Savannah, a first-year VISTA member of HOME Line’s tenant organizer cohort, has been hard at work finding ways to conduct accessible outreach to the renters of West St. Paul. Savannah is serving as the Healthy Housing Organizer with the city of West St. Paul. Her VISTA position resulted from city council’s desire to address the health, safety, and wellbeing of rental properties, the balance of power between tenants and landlords, and renters’ overall engagement with the city.
Renter engagement is a nuanced task. The city recognized that renters can experience a number of vulnerabilities not typically faced by homeowners, and that there is room in the city’s traditional community engagement methods to better engage renters specifically. For this reason, Savannah was determined to approach the goal of increased renter engagement with an accessibility lens. The goal was to reach West St. Paul renters where they’re at.
Savannah knew that language was a barrier to effective tenant engagement, as census data revealed that a significant portion of West St. Paul residents speak a language other than English at home. After extensive research on survey design, and a draft of the renter engagement survey, Savannah intended to use city resources to translate the written survey text into the languages that city residents spoke. However, upon attending AmeriCorps VISTA In-Service Training in Dallas and collaborating with other VISTA members across the country, Savannah realized that accessible communication wasn’t just about translating written text, but engaging communities on the basis of their literacy needs as well.
After returning from the Dallas VISTA Training, Savannah revamped the renter engagement survey to become more accessible and better meet the needs of West St. Paul residents. The City’s survey platform did not have a built-in process for reading text aloud, but did have the ability to embed SoundCloud audio files, which Savannah used to host spoken recordings of the survey text in a variety of languages. She was able to produce these recordings with a limited budget by generating the audio with advanced text-to-speech platforms and verifying accuracy and comprehension with native language speakers. Additionally, she added an audio response function so that respondents can share their responses orally.
The city has already begun sharing the survey digitally and are seeing respondents make use of the innovative functions. Savannah is planning to further engage tenants by visiting high-traffic areas like bus stops and laundromats to meet the city’s goals of meeting tenants “where they’re at.” Savannah credits the survey’s initial success to her supportive collaboration with peers dedicated to accessible design: “It’s a bit more work at the front end, but is worth it.” Through this project, “the City wants to make changes that [renters] can feel in the community, not just policy on paper, but that they can actually feel an improvement.”
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