What makes a city livable? It’s more than just jobs, schools, culture and weather. It’s knowing your neighbors have your back.

That’s because even if a community can provide economic prosperity, educational opportunity, social stability and equity, cultural, entertainment and recreation possibilities as well as natural environments, residents don’t find a place to be livable if they don’t feel connected to others around them.

Creating a livable city is something on the minds of many people in Seattle, which is growing at a record pace. We have been trying to address this challenge as part of the Washington Technology Industry Association Ion Program.

Launched in May 2017, Ion was born out of Seattle’s urgent need for cross-sector collaboration. The complex civic issues that are present in our city can only be meaningfully addressed when different industries come together to create dynamic solutions. Ion Collaborators of various professional backgrounds are grouped into three teams  – accessibility, economic growth, and livability. We represent the Livability team.

Livable Cities Are Empathetic Cities

When Ion volunteer interviewed residents, members of the tech community and mission-driven organizations, a common theme emerged: empathy is needed for a livable city.

If we figure out the secret sauce of community-wide empathy and resilience, could we deepen the experience of community in a way that allows for more productive conversations about affordable housing, public services, and more.

To try to answer this question, Ion collaborators brought together organizers, activists, artists, and placemakers to share best practices for fostering empathy in their own communities. Participants described instances in which they felt personally welcomed and supported – from neighbors offering their home as a refuge during one participant’s home renovation project to a professor supporting a student whose parents were deported during the school year. Feedback from participants included:

civic power of empathy Giving Compass

“Hearing input from others ... affirms experiences you had when you thought you were the only person who had these experiences.”

“[There was] meaningful engagement in the room that I want to bring to the community.”

“Being genuine and vulnerable is a good thing and useful in storytelling.”

Then participants shared professional success stories and lessons learned, revealing patterns of community-building that transcended industries, organizational structures, or resources.

Here’s how you can embrace an empathetic approach:

  1. Trust and empathy develop between individuals, not organizations. Community members want to identify people in the community who are reliable, not necessarily organizations. In practice, this means that employees and volunteers should be prepared to share information about themselves, not just talking points about an organization’s mission.
  2. Active listening is critical. After individuals have kicked off a conversation with a personal anecdote, they should take a step back and listen. Really listen! Ask community members – repeatedly and in different ways – what livability means to them. Pause to identify unconscious bias and assumptions along the way and ask community members to clarify statements that could be open to interpretation.
  3. The most successful community-builders are firm on a vision but flexible on the execution. These organizations articulate their priorities for employees and volunteers but allow individuals to identify the most authentic engagement tactics to achieve these goals.
A Versatile Model for Building Authentic, Gut-Level Connections

Having worked on and lived this initial and experimental evening, we believe strongly in its promise in building authentic connections between people. We saw and felt in the participants something we did not expect: a sense of relief that this type of deeply human connection is not only still possible in today’s technology-dependent and arguably increasingly divided society, but also that it is possible to create quickly.

The model is able to do this -- whether in this setting, or in a nonprofit, public, and private setting -- by bringing together key individuals from their own communities, organizations, or other groups of interest who would otherwise likely never meet. It then invites them to think together and aloud about what makes people feel welcome, included, and part of a larger – you might call it civic, or even civil community.

No interruptions, no privileging one person over another, and no hard limits on where the group wants to take the conversation.

This type of organic but highly intentional and curated conversation can be just what an organization or community needs to break through old patterns, overcome divisions of all sorts, and to create new connections that can lead to stronger teams, more solidarity, innovation, and, for some, the beginnings of true inclusion.

We know that not every experiment or conversation will go as planned, but in every coming together, people share who they are, ideas emerge and shift, and new collective possibilities are born. We would invite anyone who thinks this model might be useful to be open to being as surprised as we were by what can happen.

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Original contribution by Dr. Ryan Biava (City of Seattle), Melanie Chavez (Year Up), Alexis Perlmutter (Amazon), Jeanne Suleiman (Seattle Public Schools), B.J. Stewart (Urban Impact), Dr. Lorraine Yu (Sirius 6).