The San Francisco Environment Department, or SF Environment, spearheads the City’s Climate Action Plan (CAP), which outlines the citywide strategy to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. The actions and strategies in the Climate Action Plan strives to address racial and social equity, public health, economic recovery, resilience, and providing safe and affordable housing to all.
In July 2023, Civic Edge Consulting was hired by the San Francisco Environment Department to plan and implement three events: the City of San Francisco 2023 Climate Action Plan (CAP) Retreat, the SF Environment’s Engagement Program team retreat, and facilitate a racial equity workshop for their Building Operations Task Force.
To best engage with each of these groups, the team at Civic Edge worked closely with the SF Environment team to conduct background research around target audiences, develop all retreat programming, provide day-of staffing and lead the facilitation of each event. All events were led by Civic Edge to great success. Our team was able to set up engaging activities, manage all logistics for events, and gather key feedback for the San Francisco Environment team to utilize in their ongoing and future efforts.
For the racial equity workshop, Building Operation Task Force Members included representatives from local agencies, CBOs, advocacy groups, tenant and homeowners associations, property owners/managers, and workforce programs and labor unions. The Civic Edge team was able to facilitate a productive conversation around framing racial equity within building operations initiatives. To collect feedback and generate meaningful discussions, we conducted a “Jamboard Activity” in which members provided their thoughts on sticky notes to paste under prompts on discussion boards. Following the activity, the members provided additional thoughts and comments through a reflection discussion. Civic Edge synthesized all the feedback into comprehensive reporting documents that identified responses by theme that the task force and SF Environment team could utilize in future work.
The Climate Action Plan Retreat was a highly anticipated, citywide San Francisco Environment Event with more than 40 attendees, including agency leaders and program staff from SFMTA, SF Planning, Port of SF, SFO Airport, SFPUC, SF Rec and Parks, and the Mayor’s Office. On November 2, 2023, our team led this in-person, 4-hour retreat at the Southeast Community Center. We thoughtfully designed an engaging program that included large group discussions, small-group breakout activities, and inspirational guest speakers, all with graphic facilitation and fueled by healthy and tasty local catering. We successfully facilitated meaningful conversations around the Climate Action Plan among attendees from different organizations with varying priorities and left people motivated to collaborate on the Plan’s future development and implementation.
On November 8, 2023, our team led San Francisco Environment’s in-person, 7-hour Engagement Program Retreat for all SFE staff members on the Engagement Team. In close collaboration with the team leader's vision and goals, we designed and implemented a full day of team activities to strategically bring the group along a journey from broad visionary ideation to more specific program planning. We led an active agenda, utilizing the event space’s amazing outdoor spaces for refreshing open-air interactive discussions and avoiding the typical staleness of full-day team retreats. At the end of the day, Engagement Team members not only had an enjoyable experience, but also left with a strong sense of buy-in with the team’s strategic priorities going forward.