On July 4, the nascent community of the Centocelle Archaeological Park meets in the Houses of Culture at Villa de Sanctis to participate in the third workshop organized by LabGov.
The meeting begins as always with the presentation of the “new arrivals”: members of new associations active in the area and individual citizens who care about the future of the Park are added to the participants.
During the two previous meetings, the community set a common goal, started a process of mutual knowledge through the sharing of values and skills and identified the heart of the park’s issues, benefits, and expectations; The last step of workshop #2 was to identify an action: the park’s tenth anniversary party.
The concept “How could we organize THE FESTIVAL OF THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PARK through easy actions so as to create socialization, well-being, relaxation, knowledge, exchange?” – is the heart of a first project that will see the group compete in the involvement of the community for the design and implementation of this event that has been called “Operation Festival of the Park”.
This operation will serve not only to test the operations team, but above all to make the group visible to the outside and to mobilize the community in the redevelopment paths of the Park to shared management, integrating as much as possible public and private.
Step 1- Comparison of community needs analysis
We start by specifying that the strategic objective of the “Operation Festa del Parco” is not to favor a massive presence during the celebration, but to trigger the first good practices of activation of the whole territory (associations, private individuals and institutions) in this first participatory action on the Park.
Participants of the previous meeting were asked to report the results of the interviews on the identification of community needs. What emerges is that there is a lack of knowledge of the current conditions of the Park: many, in fact, do not access because they have memory of stray dogs, the lack of shady areas, the cumbersome presence of scrappers and skids, and the total inaccessibility. The needs most requested by the community therefore turn out to be cleanliness and safety.
Among those present there is a voice (Patrizia) that says that the Park is very popular only on some festive occasions of the year, after which the Park is forgotten. Patrizia strongly affirms that the Park is a place, not a place to be attended only when there is an event! Patrizia concludes by saying that events are welcome, but they must not be an end in themselves. This statement fits perfectly with the strategic objective of “Operation Festa del Parco”: the party, in fact, is not the end, but the carburetor of the actions.
From the first moment of comparison two very important aspects emerge:
- People don’t come into the park, and they have an altered vision that keeps them away. This is a clear sign of the existence of a serious communication problem.
- the goal of the festival is not the party itself, but is to communicate the value of the Park as a Park, as a resource and a place of attraction for the community and for the community
Step 2 – Summary of the Park’s Value Proposition: The Park as a resource.
These two important data contributed to the definition of the Value Proporsition of the Park.
An adaptation of Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas was used as a tool to conduct the workshop. This tool has the function of combining in a strategic way the contents that emerge from the collective confrontation to have an organic overview of a dynamic and unpredictable context such as the CAP community.
Step 3 – Visualization of the “Business Model” of the “Operation Park Festival”
In this case the tool is functional to the design of a specific action (the festival de Park) that responds to real needs, through actions that are easily executable involving the territory (private individuals, associations, institutions), mobilizing resources present in the territory and providing collaborative solutions to cover costs.
Once the “objective value” (the Value Proposition) is identified as “the Park as a resource”, participants begin to propose micro-activities of emblematic and aggregator mending. These actions must be understood as “minimum working solutions” that will contribute to increasing the value of the Park.
Step 3 – The Activities
The various activities proposed highlight the typical problems related to the organization of initiatives from below, that is administrative constraints, permits and bureaucratic regulations to be respected. Assuming that regulations are not always obstacles to action, the group is able to negotiate, according to a shared priority criterion, a list of micro-activities easily executable: build a playground with abandoned logs, plant/adopt trees, establish an observation point for birds, organise visits to underground cavities, organise information boards for plants and species, design and manage a community garden, organise a photo workshop, to set up a historical/photographic path, to restore the fountains that are not working, to organize recreational activities, to organize the partial cleaning of the Park, to establish the day of walking, to set up a temporary cricket ground, to build furniture with pallets.
Step 4 – The Users
Having established the micro-activities, we move on to the definition of the users. The event is certainly aimed at everyone, but detailing the different categories helped to define partners and solutions.
Users to contact are: families, young people, elderly, adolescents, lazy, environmentalists, lonely people, neighborhood commuters, tourists, journalists, associations, tour guides, committees, disabled, bird watchers, speleologists, archaeologists, sports, foreign communities, dog owners, who does not know the Park, disappointed by the Park.
These users are required to participate actively not only on the day of the event, but also for project activities.
Step 5 – Communication Channels, Partners and Resources
To convey the awareness of the impact that the event can have on the community, specific channels of communication are chosen for the “recruitment” of territorial partners to be involved: institutions, universities, the Joint Command, schools, the Civil Protection, The Elderly Centers, the neighborhood newspapers, local traders, Roma families, the demolition cars (explicitly provocative proposal), the Parishes, the Mosque, the Green Childhood Point.
These entities will be an active part in the participatory action through the provision of their resources.
Step 6 – Costs and Solutions
Mobilizing this action plan involves structured costs in time and money.
To meet this need, a series of solutions are defined to identify the “currency of exchange” that the community can offer: crowdfunding campaigns, fundraising activities, search for sponsors, identification of physical and non-community goods, (all those goods that the inhabitants of the neighborhood can share to actively participate in the organization, from technical/intellectual skills to physical objects).
The working group will meet after the holidays to resume work.
