Cornerstones Blog

Note: This post is section two of a five-part series highlighting excerpts from the study Stewarding the Future of Our Communities by Steven C. Ames, the Foundation’s 2012 Craig Byrne Fellow. This paper addresses the challenges of stewarding local community engagement and planning in order to ensure its ongoing success and impact. Featuring case studies of five exemplary community engagement and planning experiences in small towns and cities around the country, Ames highlights specific stewardship approaches the communities have used to carry the success of their efforts far into the future. This blog post examines how communities translate visions into action.

It probably goes without saying that a vision or plan that is filed on a shelf and not achieved can easily negate all of the energy and effort that went into its creation. Similarly, without an organized, deliberate implementation effort, the most dynamic community vision or plan probably will not be achieved. The implementation that follows on the heels of a community visioning or planning initiative is often less visible or exciting than the community’s initial engagement, but it is when the rubber hits the road.

Hillsboro, OR is a case in point: The 2020 action plan clearly charts the prescribed implementation of the community’s 20-year vision by its twenty-three lead partner organizations. Most recently updated in 2010 and now in its third iteration, the Hillsboro action plan currently contains 180 actions, 35 of them created during its last update. By the end of 2011, fully 85% of those actions were already under way or implemented. In the case of Hillsboro, such an approach to implementation closely fits one of the community’s core values: getting the job done.

Hillsboro 2020 conducts an annual lead partner survey to monitor and track how its 23 lead partner organizations are progressing with the implementation of their designated actions. The project also has used the Lead Partner Assistance Subcommittee (LPAS), part of its Vision Implementation Committee (VIC), to provide one-on-one assistance to lead partner organizations, discussing their implementation challenges and assisting in their success.

What has resulted is a well-oiled machine, as well as a program of activities and events that have established a regular cycle—or community rhythm—for implementing, reporting on, and refining Hillsboro’s vision and action plan.

One of the planning experts interviewed for the stewardship study, Steve Faust, would add that the key to such success lies in partnerships. “It really makes sense to go the route of a community owned plan where more than one organization is charged with implementation, because these days no city can achieve the goals set out in its land use plan alone, or any plan for that matter,” he says. “Everybody needs to participate if these goals are to be achieved.”

Twelve years into its vision and action plan, Hillsboro 2020 has established an impressive record in achieving its vision. In fact, the very structure of Hillsboro’s vision implementation approach has created a system that helps steward its vision, sustaining the community’s capacity to realize its values and visions over time.

READ THE STUDY >>

Note: This post is section one of a five-part series highlighting excerpts from the study Stewarding the Future of Our Communities by Steven C. Ames, the Foundation’s 2012 Craig Byrne Fellow. This paper addresses the challenges of stewarding local community engagement and planning in order to ensure its ongoing success and impact. Featuring case studies of five exemplary community engagement and planning experiences in small towns and cities around the country, Ames highlights specific stewardship approaches the communities have used to carry the success of their efforts far into the future. This blog post examines how communities keep residents engaged and participating in important local decision-making. 

The ongoing engagement of a community’s residents is the lifeline of its community plan and is essential to its successful future. No vision or plan, however eloquently stated or thoughtfully constructed, will endure long enough to be realized if the townspeople are not continually engaged in its achievement.

Beginning in the mid-2000s, the Duluth Local Initiative Support Corporation (Duluth LISC) and its At Home in Duluth collaborative, a program focused on five inner-city neighborhoods, intensified their efforts in West Duluth, an older, established neighborhood in need of revitalization. Since then, more than 40 major initiatives addressing housing, income, economic activity, education, and health have been implemented, resulting in a catalogue of achievements and a reenergized sense of community.

The death of Maurice Sendak this week has gotten me thinking about why his books have made such an impact, and why as a nation we are registering his passing as a significant cultural loss.

I think, in large part, it’s because his books are not about a world in which there is obvious good or obvious evil, where the bad guys get outwitted and it all turns out okay in the end. His heroes are often misbehaving misfits of one sort or another who do what they can to escape the confines of their particular reality.

