City of Salem, MIG, and GreenWorks Produce Video for Virtual Open House

Like everything else right now, public engagement looks different during the COVID-19 pandemic. It takes adaptation and some creativity.

Graphic orienting the park

City staff interview

Drone tour with mini-map

For the City of Salem, it posed a challenge from the very beginning to the Cultural Landscape Management Plan in progress for Bush’s Pasture Park and Deepwood Gardens. With the kind of large, in-person meetings needed to effectively listen to the community out of the question, the team had to come up with something different.

GreenWorks and MIG were selected to assist the City to, among other things, equip the City to engage the public. The new reality presented the team with an opportunity to do something they usually wouldn’t have done: We put much of the information that would have been shared at the in-person meeting into a video.

Bush’s Pasture Park and Deepwood Gardens are important public spaces at the heart of the City of Salem. They offer Salemites an impressive variety of amenities: gardens, sports facilities, three playgrounds, picnic areas, two museums, natural areas, an art center, and even a Soap Box Derby track.

This wide variety of uses is an asset for the City, but it also poses challenges. Users expect different things from the park, and sometimes these intentions can come into conflict. The Bush and Deepwood Cultural Landscape Management Plan seeks to alleviate some of that conflict by creating a plan to manage these public spaces in a way that best serves the public.

The video contains interviews with city staff providing context for the project and a behind-the-scenes look at what they do to maintain the park, footage of the park recorded by a drone, motion graphics orienting the audience throughout the tour, and a demonstration of how to sign up for email alerts when surveys are posted to the City’s website.

The first open house began August 18th and runs through August 30th.

If you live in Salem and want to share your thoughts with the team, you can visit the virtual open house in both Spanish and English.