Celebrating the 2023 Western Planner Student Planning Project Award: City of Phoenix 2025 General Plan Youth Engagement Strategy
by Loras Rauch, AICP and Meagan Ehlenz, AICP, PhD
2023 Award Winner:
Arizona State University Planning Workshop Students for their work on the “City of Phoenix 2025 General Plan Youth Engagement Strategy”
Youth engagement is a tough nut to crack, but a vital component when considering a community’s future (General Plan), and one that has historically been left out or under engaged by many communities. The City of Phoenix chose to change that paradigm as they embarked on the City’s 2025 General Plan. The City of Phoenix’s Planning & Development Department reached out to ASU’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (SGSUP) to see if the graduate program students enrolled in the “Planning Workshop” course would be interested in taking on the task of designing and implementing a youth engagement strategy in support of the City’s ongoing public outreach process for the 2025 General Plan.
Each year, SGSUP’s partners with Arizona communities and organizations to incorporate real-world planning challenges into the “Planning Workshop” class curriculum to provide the graduate program students with hands-on planning experiences, as well as foster meaningful relationships and provide useful planning deliverables to the partnering communities. The “Planning Workshop” class functions as a planning “firm,” with faculty advising students as they take on the role of planning consultant and work for a public-sector client.
The project included four deliverables: (1) a best practices report; (2) workshop materials with lesson plans for replication; (3) ArcGIS StoryMap with interactive dashboard (http://bit.ly/phx_youth2050) for each school with results; and (4) a summary analysis and report with recommendations that are tailored to the diversity of Phoenix youth.
The “Planning Workshop” work began in the fall 2022 semester with an investigation of the best practices for youth engagement in long-range planning and public outreach efforts. In addition to their extensive review of existing best practices for youth engagement, “Planning Workshop” also interviewed four cities who have pursued youth engagement work as part of their public outreach efforts (Cincinnati, OH, Charlotte, NC, Memphis, TN, and Tempe, AZ).
During the spring 2023 semester “Planning Workshop” used the best practices as a foundation for designing a two-hour youth engagement workshop for 5th to 8th grade youth in Phoenix. The workshop included four activities, ranging from ice-breaker activities to both passive and active engagement, that would engage with youth in the most inclusive ways possible. “Planning Workshop” intentionally designed a youth outreach strategy that offered different styles of engagement to kids. The ASU students recognized that not all youth are comfortable talking with adults in the same way, so they created an ice breaker activity (incorporating physical movement and a few silly questions to get kids talking from the start) that led into three additional engagement methods with more passive and active attributes. As a result, “Planning Workshop” truly offered a variety of options for kids to inclusively share their thoughts—immediately or after some thought, out loud or via writing or voting. “Planning Workshop” piloted their proposed outreach plan at one public K-8 school, working with 4th through 8th grade classrooms, before developing a final workshop format to implement in additional classrooms.
“Planning Workshop” students developed a complete set of workshop materials that would allow teachers, planners, and/or other facilitators to replicate the outreach process with other youth. Their Youth Engagement Workshop Materials packet included a complete lesson plan for each of the four youth outreach strategies, including details regarding workshop best practices, required materials, and detailed descriptions of each activity with “lesson” objectives, prompts, and special materials. The City of Phoenix will be able to share these materials with other youth engagement partners throughout their general planning process. In addition, the workshop materials packet offers a transferrable, best-practices-informed approach for other communities interested in incorporating youth perspectives into their planning efforts.
All total the ASU “Planning Workshop” students came together to: (1) design a series of youth engagement activities for 5th to 8th graders to elicit public input on Phoenix’s future; (2) launch the youth engagement outreach program in eight Council member-selected schools across Phoenix, collecting data about what Phoenix youth want to see in the future; and (3) analyze youth perspectives to provide recommendations to the City of Phoenix as they draft the 2025 General Plan. During the spring 2023 semester, the ASU “Planning Workshop” students engaged with more than 200 youth across Phoenix from eight schools (one pilot school with three classrooms and seven classroom workshops in schools selected by the Mayor and Council members).
The students’ work offers a blueprint for engaging youth in an all-important public outreach process—something that is often neglected but represents an important opportunity to expand the definition of “public.”
A variety of youth engagement, photos courtesy of ASU Youth Engagement, 2025 General Plan.
About the Authors
Meagan Ehlenz, AICP PhD is an associate professor at Arizona State University's School of Geography and Urban Planning. She is also the Associate Director of Planning programs. Her major fields of study include urban revitalization and community development, with specializations in the role of anchor institutions in urban places and mechanisms for building community wealth.
Prior to joining ASU's faculty, Ehlenz was a research associate at the Penn Institute for Urban Research. In this capacity, she developed a set of case studies for Penn IUR's Anchor Institution Roundtable (PRAI), "The Power of Eds & Meds: Urban Universities Investing in Neighborhood Revitalization and Innovation." She was also a Lincoln Institute of Land Policy C. Lowell Harriss dissertation fellow. Previously, Ehlenz worked as a planning consultant in Southeastern Wisconsin and as a senior planner for the City of Milwaukee's Department of City Development.
Ehlenz is a a certified planner with the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP).
Loras Rauch, AICP is the president of Contract Planning Services and the President-elect of Western Planner Resources. Her firm specializes in land development codes & zoning ordinance development, urban design standards, current planning processes, public outreach & involvement, and form based codes. She has also been actively supportive of the Tribal and Indigenous Planning Division of the APA and enjoys her work with Tribal communities.