“I wanted the municipality to learn to involve the citizens in planning, to ask for their input. But instead it became clear that the community can do these things without municipal leadership.”
Lucie, an environmental educator, is passionate about people working together for the good of the community and assuming responsibility for their own role in the life of the community.
She advises community groups striving to engage other residents. When she joined CA, she was helping residents in the town of Chlum U Třeboně redesign an open space at a preschool. She was working under the auspices of the Town of Chlum, but felt that the community she was seeking to involve was not responding to her efforts as she had hoped.
Although Lucie is a native of Prague, she spent much of her childhood at a house nestled between woods and fish breeding lakes near Chlum U Třeboně. She feels a strong bond to the nature in this area and it is here that she resettled as an adult with her young family. In the 2000s, she co-created an environmental education center in the nearby town of Jindřichův Hradec and ran programs for preschools and elementary schools and led landscape restoration projects.
Today, she designs and implements workshops for preschool and elementary school children and teachers in various subject areas, drawing particularly on her background in environmental education and Montessori pedagogy. Lucie also advises, through Via Foundation, community groups creating public space improvements through community engagement.
Chlum (pop. 1,900) is a town on the southern border of the Czech Republic with Austria. It lies in an area of fish breeding lakes developed in the 16th century and has historically served as a market town. A major glassworks factory built in the late 19th century was the town’s main employer for most of the 20th century. Today seasonal tourism services and a few factories in the area are the key sources of employment. Some residents commute to larger cities in the region. In the 1990s the glassworks went bankrupt and 600 people lost their jobs. Until that moment it had been a vibrant community with many cultural activities. After the factory closed, some people left, some stayed, but the town has not recovered.
One of Chlum’s most important public spaces is its town square, which presides over the town on a hill at the end of a street leading from the shopping district, chateau and lake. Its dominant feature is a 18th century church and it is also home to the municipal office, an elementary school, a children’s activity center, a small grocery store and homes. At the center of the square is a fountain, which was surrounded by shade trees until their removal in 2018. Residents regularly use the square to access the school, office and other facilities, while larger crowds are drawn to the traditional mid-August fair, school crafts fairs and other community events that take place there.
In 2017, the town council commissioned a redesign of the town square. Many residents were unhappy with the initial site design, which envisioned turning part of the square into a parking lot. They complained that the design did not respond to their needs. This sparked the new initiative described below.
Our story begins in 2017, when the Chlum town council commissioned a new site plan for the town square. It entrusted the design process to an architectural firm but did not invite residents to take part. The town council presented the proposed site plan to residents through a municipal newsletter, asked them to submit their feedback and announced a public meeting to discuss the proposed site plan.
After some residents expressed dissatisfaction with the proposed site plan, a councillor asked Lucie to get involved, knowing that Lucie had experience in community planning and managing public space projects. The councillor suggested that Lucie lead a community meeting to gather residents’ comments. Lucie agreed to become involved on a volunteer basis.
Then, after municipal elections, the composition of the town council changed. With the support of the new mayor, Lucie facilitated a meeting where residents had the opportunity to comment on the proposed site plan.
About 70 people came, including people living near the square, older people, people with holiday homes in Chlum, teachers, parents and children, members of the town council, people from nearby villages, young people studying elsewhere, and the architects preparing the plans.
A number of participants expressed distrust in the idea of reaching agreement through a community meeting process. People nevertheless gave input, e.g. eliminating car traffic in front of the school, adding more greenery, especially mature trees to provide shade, as well as seating and drinking water.
The newly mayor and council were quite happy with the result of the community meeting and a summary of residents’ comments were passed on to the architects to incorporate into the final site plan. A parking solution was found elsewhere in the town and it was agreed that the square would become a ‘no parking, no driving’ zone.
But then, under pressure to address more urgent community needs, the town council decided to put funding into the sewage system and not into the square redesign.
