The West Side may be seeing more urban agriculture, reentry services and decarbonized buildings in the next year, thanks to a new co-governance framework in Chicago.
Earlier this year, Chicago United for Equity and Chicago’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice launched a co-governance framework that creates a way for city government and community members to partner to bring more programs, policies and resources to Chicago neighborhoods that need it most, like those on the West Side. This month, they announced the framework’s first pilot initiatives.
“We have to start with the people who know the work and have the lived experience being the designers – not just the people who are cosigning the design,” said Candace Williams, interim executive director of Chicago United for Equity, which amplifies the power of individuals and serves as the community-focused part, while OERJ represents citywide departments.
While part of the co-governance framework focuses on governmental entities understanding and acting on community feedback, allowing for more local input in the decision-making process, it also aims to help residents understand government processes and what to ask for.
“Our ultimate goal is around changing material conditions that actually makes people’s lives better,” said Lyric Griffin, OERJ’s deputy chief equity officer, who lives on the West Side.
With the launch of the co-governance framework, over the next year-to-18-months, OERJ and Chicago United for Equity are helping to develop three citywide pilot projects: urban gardens, reentry services and decarbonization in buildings.
While urban agriculture has had some government funding, Griffin said, there hasn’t been any significant policy funding. With the co-governance framework, city departments and community organizations are working together to create a policy agenda that sustains urban agriculture across Chicago, prioritizing neighborhoods with food deserts.
“It’s no secret that areas like Austin, North Lawndale and Garfield, or South Side communities like Englewood, are living in food deserts with limited access to food and groceries,” Griffin said. “How do we empower our urban growers and our farmers to be able to feed communities in a different way? How do we reconstruct the way we think about food delivery and food growing from traditional models?”
The returning resident service provision pilot started with Chicago’s Department of Family and Support Services, which is partnering with communities to see how they can better provide programming and infrastructure that meet the needs of those who are returning to society after serving time.
Reentry services are in high demand on Chicago’s West and South Sides. According to 2019 research from the Safer Foundation, over 30% of people who serve prison time in Illinois move to Chicago when they get out. Nearly all of them live in six neighborhoods, including Austin, East Garfield Park and North Lawndale.
The third pilot project is the city’s Department of Environment and Community Organization’s effort to decarbonize buildings. Though the city previously had a working group to address this effort, they didn’t follow a co-governance model. But now they want to.
“That’s going to have huge equitable impacts in communities, not only for decreasing emissions, because buildings are one of the biggest polluters in Chicago, but it’s also going to help lower utility costs,” Griffin said. “We know that’s critical for communities like Austin.”
Though it might seem like these three priorities have existed in West Side communities for years, Griffin said this is the first time the city government is helping by using its power to deepen civic trust and asking Chicagoans for help in shaping their neighborhoods.
“We are teaching folks to do the things that we have seen done by us,” Griffin said. “Now we’re not leading the table, departments are leading the table. Communities are doing what they’ve always been doing and leading the conversations.”
What is co-governance?
When Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson started his term in 2023, many of the people rallying around him, and the mayor himself, called for a co-governance framework that would allow those who have been most impacted by systemic injustices to have more control over satisfying their needs, building their trust in government entities.
Though Johnson supports it, the co-governance framework is not administration-based and was developed to sustainably continue after Johnson’s term ends. Instead, the goal is to eventually embed the framework into all departments of Chicago’s government.
“We cannot do true governance work, we cannot talk about sustainability, equity and accountability on a government level, while making it focused on one administration,” Williams said. “What does it look like to take this framework and institutionalize it into the very fabric of Chicago governance to make sure there are long-standing impacts?”
Though OERJ was created in 2019 to focus on equity and racial disparities in city government, Griffin said people came into the OERJ and Chicago United for Equity’s office around Mayor Johnson’s election to express their confusion around what co-governance meant for them. Griffin said, while neighborhoods across the city were represented, many of those who came to the offices work around equity and justice, and many are based on the West and South Sides of Chicago.
So in 2023, OERJ and Chicago United for Equity convened national and local entities who are doing co-governance work, plus over 100 organizers, researchers, academics and government staff to define co-governance.
First drafted in February and launched in April, the co-governance framework outlines shared institutional and community values and pathways, and a mutual definition of co-governance: “Co-governance is a problem-solving structure in which community members directly impacted by systemic racism and economic inequity work side-by-side with government representatives to share decision-making power and accountability for creating stronger policies, programs, and practices.”
While building the framework, OERJ and Chicago United for Equity held 18 community conversations – two were hosted in Austin, though Austin residents attended four of the community conversations – where over 200 participants from 57 neighborhoods rated their experience with the government and what contributed to that ranking.
“We had well over half of the total participants who rated that they either had no experience with government or a very difficult experience with government,” Griffin said.
Common reasoning behind these ratings were negative interactions with the government, the government’s low ability to deliver on services and low government engagement with residents. Examples include a pothole not being filled, calling 911 and getting pushback or feeling like you’re going in circles filing a 311 request.
“How many times have you gone to the table and said, ‘Hey, this is the change we need in our community?’” Griffin asked. “And yet nothing changes.”
Williams said this distrust of the government isn’t new for many Chicago communities.
“People in the communities are not apathetic. We’re dealing with a long line of communities who are vocal, who are trying to advocate, but they have been disenfranchised,” Williams said. “They have been disinvested in and they have been silenced.”
Positive feedback from those community conversations, Griffin said, was, “‘This feels like the city is doing something different.’”
The community conversations were hosted by nine paid steering committee members, who designed and facilitated the talks. Those who attended community conversations also received stipends for their time. About 10% of community participants who built the co-governance framework live in Austin, Griffin estimated.
“Austin is a community area that has been, whether intentional or unintentional, left out of or excluded from decision making,” Griffin said.
In April, organizations and city departments started applying to take part in one of the first three co-governance pilot projects. OERJ and Chicago United for Equity asked for community organizations and government entities to apply together.
“These are leads that have relationships, that haven’t gotten to their intended goal that they want to get to ultimately and are now going to apply co-governance to it so that they can drive greater impact,” Griffin said. She added that some applicants started with a policy plan that wasn’t passed, an idea for a program that isn’t as sustainable as they want or have been offering services that aren’t as impactful as they want them to be.
As the three pilot projects develop throughout the city over the next year or so, OERJ and Chicago United for Equity plan to share what they’ve learned along the way. They say that the framework established to create the pilots will continue after the initial 18-month phase ends.
“How can we share knowledge and build the capacity of those in the government and community to co-govern together?” Griffin said.