For this stage of the park planning, we provided two ways for community members to weigh in on the project: a pair of workshops and a survey.
Let’s talk about the survey first, since that was how most people took part in the process.
The survey asked questions about what community members do at parks, what type of experience they want to see at Willamette Cove, how they would like to access the river and how Metro should balance access for people with providing space for nature. The survey was online, in English and Spanish, and open to everyone. We shared it through Metro’s social media and, critically, through a postcard that went out to every residence in North Portland, which tallied just under 37,000 homes. The survey was open from the last week of April to mid-May.
While we did not ask where folks lived in greater Portland, we know the vast majority of survey participants were from North Portland since most of the surveys were filled on the days the postcards hit mailboxes.
More than 2,200 people finished the survey, with each offering about 16 minutes of their time.
We were pleased with this response, and we can’t say how much we appreciate the time community members gave to us. The survey provided the park planners a rich set of data that is guiding their designs. That’s a success.
We made one faulty decision on the postcard that we’ll avoid next time. The postcard included a QR code that linked directly to the survey, but we didn’t include a web address. We heard from multiple people that this made the survey inaccessible to people without smartphones or who don’t have experience with QR codes. They’re right, and the next postcard will have a URL.
While it did a good job collecting a lot of information, the survey did not do a good job gathering information from a representative sample of either the North Portland community or the Metro region.
First, we didn’t reach people of color well. White people make up about 79% of North Portland’s population, but they represented 83% of the survey participants. Every other racial and ethnic group was extremely underrepresented. Black community members, are nearly 14% of North Portland's population, but made up less than 2% of respondents. (Slavic and Middle Eastern or North African people are the exceptions to this underrepresentation, but data for both groups is difficult to parse.)
The survey participants also skewed toward higher incomes and homeowners. People with disabilities were underrepresented by about half. All of this is in line with past surveys Metro’s done.
We know all of this because the vast majority of the participants answered the small set of demographic questions at the survey’s end. These questions are incredibly valuable for helping us do better and take different aproaches to make sure we hear from a set of people who look like our entire community.
The workshops we held are part of that work to do better. They are designed to make sure we hear from communities who have been left out of or who have often been harmed by government decision-making processes.
We held a virtual workshop and an in-person workshop in early May, while the survey was live. Each workshop had capacity for 50 participants, and 37 participated in-person and 25 attended the online session (more than 50 registered, so we learned lessons about virtual no-shows). The workshops had at a lot of the same information as the survey, but added activities that let community members place ideas for park features on maps.
One of the maps filled in by community members during a workshop in May.
We worked with several community-based organizations to help get the word out to the communities they serve, including the Indigenous, Black and Latine communities, the disability community, and the houseless community.
We were successful in reaching people of color. The in-person engagement was 46% Latine, 29% white, 14% Black, 6% Asian American, 6% Middle Eastern or North African, and 3% Native American.
Folks with cognitive difficulty or vision difficulty were better represented in the workshop compared to the survey, but overall the disability community was still underrepresented, so we have clear work to do better for this community.
Unfortunately, only eight virtual participants filled out the demographic questions, so we don’t have good data for that workshop.