ALTON - City Shapers is a community and economic development cohort that launched in September with leaders from all across Alton, including business owners, nonprofit leaders, city council members, and more. For the past four months, they have been studying the ways in which Alton has been addressing poverty and surveying the Alton public about their opinions. Friday morning, they announced their findings in a virtual meeting.
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The cohort has been working with The Lupton Center, a nonprofit training and consultancy firm based in Atlanta, to conduct this research. In total, 60 Alton residents who were members of the cohort conducted 21 word-on-the-street interviews.
“Over the last four months, this cohort has really gotten into the grassroots of neighborhoods,” said Stacy Brungardt, a consultant with The Lupton Center. “They’ve been going around and interviewing people that are experiencing chronic material poverty in the city and asking them questions about the social, economic, and structural systems that are currently in play - and so this is a real-time ground analysis of ‘What’s the current reality?’ It’s not a judgment, it’s not a criticism whatsoever, it’s just so that we understand what’s working and what’s not, currently.”
Brungardt said there were some interesting findings from these interviews, including how Alton respondents view their neighbors and city leadership.
“Half of the people that were interviewed said they have really trusting relationships with their neighbors. That was pretty cool. The other half wanted to have those relationships, so they were really asking about ways to host events or opportunities to have neighborhood barbecues,” Brungardt said.
“They also wanted credible leadership in the neighborhood,” Brungardt said. “Not only from neighbor to neighbor but also at the city level, they didn’t feel like they had a visible representation. Many of them felt like the area has been overlooked and overgrown and become blighted because nobody’s paying attention from the city level.”
Based on these responses, the team numerically ranked Alton on a four-point scale across five areas: execution, solutions, integration, relationships, and participation. In those five areas, Alton ranked 4.0 on execution, 3.8 on solutions, 3.7 on integration, 3.3 on relationships, and 2.8 on participation, for an overall average of 3.56 out of 4.
Brungardt said she was encouraged by the results overall, which indicate Alton is a collaborative community. However, she also said there is work to be done in the lower-scoring areas of relationships and participation, pointing out that 80 percent of survey respondents felt like Alton’s services were “transactional,” meaning there was no further personal connection beyond exchanges.
As part of the “solutions” area, the group also analyzed Alton’s distribution of resources. They found the number of resources allocated to social services tripled the amount invested in categories like housing and education.
“You have triple investment … in things that are not creating a long-term impact,” Brungardt said. “I would actually like to see that social service number go down, down, down, and the housing and health go up.”
Over the next four months, City Shapers looks to conduct a community-wide assessment focusing more on the social, economic, and structural systems that were mentioned in the word-on-the-street interviews. While they have not publicly announced how to get involved in the next phase of their assessment, they do look for feedback from community members and will announce those details in the near future.
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