Lucie thought this was a shame and became more involved. She met with 7 middle-aged or older women she had come to know through the process to redesign the square and raised the idea of a new initiative so that momentum among residents would not be lost. It was also at this stage that the municipality pulled back and didn’t want to be so closely aligned with it. The municipal leadership struggled with how to show that it wasn’t an official municipal action, that it was something community-led.
Some residents were motivated to ‘do something’ by their disillusionment with the municipality’s decision not to fund the results of the square redesign process. Others, according to Lucie, were angry that the previous municipal administration had cut down the mature shade trees surrounding the fountain on the square.
Lucie suggested that the group pursue a project on one part of the site: namely, the garden adjacent to the school, which was a municipally owned green space of 650 sq.m. adjacent to the square. Situated between one of the elementary school buildings and the children’s activity center, this space had been slated to become a parking lot in the original 2017 site plan. Based on resident input, he designation for this part of the site had been changed from parking lot to vegetated recreational use. There was agreement about the need to keep cars away from the school and create a place where children could come between lessons to run and rest.
Retaining and using rainwater runoff also emerged as a priority. The year before, when the mature lime trees around the fountain had been cut down, the microclimate changed, making the square uncomfortably dry and hot.
Lucie applied and received a Via grant of CZK 100,000 (ca. €4,200). She and the group of 7 women began spreading the word about the new garden project. In the same period, Lucie became a paid employee of the municipality tasked with facilitating the garden community design process and also in charge of the children’s activity center. From the beginning it was more about using a snowball technique, asking each person who else might want to get involved. I tried to use all the outreach channels I could, social media and the municipal website, PA system and newsletter. It mostly worked by word of mouth. So it was strongly based on contacts between people in the community.
At this stage in the process, Lucie was of two minds about the role she should play: wanting residents to lead and feeling pressure to lead herself. I think that if I hadn’t taken the lead from the beginning, nothing would have been realized. I did it this way with the idea that people will experience first-hand that it is possible, they will learn to be active, they will learn how to do it themselves and next time they won’t need me.
At the first planning meeting, participants mapped what works and does not work in the existing site, what activities people already engage in there, and what they would like to do in the space. The goal that emerged was to involve the school community and others in designing and creating a garden where school children could play during breaks in the school day and to find ways to cool the square which was exceedingly hot without mature trees.
Lucie and the team compiled the ideas and an architect was there as well and listened carefully. In the months following the meeting, he created two design variants. Through the town newsletter, residents were invited to a second community meeting to discuss the variants. During this period new people joined the core group, including a few mothers of young children and one particularly active teacher, Tereza, with a group of friends that she brought to the project.
Some 30 residents came to the second meeting. The architect presented the variants and people gave feedback. During the discussion the architect sought to mitigate people’s concerns, for example by proposing a pond with only 30cm of water. Through discussion the group agreed on a hybrid of the two design variants that incorporated the architect’s mitigating suggestions.
Gradually parents with children attending the elementary school became engaged, people who realized that it will be a great space for their kids. To get them involved, Lucie and one of the teachers planned a few hours of art in which the children created posters to invite people to the first work party.
After the architects created the final site plan, the core team decided to organize a flea market fundraiser. It was conceived primarily as a community event. Sellers could decide whether to donate all or only part of their proceeds to the garden project. A few women also sold baked goods to visitors. This generated a few thousand Czech crowns.
The group also received many in-kind gifts and a woman who owned a nearby shop contributed CZK 30,000 (ca. € 1,200). As Lucie added: We collected another I think CZK 15,000 from small donations, which Via Foundation then matched. We got free food to serve at work parties sometimes, and we got some materials for free (concrete bricks, floor tiles, some wood) and in the end we had (because of grants) more money than we needed.
One month later residents were invited to view the final site plan and plan out the implementation steps, including dividing tasks between those that residents could do themselves and those requiring professional work. Three main work parties were held over the summer, but including spontaneous and small group efforts, there were 26 work days altogether.
