About the AuthorPatricia Talbot( CEO and Co-Founder )

Patti cultivates homegrown changemakers prepared to step into their power and work with others to create the world they want to live in.  Get in touch to find out how you can grow the social changemaker in yourself and those you serve with Blue Roads Changemaker YOU. 

Healing communities can seem like a daunting task, but that is the core mission of Changemaker Sara Dechter. As a certified urban community planner, Sara has a bird's eye view of the Flagstaff, Arizona community she serves.  From this vantage point, she looks for opportunities to bring growth, love, and understanding to the process of community development. The special secret to her work though is coming down to earth, walking the path alongside her constituents and listening to the voices within the community. 

In this episode of “On Your Own Terms,” Sara Dechter shares her “Homegrown Solutions for a Patchwork World”. Watch the video of our conversation, listen to the podcast, and read the summary! With her insights, you can find ways to bring healing to your community as well. And that journey begins with open hearts and open ears. 

Homegrown SaraSara began her life in Pensacola, Florida, one of the oldest European settlements in the United States. It is a place deeply rooted in history. Sara has extended family living in Iowa and many of her Irish relatives live in St. Louis, Missouri. She grew up loving nature conservation, agriculture, and big communities. These passions show up in her early career as she spent 10 years in environmental planning doing resource conservation work with the USDA Forest Service.

 

I've had the opportunity to take who I am, my family stories, the place I grew up, and channel it into being an urban planner.

Part of the inspiration for Sara's career path came from the way the Pensacola community is regularly affected by seasonal hurricanes.  Year after year, torrential winds and rain damages her hometown. Despite these challenges, the community comes together and recovers time and again. 

I think of resiliency. Pensacola is a place that's a laboratory for change and identity. It is a really important part of what I learned observing my community growing up. 

Solution-Focused SaraThat resiliency has remained an inspiration for Sara in her work to build strong communities.  Time and again, her “solutions” are centered around one core value – inclusive, collective decision-making. She recognizes that in order to bring the most growth and change, we must be conscientious about how decisions impact others and whether those affected have a voice in the changes that are being made to their community. 

It is hard to take a community of people who are all here for a different reason and bring their values and stories and to make a decision together. Those decisions matter to us both in the moment and for the generations ahead of us.

One example comes from Sara's work on a neighborhood plan in her community in Flagstaff that had experienced redlining and discrimination. When she started working on the plan, she asked herself the question

How do you tell the story of this community?

She began by asking everyone who she should talk to. 

Who are the silent leaders who have been a voice in the community for generations? 

By seeking out the local changemakers, she is able to talk to them and learn from them. She hears their stories and how they contribute to the growth and betterment of the community. It is not always the most famous person or the person with the fanciest business card. Some of the most influential people are the ones who quietly contribute to their communities behind the scenes.  

Sara's PatchworkBeing an urban planner is challenged by the need to balance the community’s funding, expectations, and cultures while fostering growth.  

Sara shares a story from her early days in this work. She put a lot of effort and thought into a plan for a neighborhood and presented it to a local community near where she grew up soon after completing her prestigious Notre Dame education.  After her presentation, an older gentleman approached her and said, “I don't speak as well as you, but I deserve to be listened to here.”  Sara understood that she was not bringing forward the solutions the community was asking for.

I had a great mentor named Becky who pulled me aside and talked to me about handling failure with compassion.

With the help of her mentor, Sara was able to realize that failure is part of the journey. It is important to stick your neck out and take chances. Sometimes, you take a few knocks and learn a valuable lesson. That is how we learn and get better. 

When Sara was given feedback by this older gentleman, it hurt. She had so many ideas on how the community could grow, but it wasn't what the community really needed.  Her mentor helped her bounce back and look for ways to improve her plans to be more inclusive of the community voice. 

That's what it means to work in the public. You really have to wear that with dignity, self-respect, and humility. We continue as a profession to work on that. It can't be cold. It has to have the warmth of humanity.

Sometimes communities can be divided by opinions on politics, racism, and other heated topics. We may avoid discussing subjects to avoid any conflict, but Sara says there is a way to include disparate opinions in the community discourse in a healthy way.

One of the best tools she uses is asking questions. 

How do I find the next person who's really that key person in any community? Who's the heart of your community?”

This approach takes her directly to the real local leaders. Then she asks questions that can lead toward solutions.

Solution-focused questions help avoid answers that put the blame on others. The questions are not an investigation to find fault. They are a survey to find solutions. 

There is an art to Sara's approach. When she partnered with colleagues from local nonprofits to bring the community together to share their stories., they put up a big poster with a timeline. People gathered around to share their stories across the history of the community.  In this way, a collective story can be born.  

Changemaker SaraSara recognizes how difficult it is to have meaningful conversations in polarized communities. Despite the challenges though, she insists on never excluding people from a conversation that affects them. Real solutions can often be found in productive disagreement.   

One of the successes I'm most proud of is the way that we have been able to build teams in my organization.

From the beginning, Sara has been intentional about creating teams and processes to fit an identified need. Not every project will be the same, but the key to success lies in a collaborative environment where everyone has a voice. 

Today, Sara is the only certified planner in the US who is also a certified public participation professional. She is also part of both the American Planning Association and the International Association for Public Participation. By combining the missions and skillsets of both organizations, Sara's approach to community work is strengthened and serves as a model of what could be the gold standard for public participation in urban planning. 

Sometimes places have history and are built to exclude and transforming them into places that include requires thinking outside the box.

As you can see, Sara's work as a Changemaker addresses many of the Sustainable Development Goals prescribed by the United Nations. Specifically, I see Goal #8 – Decent Work and Economic Growth, Goal #10 Reduced Inequalities, and Goal #11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities.  

In addition, her efforts advance Goal #16 – Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions and #17 – Partnership for the Goals. Stronger communities can come together to solve the toughest problems. No matter what challenges come …poverty, hunger, climate change, or lack of education, these can be managed by a participatory community that comes together to heal, to love, and to grow.  Sara shows us how. 

Please do get in touch to let us know what YOU and people you know are doing to realize these Global Goals by the year 2030.  We can reach them when we all work together and take our place as Changemakers doing our parts to make the world work better for everyone.  

CHECK OUT our CHANGEMAKER YOU course to help you get started today! 

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