For the MCRP planning studio project, our team – Eanimi Agube, Marco Sotres and I – were charged with developing recommendations for the City of Kelowna in their upcoming work to translate equity policies set out in their recent 2040 Official Community Plan (OCP) into implementation actions. In this project we undertook reviews of equity and equity-informed strategies and policies from communities Canada, the United States and Australia, and interviewed City of Kelowna planning staff and community organisation representatives to get a better sense of the equity context in the city.

Through our work, and using a lens of pragmatic idealism, we developed a set of recommendations for internal actions to progress equity planning in the City, as well as proposed implementation targets for each equity-related policy identified in the OCP.

The project was highly collaborative throughout. I took the lead in refining our team’s working lens for the project, developing the community profile, framing and analysing equity policies for implementation, as well as overall graphic design for the project, but each of us undertook a working approach that ensured consistency in contribution and output – as well as internal team equity.