Centering Wellbeing in Community Co-Creation: WIATT and C4C
PAS Memo 121
By Senchel Matthews, Kathryn Reynolds
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Planners are educated and trained to "create great communities for all." As the field has moved toward equitable development principles, planners have shifted their roles from "experts" who define and decide how a community will be great to "co-creators" who allow community voices and ideas to lead their processes. This shift is essential to unwind generations of inequitable planning policies and ensure that future planning efforts meet the needs of existing residents.
However, community work is challenging. From the perspective of planners and government, engaging with a community can be slow, messy, and often adversarial. From a disinvested community's viewpoint, engaging with planners and government is slow and antagonistic, and it rarely results in changed opinions or decisions. These challenges underscore the need for a new approach that puts people's drive for wellbeing at the center of planning decisions to ensure more equitable development.
Two new tools offer planners innovative methods to harness wellbeing in their processes. The Full Frame Initiative's Wellbeing Insights, Assets & Tradeoffs Tool (WIATT) provides a method to help both planners and community residents gain robust insights into how a proposed infrastructure or built environment project will distribute its wellbeing benefits and tradeoffs among different constituencies so that plans can be adjusted and improved. And Urban Institute's Capital for Communities Scorecard (C4C) assesses proposed local development projects to understand their social, environmental, and economic impacts, weighting the resulting social impact score by the outcomes that the community prioritizes as most important.
This PAS Memo introduces planners to WIATT and C4C and explains how these tools offer organized evidence-based methods to structure community engagement, distribute capital project funds equitably, and advance projects that increase access to wellbeing for individuals and communities.
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About the Authors
Senchel Matthews
Senchel Matthews was the Associate Director for the Built Environment at the Full Frame Initiative, where she led efforts to center planning around wellbeing equity. Prior to FFI, she worked from coast to coast, managing planning projects focused on innovative program design, collective impact, social determinants of health, and community development. She managed the GO Neighborhoods program in Harris County, Texas, a comprehensive, equitable community development initiative. Her work in Texas helped sharpen her skills in regional planning, social enterprise development, leadership development training, mental health, holistic wrap-around services, and community engagement.
Kathryn Reynolds
Kathryn (Kate) Reynolds is a principal policy associate with the Research to Action Lab at the Urban Institute. Her work focuses on affordable rental housing, housing stability, and equitable community and economic development. Since March 2020, she has led Urban’s efforts to understand the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on the rental housing market. Previously, she served on the White House Council for Strong Cities, Strong Communities, a council founded by President Obama to help achieve economic recovery in U.S. cities across the country.