The District of Squamish plans to engage the community on how COVID-19 impacted the community and what could be done to create a “better, more equitable, resilient and inclusive’ community.
The public engagement process, in three phases, will provide an opportunity for council to gather public input and “collective wisdom and experience” to help the district find a path forward.
The first phase of this process would bring a group of diverse people in the community later in the summer to help form the initial questions.
The questions could look something like this: What has been hard about living with the pandemic? What has emerged as a silver lining or a more positive outcome? What gave people hope during the early months of the pandemic? If we wanted to address the hard things to make them better, what can we do together? If we wanted to embed the positives of the things that give us hope more deeply into the fabric of our community, how would we do that?
The second phase of the engagement would be run on the Thought Exchange platform through August, September and perhaps some of October.
Thought Exchange is an online tool that invites community members to share their ideas, and then gives them the opportunity to rate other ideas. The ideas that receive the highest rating will indicate to the community where citizens’ common interests lie and will determine the themes for the second phase of the engagement.
The third phase would involve hosting one or several safe, in-person, small groups of people, either by the district or by non-profits.
Mayor Karen Elliott will be actively involved in this project and a facilitator would help execute the project and host these conversations.
“Without pre-supposing what might emerge from Thought Exchange or the conversations, the goal of this project is to identify a list of goal statements or principles and actions that will forge our path forward to build back better,” says a staff report.
