In our project we are addressing two of the many concerns that the CIty of Seaside is asking. The first concern the city had was to have an overall demographic representation of the demographics of Seaside. The second concern was to know why isn’t the Hispanic and Latino more involved at city hall meetings? They represent 44% of the total population in Seaside. The city is working on their 2040 development plan which is a plan that is a multi-year effort that the city is undertaking to develop , and involves input from the community to document the future of Seaside and the development that will set the policies and programs to achieve that vision.
We asked ourselves why isn’t the Latino and HIspanic community more involved? And in order to answer this question, we created a visual of full-time jobs with high influence in city government to see how much of the Latino/ Hispanic was being represented in office. We obtained a list from Roberta Greathouse, who works as the cities Human Resources Director and gave us a list of their jobs and ethnicities. This list gave us the foundation for our project in that we went out into the community to engage with the 44%.
From this we set up our model of collection data methods and talked with the participants of the city to hear their stories and concerns. From the 39 participants we talked too, we gathered, we found that the community members wanted better safety, more parks, more inclusion of cultures, and more displays of art. The community stressed that they are willing to talk with the city, but the city needs to come where they are.