Sustainability and Public Health Fellowship

Sarah Petersen

Tell Us How You Move Around

The overarching Fellowship project was a mutual influence campaign in the form of a Let’s Talk Transportation website called "Tell Us How You Move Around" a public engagement website, tools, and transportation mode surveys. The goal was to build learning communities among varied website users via the interactive tools and adaptation strategies for driving less and living more. The community-generated content and data from Tell Us How You Move Around, was aimed at supporting and exploring equitable multimodal transportation futures at MnDOT and beyond.

The goals for the Tell us How You Move Around effort:

• Allows MnDOT to hear directly from real folks’ lived experiences
• Provides quantitative and qualitative data on transportation needs, filling MnDOT’s knowledge gaps on what people want/need to mode shift and can begin to know how and where to push for individual behavior change through surveys, stories and various data collection methods
• A tool for people to self-reflect on their experiences and values while also communicating with MnDOT. It seeks to open up people’s thinking so that they see the breadth of their transportation options, while also being able to analyze the limitations on those options. This will aid MNDOT in simultaneously analyze limitations for its users, in order to meet their needs

Tell Us How You Move Around Workshops

“...GHG reduction and VMT reduction goals are necessarily interdisciplinary, complex and no one person’s job to address. I am very much hoping to increase opportunities for interdisciplinary learning and collaboration internally, and perhaps even more so to engage both internal and external groups in honest, productive, creative and solutions-focused conversations around how good multimodal transportation options (other than driving everywhere alone) benefit us all. MnDOT can support the transition toward sustainable transportation, and I want to help people see that incremental choices and investments (individual and systemic) can really help us make this shift together.” – Sarah Petersen, Fellow

Sustainability and Public Health Fellow, Sarah Petersen, facilitated interactive workshops (in-person and online) and participatory pop-up engagements with external communities/stakeholders in Spring 2023. Interactive exercises on mode shift or driving less were tested and reflected upon in intimate settings. Workshop activities included a Move Around Map Game to play with place and individual transportation choices, barriers and options in everyday life while discussing why people make or don’t make various transportation choices. A second activity experimented with participants producing prototypes of personal “safety attire” they might wear in day-to-day activities with reflective ribbons, exploring user vulnerability and differing concepts of safety. Themes from these engagements led to the What if You Could Poster campaign, and a pop up Tell Us How You Move Around kit for use for in-person public engagement.