NobleFest Pop-Up Event
When: Friday, May 17th from 6:00 - 8:00PM
Where: Noble Elementary School
(1293 Ardoon St., Cleveland Heights, OH 44121)
Members of the consultant team attended the annual NobleFest event to speak with attendees about Safe Streets 4 Cleveland Heights. The event provided a wonderful opportunity to include voices of all ages from the Noble neighborhood.
Located at the Noble Elementary School, the event attracted children, parents, and nearby residents to enjoy activities, music, and great food. NobleFest is organized by Noble Neighbors and is one event during the weekend long We Are Noble annual celebration. Thanks to the gracious event hosts, Safe Streets 4 Cleveland Heights was able to setup a pop-up engagement station to gather feedback from community members.
Engagement activities used at the pop-up station included a mapping exercise and comment cards. The large map of Cleveland Heights invited people to mark the locations of their main street safety concerns with a colorful dot. The image of the map below shows the dots marked during the NobleFest event combined with the previous public Open House event held at the Cleveland Heights Community Center. Since many people who attended NobleFest live nearby, the safety concerns marked on the map during NobleFest were concentrated in the Noble neighborhood. By including more participation from Noble area community members, the map better represents the geographic distribution of safety concerns across the entire City of Cleveland Heights.
In addition to the Safety Concerns map, attendees were also encouraged to share safety priorities in their own words. Participants wrote their responses to three different prompts printed on comment cards. The three comment card prompts included:
My street safety concern is…
My idea for improving street safety is…
I want safe street for…
Responses to the comment cards were displayed during the event to encourage passersby to read the ideas and encourage others to participate. Fortunately, enough people wanted to participate that they completely filled up the display board.
“My Street Safety Concern Is... Cars speeding through Cleveland Heights Blvd as a cut-through”
Both the mapping exercise and comment cards were engagement tools also used during the first public Open House 1.0 event. So, the feedback received at NobleFest will be transcribed and included in the documentation of public engagement data. Locations of safety concerns marked on the printed maps will be added to the online PublicCoordinate map. Key themes and meaningful comparisons between data gathered from all engagement activities will be presented as the planning process continues.
On behalf of the project team, we want to thank all community members who shared their ideas at NobleFest. We plan to meet people at additional pop-up events across Cleveland Heights neighborhoods in the near future. Stay tuned for announcements of the dates for the upcoming mobile walk, neighborhood bike ride, and the second public event. The best way to receive updates is to subscribe to the Safe Streets 4 Cleveland Heights mailing list—just click on the button below!