in our region. They also heard about how freight congestion impacts our region. The economic development team compared downtown State Street retailers to those in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. The housing and land use team visited a Chicago Housing Authority mixed-income housing site that had previously been the site of mid-rise public housing project. They heard about the rich history of the neighborhood from a local business owner and compared that to what is presently on the site now. The human services team went to a neighborhood called Englewood, a Local Initiatives Support Coalition's New Community Program community, to learn from a community based organization about how they are fighting to get better services and better education in their neighborhood. Lastly, the environment team went to the City of Chicago's Center for Green Technology to see how green roofs, solar panels, rain gardens, and energy efficient buildings could make existing communities greener.
The second session focused on community engagement. Students observed a CMAP-assisted community meeting. They were required to interview community members about their thoughts on the workshop and got to ask the Alderman what she thought about the meeting as well. When the students got back to the office, they held their own community meeting, assuming the roles of various stakeholders who might attend: city council, businesses, environmentalists, residents and others.
During session three, students reflected on what they had learned at the previous two sessions and considered what questions they still had about their issue area. CMAP invited regional experts to this session to be interviewed by FLIP students. Each student participated in two interviews, one on their topic area and the second on a topic that hadn’t been their area of focus during the program. Their assignment was then to report back on how the different issue areas of planning relate. Students did their own investigative work, thinking critically to determine how issues such as the environment and economic development relate.
The last trip of the program consisted of a snowy tour of the O'Hare Airport Modernization Project. Students immersed themselves in this very controversial regional project and the surrounding community to consider what side they might have been on if they were a planner or a local resident. All of these experiences were building toward developing of the FLIP participants' recommendations for 2040, which were then presented to the CMAP Board.
Students were asked to explain a problem that they thought needed to be addressed for 2040. Then they needed to come up with a recommended course of action to address the problem they had identified. Everyone had their own unique recommendation, and then each team worked to summarize their main points. The FLIP transportation team summed their recommendations by stating: “The plans that are being made right now are generally to reduce congestion, make high speed rails, promote public transit, and overall make transportation more efficient. To do this, the first steps should be to add express lanes for buses, build sidewalks for the safety of pedestrians, and educate the citizens about high speed rails and public transit.”
Lessons Learned
In piloting a program with youth coming from such a wide variety of background and experiences, it was very important that students felt safe, respected, and free to share as much or as little as they felt comfortable with providing. In the end students learned as much from the program leaders as they did from each other.
As a follow-up to this program, we had an opportunity to have an independent evaluation done on our program by a master’s student at DePaul. She has been interviewing students, parents, program staff, and other professionals who participated. We did our own mid-program evaluation as well.
Other small but important things undertaken by CMAP staff included the development of press releases on the program for each student to be sent to local mayors and newspapers. CMAP also contacted all of the FLIP students’ local elected officials to let them know that there were youth in their communities who were talking about the future of the region. Many of these officials reached out to the students personally. Perhaps the most important thing CMAP learned was that consistently involving students in evaluation not only helped the program to improve throughout the course of the year, it also prompted FLIP participants to take ownership of its outcome.
The FLIP program strives to empower young people with planning tools, information, and knowledge so that by the end of the program they will know how to make change in their own communities.
About the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning
The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) was created in 2005 to integrate land use and transportation for northeastern Illinois. Created out of two storied agencies that had been around since the 1950s, CMAP represents seven counties and 284 municipalities. To address the future needs of the region, CMAP is leading the GO TO 2040 campaign to develop and implement strategies for addressing this growth's serious implications on quality of life – including transportation, housing, economic development, open space, the environment, and natural resources. To find out more about Future Leaders in Planning visit FLIP.
