Blue Hill Ave Real Talk Portal (2023)
As one of the dozens of engagement activities undertaken through the Blue Hill Ave Transportation Action Plan process, myself and my team at Grayscale Collaborative led a series of focus group conversations with Real Talk for Change, a program led by Caesar McDowell and the MIT Center for Constructive Communication. The Grayscale team led the 23 small-group conversations with over 170 community members who came from vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds, a process begun as a way to uplift voices not heard in more traditional engagement formats such as public meetings. The conversations focused on sharing lived experiences and relationship-building rather than the Blue Hill Ave transportation planning process exclusively, generating rich insights on community challenges and ways that the BHA TAP process could reconcile social and economic stratification. Conversations were held specifically with youth and older adults as well as every age in between.
As part of the facilitation process, the Grayscale team collectively trained trusted community members to facilitate their own Real Talk conversations, receiving compensation for their expertise. With this group, our team led sensemaking workshops to give community partners agency over the data collection and processing steps. Collectively, our shared teams developed a codebook with six key themes to organize insights from the conversation. Partnering with Cortico, the Grayscale team designed the Real Talk highlights portal to uplift community voices and allow project decision-makers to hear directly the varied perspectives on the BHA TAP process. Visit the conversation library here to hear the highlights from each conversation and visit the process section here to read more about the unique Real Talk sensemaking process. Please click on any of the slides below to visit the corresponding webpage.
This report would not have been possible without the full Grayscale team, especially Anne Lin, Caroline Filice Smith, Emma Yudelevitch, Stephen Gray and Whitney Thomas.
