Weigh in on future of East Eighth Street at this forum

A local institute focused on developing healthy communities and emerging leaders will lead an open forum on the future of the East Eighth Street corridor on Saturday, April 2.

The BAM Institute is a Sioux Falls-based organization connected to groups and individuals across the country who are dedicated to what they call civic biodesign. That is defined as “the practice of studying, mapping and synthesizing systems where nature and humans meet to create conditions for wellness in specific bioregions.”

In the case of the East Eighth Street corridor, that means bringing together social service providers, business leaders and residents, said Jordan Deffenbaugh, a BAM Institute fellow and adviser who will facilitate the event with Clinton Brown, the institute’s executive director. Anybody who has a stake or interest in the neighborhood is welcome.

Over the past two decades, social service providers such as the Bishop Dudley Hospitality House for the homeless and The Banquet food ministry have moved into the East Eighth Street corridor. The consolidation led to a concentration of lower-income residents in need of those services. Meanwhile, the East Bank area of downtown is booming, raising questions about how well social services will mingle with new development.

These are just the types of questions, how the interplay of systems affects how people live, that the BAM Institute focuses on.

The forum will be at the Union Gospel Mission Thrift Store, 705 E. Eighth St. There are sessions at 9 a.m. and 1 p.m., with lunch provided by En Place Catering.

Breakout sessions will focus on different topics and encourage feedback. The data gathered in each of the breakout sessions will be compiled and shared. Participants are encouraged to bring their own agenda items, rather than following a set of discussion topics or a schedule, Deffenbaugh said.

“It lacks the typical structure,” he said. “But what comes of it is that some of the deeper-rooted issues are revealed. Someone off the street has just as much autonomy to speak as a public official.”

Deffenbaugh and Brown have used this model in other situations. The goal is to collect data that informs pragmatic ideas with attainable, incremental goals.

“We are going to develop and drive home what deployable actions can happen in the near term,” Deffenbaugh said. “Not five-year plans. How do we move the needle in the next month?”

The BAM Institute was in residency at the Union Gospel Mission for the past year developing the concept of a “civic library,” which is finding practical systems to help people solve problems in the near term. Going to the mission every day, Deffenbaugh said he saw what should be simple problems inflated into impossible tasks, such as getting a bus pass or making a child support payment.

“The systems really don’t make sense if the outcome we want is to have this person thrive,” he said. “Why is it so complex to the point where they would rather just give up and go back to what they were doing before?”

The forum is just a small step, Deffenbaugh said. The goal is to continue to have discussions in similar forums to iterate and reexamine, always keeping near-term progress at the forefront. There’s not a big, shiny solution out there waiting to be discovered. Rather, it’s the idea that the systems you develop lead to outcomes you want.

What’s missing in Sioux Falls as a whole is a sense of cohesion, a sense of shared identity, he said. This isn’t an easy thing to develop and requires a deeper level of conversation.

“We live in a complex ecosystem,” he said. “It’s an organism, this city, and we need to deal with its complexities.”

From downtown to the east, neighborhood feels strain of new demands on social services