Introduction
About this Toolkit
This toolkit aims to enable you and your community to reflect on diversity and inclusion in your own context, and move beyond just awareness and dialogue towards concrete actions that lead to a more inclusive, diverse, and representative community of participants.
Keeping in mind that every Citizen Observatory (CO) is different, and the range of issues being investigated will affect different groups of people and stakeholders, we have endeavoured to collect a range of relevant resources developed by the European community of citizen science practitioners.
The contents of the LNOB Toolkit include:
Workshop materials that introduce the concepts of Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) and the pledge to "Leave No One Behind' along with guidance on how to run this workshop with internal stakeholders;
Descriptions of workshop facilitation methods to reflect and discuss how these concepts might be relevant in the context of one's own Citizen Observatory (CO) along with guidance on running such workshops with a wide range of stakeholders; and
Sign-posted guidance for a range of tools or methods that can be applied towards enabling or improving diverse and representative inclusion throughout the activities and lifecycle of the CO.
How this toolkit approaches diversity & inclusion
Rather than focusing on groups of people according to specific characteristics that could signal that they are marginalised, such as their gender, ethnicity, or mobility, the Toolkit seeks to encourage awareness of different vulnerabilities and factors that can cause people to be 'left behind'. A contextual understanding of the ways in which these factors intersect allows more effective measures to be designed and taken to bridge these gaps and short comings.
Depending on the scope and intention of any given CO, different communities could be contacted and invited to participate actively, and ways can be found to ensure that the unequal impacts of the environmental factor under investigation are being taken into account (such as poorer air quality in disadvantaged zones of the city), such that the needs of people thus affected are addressed.
It should be emphasised that it is not possible to engage all groups in the activities of any given CO (let alone all COs), nor should that be the aim. It may not be possible for people to engage in the core activities of the CO for a variety of reasons, such as lack of time and resources, or much more urgent issues in their day to day lives. Guidance on how to ensure that their voices and needs are also represented is thus also contained within the Toolkit.
Why is diversity & inclusion relevant?
Reasons for wanting to achieve more diverse engagement within COs include the importance of including people who are unequally (or inequitably) affected by the environmental issue being investigated, as a matter of environmental justice, and the improved effectiveness of actions taken to tackle environmental justice when there is a broader representation of both the needs and contextual insights of those affected
This can be done by:
raising awareness of and interest in environmental issues amongst a wider range of residents from across more areas of the city,
involving a diverse and representative range of people in observing their environment and sharing these data and insights towards more robust and effective action taking, and
enabling diverse and representative involvement in citizen-led actions, and co-created solutions to tackle environmental issues,
paying particular attention to the needs of minoritized groups who may be inequitably impacted by environmental issues and have a stake in the outcomes of any actions taken to address those issues.
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