Increasing Participation in Regional Vision Through Student-led Engagement

We describe the efforts of the Envision Utah Youth Council in organizing students to help lead a broad, statewide campaign to conduct research and gather information that will form the basis for a broad, inclusive discussion... [ view full abstract ]

We describe the efforts of the Envision Utah Youth Council in organizing students to help lead a broad, statewide campaign to conduct research and gather information that will form the basis for a broad, inclusive discussion regarding the future of the state of Utah. In this conversation, the lived experience of everyday people is combined with the expertise of scientists in a wide variety of fields, including environmental quality, transportation engineering, urban planning, energy, and disaster mitigation, to help shape a region’s future growth and urban form. Utah is currently undertaking a ground-breaking regional visioning effort spear-headed by a public-private partnership called Envision Utah to help generate clear choices for Utahns on issues critical to Utah’s future. The process includes educational outreach to citizens to present state-of-the-art knowledge and modeling of different potential choices, followed by the development of scenarios for voters and lawmakers based on educated feedback from citizens about their values and preferences.

Engagement and research was conducted in a first phase through the use of interactive and informational games, and the Youth Council developed strategies to encourage their peers to participate in the games that combine expert data and modeling with survey questions designed to elicit citizen preferences. The games spanned a variety of issues, including energy, water resources, transportation and housing, and education. A second ongoing phase of research links these games and other efforts to more formal school curricula (e.g. science, human geography, economics, etc.).

We also discuss the challenges and successes of the Youth Council in (1) promoting involvement by a demographic that has the most direct stake but that has traditionally been excluded from such conversations (youth / students), and (2) broadening participation of the traditional demographic (adults) through engagement of and leadership by students.