Trust, Tradeoffs, and Transformation: Planning for Community Wellbeing

FFI Founder & CEO Katya Fels Smyth and partners from the City of Cleveland and City of Kingston introduced WIATT (the Wellbeing Insights, Assets & Tradeoffs Tool) in a webinar for the American Planning Association, St. Louis. Topics covered in this conversation included:

• Wellbeing must be central to planning: Full Frame Initiative defines wellbeing as the experience of feeling whole, achieved through access to five key domains—social connection, stability, safety, mattering, and basic needs—in combination and balance.
• Traditional planning can unintentionally cause harm: Concepts like wellbeing stripping—where community assets like parks or gathering spaces are lost through redevelopment—highlight how planning without a wellbeing lens can erode trust and community resilience.
• Credible messengers build deeper engagement: Projects in Cleveland and Kingston, NY used credible messengers—trusted community members—to co-design surveys, conduct outreach, and gather representative input, resulting in more authentic, inclusive community participation.
• The WIATT tool supports equity-focused decision-making: The Wellbeing, Insights, Assets and Tradeoffs (WIATT) tool helps communities gather and analyze data about how built environment projects impact wellbeing, ensuring feedback is representative and actionably informs plans.
• Sustainable systems change requires new norms: To move beyond transactional engagement, cities and planners must invest in long-term relationships, shift from extractive data practices to community-owned insights, and embed wellbeing as a guiding principle across all planning efforts.

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