How-to Guide for Local Action and Coordination

Ideas and advice for coordinating local activities

In this article, we cover a number of suggestions for being active locally. This includes action ideas as well as good advice on how to coordinate mindfully with other local allies. It is important to remember that having trusted, dedicated allies in your city/region is one of the best ways to help you create lasting impact.

The first place to start is to map out your local allies, highlight important issues, and take stock of your best options. To do this, you can make us of our Toolkit #2 Diagnostic Tool. For the rest of this article, we’ll assume that you have done your homework, and you will be able to coordinate in a shared space with others who agree with your vision and values.

From now on, the trick is to employ coordinated effort, whether on the city level or the regional/national level, to become an effective pathway leading to meaningful impact. The following is a list of types of activities, campaigns, and programs. Built into this is discussion and advice on meaningful ways to coordinate with your allies.

This is not an exhaustive list of action ideas. Please also make use of our Toolkit #3 Action Ideas, Toolkit #6 Tactics and Strategy as well as our Toolkit #10 Projects Catalogue. All of the toolkits mentioned in this article can be downloaded from the TOOLKITS PAGE.

Checklist for local action and coordination

1. Counter entrenched car culture. Ask for (more) pedestrian zones (carfree streets, carfree squares) and promote the vision of fewer cars in cities or vastly improved and expanded pedestrian and cycling zones. Ask the local government to pedestrianize streets, or at least temporarily close them to cars and motorcycles on a regular basis. If government doesn’t agree, see if you can organize events yourself. If you don’t ask, you might never know what is possible!

2. Coordinate activities and campaigns; engage in on-the-ground activity: people are roughly aware of which organizations are involved in certain topics; regularly talk to each other, and at least occasionally support each other’s work. For example, around World Carfree Day (WCD) groups might brainstorm a long list of activities and then form sub-committees or decide who will take the lead for a particular activity. Some groups may choose to work independently, although preferably sharing their plans/results with the wider community.

3. Share information with other groups. This could be about ongoing projects/programs, or important news and urgent calls to action, such as new policy measures. Partners are encouraged to write and share comments and letters that get sent to their local governments regarding policy and design changes that address urban inequality.

4. Encourage allies to attend useful meetings; this way, government agencies and multilateral banks, among others, hear the same message from multiple sources. Coordinating beforehand on a common strategy will boost the chances to generate impact.

5. Recruit more individuals/organizations to be at least passive supporters and in some cases active supporters of carfree cities, including youth (create internship opportunities, visit schools and universities) and professionals across environment, climate, public health, urban planning, transport policy, etc.

6. Build an intellectual base (how to make the case for carfree cities in your country/region).

7. Gain more media attention (conventional and social) towards the issues and solutions, as well as what different groups are doing.

8. Work with government to create, pass, implement, monitor and evaluate policy changes.

Additional wisdom on the art of working with others

CCA core team member Debra Efroymson has shared some caveats from her experience:

From my long history of working with coalitions, alliances, interest groups, etc., I’ve seen that it’s extremely difficult to get people to work together. Coordination (mostly communication, but also some division of tasks) is much easier than collaboration (joint decision-making). When I say collaboration, I refer to different individuals/groups sitting down together and engaging in joint decision-making, e.g. what should be the theme of this year’s World Carfree Day? Do we wish to use or avoid the term “carfree”? Is it best to approach policymakers first or have mass protests and a media blitz first?

When I say coordination, I mean that each group has its own way to approach the issue. There is a very consensus (we want our cities to be better, which includes fewer cars) but no agreement on the details either of the vision or how to achieve it. Coordination involves sharing at least some of what the different groups are working on, trying to fill any obvious gaps, sharing information, and jointly celebrating successes. Absent is the need to agree on much of anything; each group can work independently, but they do get together to share what they’re up to (vs. collaboration, where they would work together to do the activities).

Also, if there are several high-level people working on an issue, choosing one to coordinate a group is likely to fail as others won’t want to work under that person’s leadership. Choosing someone young and new, who is friendly, supportive, hard-working and humble, and willing to stroke everyone else’s ego and regularly have their own ego bruised, is (in my experience) the most likely to succeed.