In short, he writes from a place of difference or disadvantage. We are invited to sympathize, and even root for, those least acceptable to society. For children, who are so often misunderstood, there is something very gratifying about this.

Note: This post is a brief excerpt from the study Stewarding the Future of Our Communities by Steven C. Ames, the Foundation’s 2012 Craig Byrne Fellow 

How does a community remain connected to its core values, those widely shared beliefs and ideals that define the community, who it is, and what is important to its residents? How does it ensure that important future decisions and directions are aligned with its values?

Core values provide the touchstone and foundation for any community’s planning and engagement effort, because, in the language of the Foundation, they connect to the community’s heart and soul.

According to Doug Zenn, a public participation specialist affiliated with the International Association for Public Participation: “Values are essential in finding common ground upon which further conversations can be built. The outcomes of any planning process always work best when they are aligned with core values. The more contentious a public involvement process, the more we rely on up-front identification of values.”

When I go traveling to another country, I always take a book that helps me get in the right mindset. Oftentimes I choose fiction that takes place in that particular country. But this time as I packed for Italy, I made room in my suitcase for a fabulous collection of Paul Bowles collected writings entitled Travels.

While none of this book takes place in Italy, focusing more on Tangiers, where he lived for most of his life, and Morocco, in which he traveled extensively, it’s a book about exploring foreign lands. Bowles regales the reader with hilarious tales of near disasters, describes wonderful characters he meets along the way, and reflects on what it means to be traveling in a country other than one’s own.

In a re-published piece entitled “Windows on the Past” written in 1957 about his travels in Europe, Bowles argues that Americans travel to Europe to regain their connections to the past. We get lost, he claims, in the vast American melting pot, in a society always transforming and remaking itself, focused more on techniques and gadgets than something deeper and more meaningful. So we go to Europe seeking something else, something he labels “culture”.

This post is the fourteenth in a month-long series hosted by PlaceMatters on the impressive diversity of participatory decision-making tools that communities can use for land use plans, transportation plans, sustainability plans, or any other type of community plan. The series covers the gamut, from low-tech to high-tech, web-based to tactile, art-based to those based on scenario planning tools, and more. Along with PlaceMatters, we welcome your feedback and would love to hear about the participatory design strategies that you’ve found to be the most useful.

Everyone has a story to tell about his or her community. It doesn’t matter whether you are young or old, native or newcomer; we all have personal experiences that connect us to our city or town. Stories tell us a lot about what we value most—the customs, characteristics and special places that make our community unique.

There are many examples of how stories have been used to understand community, such as Why Here Why Now or Saving the Sierra, and there is also great potential to apply personal story in community planning efforts.

The Orton Family Foundation’s Heart & Soul Community Planning approach uses personal stories to identify what people value in their community. We rely on personal stories for three key reasons:

I was recently chatting with Lyman Orton, founder of the Orton Family Foundation, about the difficulties of describing Heart & Soul community planning.

The Foundation’s Heart & Soul Principles describe the process as tapping local wisdom through broad engagement, articulating shared values, and taking action to enhance those values.

But how do we delve into what that means specifically in a community? We live in such a charged ideological and political environment that it can be difficult to find words to describe a community process that doesn’t feed into political divides.

There’s no doubt that Boston sports fans are a community. For every season and every sport complete strangers come together to support their beloved teams. Stadiums and arenas undulate with greens, blacks and golds, navys, and the iconic reds. All Boston sports fans revere the names Bird, Orr, and Williams just as much as today’s Brady, Garnett, and Pedroia.

And like any community, this one has its own legends rituals, heroes, and adversaries celebreated in numberous museums, books and movies. While sports communities have obvious benefits like creating camaraderie that crosses formidable social lines, there is something amiss. The fervent and vocal expression of animosity towards a shared enemy struck a chord, especially in light of my recent experience with Orton’s community work.