Winter-Spring Series 2017:

Who belongs? Dialogues on Race and Ethnicity in Medford and Beyond

January 29th 2017 through March 12th 2017

Our first conversations series was an amazing success!  For our first conversations series 100 members of the Medford community participated in nine conversation "circles" that each met five times over the course of six weeks. Twenty-six of the participants completed ten hours of facilitation training from Everyday Democracy  to serve as facilitators for their circles. The widely publicized Opening Event maxed out our facility and had over 215 attendees with a number of volunteers recruited at the last minute to serve as additional facilitators.  Our closing "Action Event" pulled together issues and ideas from circle participants and members of the Medford Community.  You can read those issues and ideas for actions generated by the circles below.

Issues

Attendees at the Closing Event were asked to vote on the issues that were raised by the circle participants, each attendee getting three votes in a round of "dotmocracy".  Here are the results, in order of votes, with the number of votes in parenthesis before each issue.  Note that issues that did not receive many, or any, votes, were still considered important enough to raise and put on the list.
  • (62) City Government/Leadership
    • Lack of diversity in Medford community leadership (city council, school committee, chamber of commerce, both elected and non-elected, appointed, etc.)
  • (34) Housing/Gentrification 
    • Lack of affordable housing (e.g., long voucher lists/high prices for rent/purchase)
  • (28) Education 
    • Lack of diversity among public schools teachers (not representative of race/ethnicity of students)
  • (28) Communication 
    • Lack of network for disseminating information: How are community activities being communicated? How do people find out about all that's happening in Medford?
  • (27) Engagement 
    • Communities in Medford are too isolated by culture or neighborhoods. Need more opportunities to connect communities beyond language/cultural barriers.
  • (25) Engagement 
    • Lack of opportunities for social connectedness and to interact with others beyond personal social circles.
  • (17) Immigrants 
    • Medford becoming a sanctuary city/outward display important
  • (14) Engagement 
    • Need to expand the conversations - more diverse representation when discussing issues of common concern.
  • (11) Education 
    • Lack of diversity in school curriculum (need more authors of color, diverse perspectives)
  • (11) City Government/Leadership
    • Lack of diversity in city government employees
  • (10) City Government/Leadership
    • Lack of coordination between City Hall, civic organizations, businesses and residents
  • (9) Communication
    • Lack of awareness of discrimination in Medford
  • (9) Housing/Gentrification
    • Gentrification of African-Americans in Medford, where children cannot stay in Medford and the elderly cannot stay because of tax rates
  • (8) Education 
    • High School curriculum/homework load too high, not connecting to who students are and what are interested in
  • (8) Police 
    • Not enough communication / transparency between community and the police/ impression is that some groups treated harsher by police than others/biased policing
  • (6) Immigrants 
    • Lack of resources for new immigrants
  • (6) Education 
    • High School facility needs improvement
  • (5) Public Works/Transportation
    • Lack of adequate public transportation to underserved neighborhoods (socioeconomic bias as well as race)
  • (4) Education 
    • Tufts should do more to financially help Medford students attend and outreach to get them there
  • (4) Social Services/Health Care
    • Lack of day care for seniors
  • (3) Immigrants 
    • Not enough ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) spaces for demand
  • (3) Communication
    • Current communication methods do not reflect diversity - public schools blog, Medford facebook
  • (3) Social Services/Health Care 
    • No multi-service center in Medford
  • (2) Social Services/Health Care 
    • Need more mental health programs in general.
  • (2) Education 
    • Not every special needs child receives a quality education
  • (2) Public Works/Transportation
    • Not all streets taken care of equally (road maintenance, snow/ice removal, pedestrian/bike safety)
  • (2) Social Services/Health Care 
    • Need for broader range of social services (beyond crisis intervention i.e. prevention, youth services, homeless prevention)
  • (2) Social Services/Health Care 
    • Lack of affordable childcare (long voucher lists)
  • (2) Social Services/Health Care 
    • Lacking in youth programs and services, options for parents in other cities only
  • (1) Education 
    • Need better early education (preschool)
  • (1) Employment 
    • Lack of pay equality (race and gender)
  • (1) Employment 
    • Income inequality/poverty
  • (1) Engagement 
    • Chamber of Commerce racial & ethnic insensitivity with Restaurant Week event (little effort to inform or recruit any ethnic restaurants to participate)
  • (1) Public Works/Transportation
    • Make Medford prettier (flowers, gardens, rotaries)-use Community Preservation Act fund?
  • (0) Communication
    • Insufficient Medford coverage / insufficient news reported
  • (0) Communication 
    • Lack of demographic Medford data
  • (0) Education 
    • Leadership opportunities at schools are not designed to include all parents

