Town Halls

Feb 26

Written By CCSJ

Town halls can bring government officials in conversation with community members to address pressing issues and answer their questions. Choosing a narrow focus for a town hall can allow officials and community members to have detailed conversations about policy and implementation. Providing translators and translation equipment is especially important to making sure limited-English speaking community members can engage directly with officials.

After several high profile student safety incidents at San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) schools or involving youth, CCSJ organized a youth safety town hall to address families’ growing concerns. Having official information, updates, and paths of recourse are key components of safety planning, but are usually less accessible for parents with limited English proficiency. Led by CAA, with support from other CCSJ members, the town hall aimed to provide access to city agencies by featuring key city representatives, including from SFUSD, the Department of Children, Youth, and Families, and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.

Main Components

Opening remarks from a parent and a student

The town hall opened with prepared remarks from an SFUSD parent and an SFUSD student. Each of them described how the recent safety incidents impacted them and their families or classmates and shared their hopes for the town hall. This helped to ground the conversation in the experiences of families and students and made sure government officials heard directly from community members about how safety incidents affected them.

Remarks from government representatives

Each agency representative had several minutes to share their institution’s response to the safety incidents and what they have been doing to improve youth safety. They also addressed how parents with limited English proficiency can get up-to-date information about ongoing efforts and express their concerns.

Community question and answer period

While the agency representatives shared their remarks, we asked community members to submit questions for the question and answer portion. The question selection team included bilingual staff and topic area experts. The team tallied the questions to select the most popular questions to pose to city representatives. At this town hall, the most common questions were 1) how should we improve youth safety at school and on public transportation, 2) how do we address gun violence and weapons at school, and 3) what mental health supports exist for youth and their parents?

Childcare

It may be obvious, but it was crucial to provide childcare to make the event accessible to parents. We estimated the number of children requiring childcare through RSVPs and hired additional childcare providers just in case more children needed childcare than expected. We prepared the childcare area with toys, books, a movie projector, and nut-free snacks.

Keys to Success

Relationship-building with city officials

We were able to bring representatives from multiple agencies to this event because we have built strong relationships with different agencies as individual organizations and as a coalition. Even if we have criticisms of agencies, we have a reputation for acting in good faith and holding well-run events. Agencies would be reluctant to participate if they thought they would be “ambushed” at the event or if the event would be embarrassing to be associated with. Our strong reputation brought government officials to the table.

Perspectives from multiple city representatives

The issue of youth safety is multifaceted and complex. Conflicts from schools can spill into public transit and the community. Furthermore, safety interventions need to come from different angles, including mental health support both in and outside of schools. It was important to bring representatives from multiple city agencies together to discuss policies from their different perspectives and highlight the importance of a coordinated response. We had representatives from the central school office, school board, a family liaison from an individual school, the Department of Children, Youth, and Families, and the local transit agency.

Recruitment and support from multiple organizations

We leaned on our coalition and other partners to reach a broad base of community members. Co-sponsorship from CCSJ members lent credibility to the town hall as an event that would be informative and worth attending. Collaborating among the CCSJ partners also allowed us to develop an agenda that represented more diverse community perspectives.