Tools

Several weeks ago while checking out the latest discussions at Wayne Senville’s Planning Commissioners Journal, my eye was drawn to the headline: “Plannerisms we can do without!”

Why is it, I’ve wondered, that planners and a myriad of other professionals rely on their own ingrown jargon to communicate with the rest of the world?

And, professional jargon aside, have you ever noticed that the more formal or professional the situation, the less direct the language? It’s almost that simple.

In a room filled with artwork, news clippings and photos, interested citizens spent the evening of November 15th celebrating Starksboro’s Art & Soul Civic Engagement project, which used art and storytelling to identify and enhance the community’s shared values.

The event, hosted in Bristol, Vermont’s Town Hall, aimed to share the stories and successes of the project, thank the key movers-and-shakers, acknowledge valuable partnerships, and inspire other communities to start their own creative community explorations.

Photo: Workshop participants take advantage of Belfast’s public art chairs while doing fieldwork.

Heart & Soul Community Planning is rooted in the idea that people share common values when it comes to what makes their cities and towns unique. Although the language people use may be similar across communities, the specifics of what people mean by that language can be quite different from place to place.

So how do you get beyond nebulous conversations about “sense of community” to a shared understanding of the specifics of your town? You get on the ground and figure it out.

Sick of news tethered to corporate advertisers? Of mainstream cultural and music programing? Tired of listening only to your statewide NPR affiliate? Want to get the word out about events in your town? Maybe share your quirky taste in music and the arts? Or stir up debate and discussion?

Learn more about low-power FM radio (LPFM) and start your own local station.

In a rare move that wrested some control from high-power corporate communications interests, the US Congress last December voted to open more bandwidth to low-power FM stations, and President Obama signed the Local Community Radio Act into law in January.

LPFM frequencies sometimes reach only a few miles out, but non-commercial, locally owned stations can pack a punch, opening the airwaves to citizens in rural towns and urban neighborhoods—anyone who has a voice and a message has a seat behind the mic.

On airplanes I prefer window seats because of the view. Most of the time I have the clouds and distant landscape to myself, but when we start coming in for a landing, the other passengers join me in gazing down at the sights below. Everyone, it seems, has something to look for.

For me it’s the settlement patterns: open fields and agriculture here; houses there; industrial areas over there; stores and malls and football stadiums; and then finally the sprouting rectangles of downtown.

From that vantage point you feel so powerful, so influential. It’s as if you could reach down and move things around like pieces on a game board. You could tend the place like a garden, carefully planting new seeds of houses in neat rows, or transplanting sprouted stores to a new location next to the flowering apartments. What kind of garden would that make? What would it be like to live there?

Now you can actually find out.

Visit any local planning office and you’ll find an abundance of plans addressing housing, transportation, open space, economic development, etc. These issues are important building blocks of community planning and development, but do they really express what makes our communities special? Did the process of creating them tap into a shared community vision? Did that process help people take action and achieve tangible results?

If we are to fight off the spread of “Anywhere, USA” and help people take ownership of the future of their towns, we need a planning process that embeds community values in decision-making.

So, what are community values? They are what people care about in their community—the customs, characteristics and places that create a town’s unique identity. They are what connect people to their community and to each other. They are a community’s heart and soul.

As a local government Planner, I never had the time to research and find new ways of communicating with the public, much less creating a two-way communication channel.

Even though I knew there had to be a better way to let people know about citywide policy updates, I often resorted to using the same old public notice with the same formal message broadcasted to everyone in the city. Then I’d prepare for the disappointment when the same five people showed up to the meeting.

I always knew there was a better way of understanding who makes up a community and that a public notice could be designed to actually speak to citizens. With a specific but meaningful message delivered in the right way, more people would recognize that the issues in question really mattered to them, and as a result, show interest and participate in a much more democratic way.

On April 18, 2011 the Orton Family Foundation issued its second Request for Proposals seeking four new communities to undertake and evolve Heart & Soul Community Planning.

We selected our first round of experimental projects in 2008 as part of a $10 million Heart & Soul initiative, and have been working ever since with Damariscotta and Biddeford, ME, Victor, ID, Golden, CO and Starksboro, VT.

Our work is predicated on the belief that if a community initiates engagement based on what people value about their place (instead of in response to a crisis) and insists on citizen-led (instead of developer- or official-led) thinking and action, then the community will make wiser, more enduring decisions about planning.