Additional issues were raised at the Final Event, but weren't available to all tables for voting, due to logistics:
  • Disability, Inclusion in the planning of all public services including in the recreation program
  • Attention to and accommodations for a diversity of individuals with visible and invisible special needs and challenges to be included in dialogue and planning of all generations. - 1 vote
  • Places for teens to meet
  • Funding opportunities
  • Stakeholder engagement - 3 votes
  • Image of the quality of education - 3 votes
  • A need for community resources and community need opportunities to be organized, updated and available in a central location.  Resource need matching. - 1 vote

Ideas for Action

The Circles also generated a lot of ideas for actions around Race and Ethnicity. We share these ideas below in the hopes that some of them may spur action.
City Government/Leadership
  • Rigorous campaign to get people voting-make it easy to find out about local elections and issues
  • Lower municipal voting age to 16 to engage young people in the future of Medford
  • Tap/encourage people to think about leadership at a younger age
  • Charter review - have ward representation
  • Term limits for political seats
  • Use participatory budgeting (where residents vote on how to spend a portion of the city budget) to engage residents
  • Review hiring practices in city - more diversity in city government employees-fire, police, schools,
  • Understanding of wider range or experience/needs

Communication
  • Welcome packet when move to city
  • City newsletter (like Somerville weekly email newsletter)
  • Do outreach through a variety of methods, not just social media
  • Create resource directory
  • Local access programming needs to be developed
  • Newspaper news/stories require initiative to see all pieces of the city

Education
  • Include more parents in PTO meetings (especially non-English speakers)
  • Hire more teachers of color
  • Project Citizen - curriculum about making social change for high school students
  • Get kids in schools involved in civic engagement and bring their parents in

Employment
  • Increase minimum wage
  • Create ways to move into higher paying jobs
  • Create more jobs

Engagement
  • Create more opportunities for social engagement:
    • “unity” dinners/potlucks;
    • West Medford Open Studios;f
    • Humans of Medford;
    • World Cafe/MHS;
    • physical spaces for meeting;
    • faith community outreach/inreach-interfaith network;
    • website for civic participation;
    • project -who are our neighbors? “Portraits of community” question set;
    • have conversation corner at Circle the Square in Peace park
  • More vibrant community centers
  • Meeting people where they are and have multiple entry points
  • Medford Community  Coalition/exemplars? Portsmouth NH
  • Post office mural - curate/interpret (Royall House)
  • The initiation and development of a Medford version of “Cambridge At Home”, which is a network of sharing, interests, socializing, support in localized communities.

Housing/Gentrification
  • Enforce affordable housing quotas with new developments
  • Could the Community Preservation Act be used to support affordable housing aspect to help people stay in their own home?  Ie. a roof repair (loan or grant), upkeep

Police
  • Hire more police officers of color
  • Attend the Medford Police Community Forum at West Medford Community Center, April 5
  • Police recognize and treat, not arrest for opiate issue, which is positive

Public Works/Transportation
  • Advocacy for your neighborhood - how have equal treatment?  Get people to advocate

Social Services/Health Care
  • Need strong recreation department
  • Library is important community resource which should be supported

Engagement
  • the initiation and development of a Medford version of “Cambridge At Home”, which is a network of sharing, interests, socializing, support in localized communities.