The Minnesota Equity Blueprint Addresses Widening Inequalities and the Climate Crisis
Growth & Justice president Jane Leonard on a new tool for Minnesota communities and policymakers
By Sheri Hansen | April 15, 2021
A community visioning session at a statewide organizing conference in June 2018, held at the Upper Sioux Community.
FEATURE
Since its founding nearly 20 years ago, Growth & Justice has centered its work on examining Minnesota’s complex inequities and using research and innovative community engagement to identify paths forward. More recently, the organization partnered with OneMN.org and worked with members of the Thriving by Design Network—Urban & Rural Together to create the Minnesota Equity Blueprint. The new document—a policy and community-action handbook on urban and rural equity issues that reach across the state—highlights the interconnectedness of growing disparities and shows how a diversity of perspectives can create a richer diversity of solutions.
The Blueprint was released in February 2020, just a month before the pandemic slammed into Minnesota. The issues it aims to address have become even more critical in light of the social and economic impacts of COVID-19. Many of the issues both shape and are shaped by the built environment. ENTER sat down with Growth & Justice president Jane Leonard to get her insights on the Blueprint and the role of the architecture community in the work of resolving inequities.
“I think the pandemic and the racial reckoning we are facing have actually created more awareness of the inequities that have been impeding our progress for generations,” says Leonard. “In some ways, the pandemic has created new urgency to have these important conversations, to get to the bottom of some of these issues, and to find new ways to work together to solve them.”
A Vigorous Community Engagement Process
“Creating the Blueprint took years of carefully managed, deep, rich, and meaningful community engagement,” says Leonard. “By selecting leaders from communities all over the state that represent where our state is headed demographically, training and connecting them so they became a network, and creating the time and space each community needed to gather its issues and proposed solutions, we felt that the process demonstrated how much we as Minnesotans depend on each other, and that our solutions will work best when they serve as many communities as possible.”
“Issues like broadband access and affordable housing demonstrate that our needs are not separated by an urban-rural divide—they are connected by a common challenge.”
Growth & Justice worked with a number of organizational partners on the project, including during the creation of the community engagement process. Over the course of two years, the Blueprint team convened two statewide conferences and more than a dozen community meetings designed to generate discussion of the issues as well as ideas for resolving them. The process yielded 700 policy proposals; 140 made their way into the Blueprint.
“In many cases, the proposals from communities could be grouped together, which shows that our communities face common challenges and can work together for change,” says Leonard. “We didn’t just ask economic development experts and mayors to weigh in; we created space for new voices, and those voices reinforced the opportunity we have to explore community and policy solutions to inequities that have been building in Minnesota for hundreds of years.”
Interconnected Challenges
The Minnesota Equity Blueprint is organized into four chapters—Human Capital, Economic Development, Infrastructure, and Environmental Resilience—each containing sub-sections. The Economic Development chapter, for example, tackles criminal justice reform, an issue that has become even more prominent in Minnesota following the events of 2020 and 2021. Affordable housing and broadband access are organized under Infrastructure.
“Issues like broadband access and affordable housing demonstrate that our needs are not separated by an urban-rural divide—they are connected by a common challenge,” Leonard explains. “The pandemic highlighted how a shortage of broadband access in rural Minnesota and in some inner-city neighborhoods created a ripple effect of educational challenges for our children, career challenges for individuals, and business challenges that impacted whole communities.
“And research shows us a dearth of affordable housing in nearly every community in the state, urban or rural,” she continues. “While the solutions need to be customized to fit a community’s individual goals, understanding the commonalities of the challenges and pooling resources can help identify some cornerstone solutions that help everyone—and can open doors to policy solutions that are desperately needed at the federal, state, and local levels.”
Design Thinking to Drive Solutions
Leonard sees architects, engineers, and planners as having an especially important role in advancing environmental equity. “The built environment’s impact on climate is significant,” she says. “It’s wonderful to see how design professionals are engaging their tools to help counteract that impact.” She cites architects who have long been working across Minnesota to help identify ways to respond to the climate challenge, raise awareness of the opportunities to make meaningful change, and help communities visualize a more climate-responsive future.
“I’ve been engaged with the Minnesota Design Team for many years, so I’ve seen the power of design thinking to help bring a community’s vision to life,” says Leonard. “Much of the work of that group over the decades has been to help communities identify their issues, explore their future, and create a collective visual to rally around. Design thinking can be an important tool as we start to take action on the Blueprint, in part because architects have a special understanding of the physics of the built environment, along with its less-tangible elements.”
Minnesota is a place where many things come together: human cultures, merging bodies of water, and multiple climate zones and biomes. Leonard sees the Blueprint as a way to harness the power of those community and environmental connections to solve problems for all Minnesotans.
“Over the course of Minnesota’s history, our greatest successes have come when we found ways to bridge divides, share both success and challenge, and work together equitably to solve problems,” she says. “We hope the Blueprint gives Minnesotans of today and tomorrow another tool for building a better future for our state.”