Landscape Mapping {Phase I: EPIK Alliance Meeting Report}

November 5, 2014

This month’s meeting was held in the West Jordan Library building (adjacent to the Veridian Event Center). Many thanks to Carrie Rogers-Whitehead, Senior Librarian for Teen Services (Salt Lake County Library system), who was our host.

As has been the pattern thus far, the meeting started with lunch and a welcome from our host, followed by a brief summary of how collective impact is different from the way work is typically done in meetings. We reviewed the following two graphics for those who are new to the community impact effort:

In past meetings, all as part of Phase 1, cross-sector community partners have done initial sector maps, issue mapping, and issue clustering. They visually captured participants’ perspectives and experiences related to the issue of raising children in a tech-saturated world.

In the meeting on November 5th, the group continued Phase 1 work through the creation of a landscape/context map. Although the output of this meeting was only a preliminary landscape map, it will help with continuous community outreach and convening, facilitate continued discussions about the issue, and lay the foundation for preliminary data-gathering and issue analysis in Phase 2.

Each person was given 10 minutes to write down “who does what and why.”

Who: Which organizations/individuals are doing something to address opportunities and challenges (“positives” and “negatives”) of raising children in a tech-saturated world. (Please be sure to include the work you do, and don’t hesitate to include anyone who is already “at the table” with the alliance.)

What: What are those organizations doing? Identify any and all relevant programs, activities, initiatives, curricula, products, etc.

Why: What facet(s) of the issue are being addressed by the what? e.g., educating parents, educating children about potential harm(s) of technology, helping children/youth build tech skills, using social media for good, providing technological solutions to parents/children/educators, etc.

Each person was then given a few minutes to share what they had written, including sharing about what they do and why. Pink sticky notes represent the people they think should be involved, or at least be on the group’s radar screen.

As always, we wish we’d had more time for the Insights and Impressions discussion at the end of the meeting, but the group was able to talk about a few things in the last few minutes of the meeting. Most of the comments centered around pornography prevention.

• The importance of focusing on brain science and the public health facet of pornography prevention (rather than a moral or religious or sex ed focus) was mentioned.
• It was noted that in a pilot implementation of Fight the New Drug’s program there was resistance from community members to having pornography talked about in the schools.
• A clear takeaway was that there are many resources that are available, but not a lot of knowledge within the community about what is available.
• Unique challenges of living in a community where there is a predominant religion’s influence were also discussed.