March 2019 Project Connect Neighborhood Working Group

The Project Connect Neighborhood Working Group Meets monthly to discuss a variety of topics that impact the 8 neighborhoods surrounding the future home of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency West.

The Project Connect Neighborhood Working Group convened on Wednesday, March 27, 2019 to discuss community events and participate in Strategic Doing Workshop #1. 

Strategic Doing is a discipline that is designed for open, loosely connected networks and enables people to form action-oriented collaborations quickly.
Through the Strategic Doing process the Neighborhood Working Group will identify a series of projects that will incrementally achieve our goal of removing blight, improving the community and holistically improving North St. Louis City.



 

Strategic Doing requires a concise agreement to follow Rules of Civility. Creating our "safe space" allows for organic teamwork and input from all teammates.

To establish the safe space, Project Connect illustrated the importance of removing prejudgment from our collaboration space. To illustrate this we participated in a short round of "Face Value".
Project Connect Neighborhood Working Group members engage one another in an activity intended to create a safe space.
Above: Project Connect Neighborhood Working Group members engage one another in an activity intended to establish equity in voice and foster collaboration. Face Value illustrates how our prejudgments of one another hinder our ability to effectively collaborate.


After establishing our Safe Space and discussing our Framing Question (Rule #2), we began to focus on uncovering one another's hidden assets (social connections, physical meeting spaces, journalism skills, etc.). This action supports Strategic Doing Rule #3.

Project Connect Neighborhood Working Group
Above: Project Connect NWG members discuss assets and their contribution to the team.



In the future the Project Connect Neighborhood Working Group (NWG) will continue to implement Strategic Doing with the goals of supporting the Project Connect Action Plan. The projects that are executed as a result of our efforts will build synergy in the community. These efforts will align with the broader regional activities supporting the relocation of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency West to the St. Louis Place Neighborhood. The Neighborhood Working Group has met with transit development and infrastructure consultants the such BiState Transit Oriented Development team, education and workforce organizations such as the United States Geospatial-Intelligence Foundation in past meetings. However, the goal is to now ensure that we support the broader North St. Louis community by communicating the various education, workforce, training, civic engagement and entrepreneurial opportunities available.

Was this page helpful?      



Comments are helpful!
500 character limit

Feedback is anonymous.