Almost all of the work was done by residents on a volunteer basis. A group of 7 fathers of school children (6 with relevant skills and one just very willing) got together on their own, decided what needed to be done and did it without Lucie’s involvement. They used their own machinery and their skills to build concrete walls, dig the pond, lay paving and a wooden walkway and platform next to the pond. This saved a huge amount of money. The municipality’s technical services staff also transported some materials.
Two services had to be paid for: the first bulldozer groundwork and one father, a mason, took payment for laying paving near the end of the project as he had contributed a lot of time earlier on and could no longer afford to work for free. There were fathers who did not come to work parties but said they would bulldoze for free on another day. That was the moment when it began working more along the lines of ABCD. It seemed at that point that the second grant maybe wouldn’t have been needed. […] I believe they would have been able to do it using their own resources.
Then, just as residents’ excitement and energy around the developing garden was growing and Lucie was meeting with various parents and others who were willing to offer help, the fall 2020 wave of Covid hit. As she said: The entire initiative, the momentum, stopped for a year. It was quite difficult to restart after that.
When the project could finally re-emerge after Covid, Lucie felt it was stuck. Some people canceled their promises and I couldn’t find a carpenter to do it and the mayor said to me, ‘You are the community coordinator, so activate the community, it’s your job’ and I was disappointed, because I thought she didn’t grasp the point of the project. When I was a paid contractor, the municipality thought I was responsible for activating the community. But it doesn’t work that way with a community. One of my friends sitting next to me asked what is going on and then said that he will do it. He is an inhabitant of Chlum. And then it got a new energy and flow.
The carpenter-friend’s willingness to help made it possible to finish the wooden elements. As they were installed, and spring flowers bloomed, people could see the results of their labour. Finally, after almost 3 years, the finale was in sight and everyone wanted to see the garden finished.
After the grand opening of the community rain garden, Lucie officially handed over the garden project to the municipality, which assumed responsibility for maintenance of the grassy area. Two of the younger team members, Jana and Tereza, took over care of the garden. Teachers and schoolchildren also gradually began using the garden, organizing campfire gatherings, fixing things, etc.
Looking back, Lucie said: There were two different approaches: me leading it externally and the insiders leading it, and they needed to see how to lead it before they took it over. I think of it as a shift towards ABCD. ABCD helped me abandon the managerial role and let the project live its own life.
Throughout this process Lucie was also uncomfortable with her own role: …I was thinking about ABCD and so I tried to push myself out of the project and let the community be the project. I was working with the community a lot, as a contracted municipal ‘employee’ . But I also wanted the municipality to take responsibility for it, too. That was really difficult. It seemed that people weren’t used to that role. They are used to having a boss, they will come and help, but they didn’t start assuming leadership roles till the end of the project. At that point, suddenly, a group of teachers who have young children of their own began thinking of what kind of activities could be held in the garden, and I shifted to a background role. But I had to wait for that.
The project sprouted visible changes, such as the:
For Lucie the other changes in Chlum u Třeboně are less tangible, but extremely important. People communicate more. In the groups of people involved in creating the new garden, and visitors to the garden (parents, teachers and especially children), there is now the attitude that things can be changed. This is also connected to the change in leadership, that some of the people engaged in the project are now taking on a leadership role in community activities. She adds: But it is still too soon. We will see how the garden and the community will live in the next years.
Lucie also noted that residents are thinking more about what they can do themselves. She held a brainstorming session about how to use the remaining money from the grant project: I have already collected some ideas – one lady said we could buy a garbage bin because there is a spot where people put garbage in a hole in a tree. But as she was talking, she realized she could do it herself. She put a plastic garbage bag on the tree and it works. You just need to touch on it and through talking they realize they don’t need any money.
Lucie notices a shift in her own approach to community building as well: Definitely more distance. Before I thought the ideal was supporting the team as a manager, with expertise, a toolbox or cookbook of project steps. Now I think that is one way that has its place in some communities, but the other approach where you let seeds that are there sprout, is more interesting. In other words, ABCD through conversations where you don’t provide them a model from the outside. This new approach seems time-consuming but meaningful.
We invite you to also read the longer version of this case study.
