Fostering Equitable Transit Oriented Development
Elevated Chicago
Elevated Chicago began as a transformative idea for addressing Chicago’s stark racial and geographic concentrations of poverty and wealth, put forward by a bold group of sustainability, community development, and finance practitioners to the SPARCC national funding competition. Foresight joined this group as coalition-facilitators and proposal writers. Through our expert facilitation, and with the help of our systems-change approach and tools, the process aligned the visions of this diverse group of professionals and surfaced the most impactful leverage points, ensuring that the application would pursue the truly transformative change the competition sought. The resulting vision—Elevated Chicago—imagined an innovative collaboration of community-based and region-wide organizations working in the public, private and nonprofit sectors coming together to create a more racially equitable city and region using an approach called Equitable Transit Oriented Development, or eTOD. The result: a winning $1M proposal, plus millions of investment potential for Chicago focused on equity, health, and climate resilience.
One and a half years after the winning proposal, we crossed paths again with Elevated. In that time they had established a staff, a larger coalition of partner organizations, and a host of “community tables” and cross-site working groups, each of which worked with individual priorities and approaches to community engagement. In need of greater cohesion among its entities, deeper understanding of how neighborhood-based work can shift forces that have historically driven racial inequality, and concrete recommendations to decision makers in local government, Elevated reengaged Foresight for a yearlong process of research, systems analysis, synthesis, priority alignment, and design. The process culminated in our creation of an actionable organizational workplan that incorporates the workplans of each of the community tables, framed with an innovative narrative-based structure woven from the stories and lived experiences of community members, and a set of community engagement principles and recommendations built from insights and effective approaches from frontline organizations across Chicago.
Today Elevated Chicago engages community members around seven CTA stations, and their partners invest resources in eTOD programs and projects within a 1⁄2 mile radius around each station. The City of Chicago’s Transit Oriented Development ordinance and policy make areas surrounding transit stops especially attractive for development: eTOD helps ensure that these new assets will be enjoyed equitably by the area’s existing and longtime residents.
