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Trust, Tradeoffs, and Transformation: Planning for Community Wellbeing
Date: Wednesday, March 19
Time: 11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Location: Zoom (registration required)
Cost: Free
CM Credits: 1 CM
What if we could make equitable access to the needs and experiences essential for health, hope, and resiliency a rigorous expectation in planning, without pitting wellbeing against economic benefit?
We can. And we must. Even with the best intentions, our construction and management of the built environment can lead to collateral harm. Too often, planning has eroded access to belonging and connection, safety, stability, a sense of mattering, and resources that communities depend on. These harms are often borne by those with the least power and voice in the community. This phenomenon of “wellbeing stripping” has generational impacts on health, wealth, and thriving.
Join Katya Fels Smyth, Founder and CEO of the Full Frame Initiative, and partners from Cleveland and Kingston, NY, who have taken on wellbeing stripping in their planning efforts. This session will:
- Introduce the six principles of planning for wellbeing as central to reducing and preventing wellbeing stripping.
- Introduce WIATT (the Wellbeing Insights, Assets & Tradeoffs Tool), a tool created at the invitation of the US Census Open Innovation Lab to prospectively identify how major built environment projects will distribute their wellbeing benefits and harms so that project plans can be adjusted.
- Share first-hand accounts of planners who have used WIATT in infrastructure projects and brownfields remediation planning, resulting in:
- Meaningful partnerships between government agencies and community members;
- Representative community input through innovative data collection methods;
- Identification and preservation of vital community assets that support wellbeing;
- Illumination of how project benefits and tradeoffs are distributed across different populations;
- Actionable insights to adapt plans for more equitable outcomes.
The session will explore both the practical implementation of WIATT and its transformative potential to build trust, repair past harms, and create more vibrant, equitable communities. Attendees will gain concrete strategies for centering wellbeing and partnering with communities in their planning work, whether or not they use WIATT as a tool to do so.
Speakers:
- Katya Fels Smyth, Founder and CEO, Full Frame Initiative
- Partners from the City of Cleveland and City of Kingston implementation teams
Katya Fels Smyth has dedicated her career to transforming systems that perpetuate inequity and harm. In 1995, she partnered with women who were unhoused in Cambridge and Boston to found On The Rise, a community for women pushed to the margins. Recognizing that righting inequities requires structural change, not services, in 2009, she founded the Full Frame Initiative (FFI), a social change organization moving the U.S. to be a country where everyone has a fair shot at wellbeing – the needs and experiences essential to weather challenges and have health and hope. Through FFI’s partnerships with communities, government, and organizations, Katya led transformative work as CEO that shifted narratives, surfaced new solution,s and created durable change. Examples include changing how pandemic recovery dollars flow into communities, transforming public perception and funding for domestic violence nationwide, and launching the Wellbeing Blueprint, an agenda for structural change in the wake of COVID and this country’s racial reckoning. She led FFI’s expansion into urban planning and climate, including the creation of WIATT, a tool for guiding infrastructure investments to increase wellbeing equity. A former Affiliate with MIT’s CoLab, Research Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Echoing Green Fellow, Katya lives in western Massachusetts with her spouse, teenagers, and an unwieldy menagerie of pets and rescued farm animals.
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