Farm&City uses an inter-disciplinary method to bring complementary policy understandings together from transportation, urban planning, sustainability, and democratic/equity concerns.
We attend stakeholder meetings across Texas, representing the people through our vision, values, and principles. By developing contacts, following policy arenas, and building new approaches and shared understandings, we widen the policy windows to make positive change more likely improve Texans’ lives. We work with other community and nonprofit groups, helping them with data, maps, and policy workshops to find optimal solutions.
We attend all the stakeholder input meetings we can on behalf of the people of Texas through the lens of our vision, values, and principles. We take notes and hold onto public documents handed out at meetings, develop contacts of important public servants and local leaders across the state, and build a body of knowledge about the various goings on across the public policy landscape of Texas. Eventually, perhaps years later with the work handed down from staffer to staffer several times over, we walk into the right meetings and articulate a vision for improving the lives of Texans that we have developed in collaboration with thousands of people across the state, many different governments.
In between the eventual paradigm shifting policy change and our initial engagement in an issue, we search and amplify the right questions, nurture potential solutions, develop research and communications strategies to increase general knowledge on the issue, we find the most effective points to intervene in our transportation and urban planning systems, we gauge the potential for change, we widen the policy windows to make positive change more likely, and we ramp up to full blown advocacy, lobbying, and policy change as policy windows open up.
Along with our major projects – such as our current ones explained below – we strive to maintain a core of public participation in policy development across the board, through Streetsblog Texas, email newsletters, monthly events, and a steady stream of content on this website and social media.
We want to end traffic deaths and serious traffic injuries in Texas. Every city, county, metropolitan planning organization and the state itself needs a plan to stop this epidemic.
We want humans to thrive in Texas metro- politan regions forever. Local land use codes need equitable reform and we need to optimize regional transportation planning.
We want to dramatically improve transit service in Texas. Metropolitan regions need local options to fund the transit they deserve.
We want the Texas transportation decision- making system to include us all. Every kid should have the potential to make their way to any position of power in Texas.