The MFA Team: Put Us to Work to Reconnect West Seattle

As part of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) team, Triangle worked with stakeholders to co-create the site’s Community Involvement Plan to describe EPA’s commitment to sustained, meaningful, and relevant engagement. 

As they implement that plan, Triangle has organized different types of community gatherings to “meet people where they are” in terms of technical knowledge, language preferences, and interest area.

• Information Sessions:  Over the past decade, Triangle has organized over 30 large information sessions for people who want to understand the technical and scientific details associated with the cleanup. 

• Post-Information Session Dialogues: 
  Following these large information sessions, Triangle holds informal dialogues with EPA and the Department of Ecology so that Tribes, Natural Resource Trustees, and community groups can ask questions in a relaxed environment. 

• Roundtable Meetings:  Triangle recently launched a Roundtable that is comprised of community, government, business, and Tribal representatives to provide feedback to EPA as it designs and implements the cleanup. These meetings include language interpretation and are designed to be understandable for all audiences so that participants are on an even playing field. 

• Healthy Seafood Meetings:  Triangle brings together immigrant fishing communities with government agencies to discuss how to safely eat seafood from the Duwamish River. These are multilingual meetings with a very targeted focus on fishing.  

• Triangle invests back into the affected communities whenever possible, including hiring community-based interpreters and translators, and launching the country’s first participation stipend  for a Superfund stakeholder group. 

• Given the valid history of mistrust between communities of color in the Duwamish Valley and government agencies that have allowed and perpetuated environmental harm in the area, building trust  through example, action, and consistency is core to our approach.  

• For projects with long-timelines, Triangle uses a relationship-based approach  with stakeholders, community members, and Tribes. This means focusing on the depth of connection with individuals, rather than a breadth of connections across the region.   

• With their office in the heart of the Chinatown/International District, TDW is part of the First Hill community. So they knew about the challenges and frustrations related to the streetcar line construction. When they were asked to step in to help, they were ready! 

• They started with an assessment of existing community concerns – it took time, but sometimes, time spent listening is the best investment you can make.   

• After spending time listening and assessing, they developed a comprehensive and flexible outreach program that offered necessary resources and information to the underserved and diverse communities most impacted by the new streetcar.  

• They recruited and trained 18 in-language safety ambassadors for the project – members of the community who could do more effective on-the-ground outreach to businesses and residents in the neighborhood and who could answer community questions not only in-language, but also in places and formats that worked for each specific audience. 

• Translated materials, focus on visuals, targeted communication tactics, and more led to a better dialogue with neighbors and a more successful project.