Community Visioning Programs

Processes and Outcomes

Norman Walzer, Gisele Hamm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136510878
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Community visioning is key in helping local public officials and community leaders create a flourishing future for their cities, and is essential for the effective planning and implementation of these strategies. Visioning involves collaborative goal setting to motivate actions – of planners, citizens, and officials – in order to design and carry out a strategic planning process for the successful development of the community.

The use of visioning since the 1980s has led to a wealth of information on the productivity of the paths it has taken. The contributors, all with experience working in the area, review the successes and failures of the strategies, and look at new innovations which are pushing the frontiers of community visioning.

This review of the development of visioning focuses on small and medium sized communities in North America. It aims to guide citizens, local leaders and planners on what strategies are best to help them revitalise their communities and ensure a prosperous future.

1

COMMUNITY VISIONING INITIATIVES

Norman Walzer and Gisele F. Hamm

City and local government leaders have struggled to manage almost unprecedented long-term changes in population and economic structure. Chicago lost an estimated 6.9 percent of its population between 2000 and 2010 and St. Louis lost an estimated 8.3 percent. Detroit lost 25 percent as residents relocated to more favorable climates, suburbs, or other locations in search of better employment. Advances in technology brought productivity increases in manufacturing that translated into fewer employees needed. The decline in numbers of jobs often meant population losses as residents moved away in search of better employment opportunities. In some instances, those remaining in the community now work in jobs at lower wages and this reduces spending in local businesses. Improvements in communications made offshore locations with lower wage rates more attractive even for some service industries, which further aggravated the setbacks in older urban centers with aging infrastructures.

Nationally, rural areas gained only 2.9 percent in population between 2000 and 2009 compared with 10.1 percent in metro areas and 13.1 percent in ex-urban areas (Gallardo, 2010). Many small and medium-sized cities, especially in the rural Midwest, experienced population declines as continued mechanization of agriculture reduced employment. In the past, these communities relied on agricultural related business to help bolster their main streets as well as provide an employment base for manufacturing and other industries.

Small communities were also affected by improvements in transportation and the growth of regional shopping centers. Regional centers compete with smaller communities as residents work and shop in larger cities. Youth, upon graduation from high school, left to either pursue higher education or moved to larger centers offering more and better employment opportunities. While this outmigration has occurred for many years, employment opportunities in small communities are no longer sufficiently competitive to cause them to return.

Increases in Internet access also force stores in smaller communities to compete with large national retail chains that offer a greater selection of merchandise at lower prices online. Two-wage earner families pressed for time can now purchase over the Internet with the merchandise delivered to their doorstep often with full rights to exchange. This scenario contributed to the job losses in small towns as downtown stores closed when the owners retired and moved away.

Demographic and economic changes forced local elected officials, community leaders, and business owners in small and medium-sized cities to seriously examine the future of their areas. These discussions are not limited to small isolated rural towns; medium-sized cities also experienced eroding employment and tax bases leading decision-makers to search for new development strategies. What the future will be in areas such as the Midwest has become a serious question for scholars and researchers as well as development practitioners (Longworth, 2008; Testa, 2008).

State and local policymakers respond to changing conditions in several ways. In some instances, community leaders, faced with an aging population and shrinking employment base, decide there is little that the community can do to revitalize the local economy and to avoid continued long-term declines. They may continue to pursue past development policies in the hopes of attracting a large manufacturing plant. The intense competition for these businesses, however, limits the chances of competing with larger communities for these plants.

Other communities take a different approach and assemble local leaders who launch efforts to control their future and find a strategy(ies) that could move them in a more positive direction. As far back as the 1980s, major economic setbacks raised the sense of urgency and led many to implement a strategic planning process with goals and strategies to pursue an agreed-upon vision (Ayres, 1990).

The term “visioning” has been used in a variety of ways in the planning literature. This has led to confusion about whether the term means the process of determining an agreed-upon future for a community or whether it involves a broader range of processes or activities that might be found in the business literature (Shipley & Michela, 2006; Strange & Mumford, 2005). Shipley (2002) provides an analysis of commonly-held views of visioning processes and examines the theoretical basis on which they are built. He tests the accuracy of the commonly-held perceptions by reviewing the professional literature, examining visioning statements and records of 40 communities in Canada, and exploring in-depth interviews with practitioners engaged in visioning processes. He finds support for several, but not all, of the common perceptions about visioning including that clear goals set in a visioning process can effectively motivate actions.

In this book, visioning is a participative process through which community leaders and residents examine past trends, identify potential alternatives for the future, and then build a consensus on a strategic action plan with follow-through. In essence, visioning is part of a community strategic planning endeavor designed to bring about change within the community and set a course for the future. Later discussions show that the specific purposes or topics in the programs differ but most contain common programmatic efforts including a visioning process.

This book examines ways in which mainly mid-size and small rural communities have approached a strategic visioning process to find goals and strategies that will revitalize their local economies. The visioning processes are participatory in that they assemble a broad-based group of residents to identify a future for the community and then find ways to move it in the desired directions. There is no one specific approach to the strategic visioning process and as subsequent chapters will show, practitioners have taken many directions in helping communities evaluate and pursue future options.

While the specific approaches used differ, the intent of the visioning exercise as part of strategic planning is to revitalize a community by helping residents identify new directions, often very different from the past, and mobilizing them to action. The intent of the visioning exercise is to find a new future where the community can prosper in a different economic scenario and/or environment. Success with these planning exercises requires that participants see future opportunities, design an action plan to move in these directions, and then organize for results (Richards & Dalbey, 2006).

Community Visioning Approaches and Uses

The use of visioning in planning efforts has grown in popularity since the mid-1980s and was an integral part of many planning efforts by the early 1990s (Shipley & Michela, 2006) with the publication of Take Charge in 1990 (Ayres et al., 1990), and a Guide to Community Visioning by the Oregon Chapter of the American Planning Association in 1993 (Oregon Chapter, 1993). By this time, the use of visioning approaches was popular as a way to engage residents in the overall planning process although there has been substantial debate regarding a clear definition of the process and its specific uses.

Part of the disagreement about visioning stemmed from the adaptation of the strategic planning process from private agencies where a vision was set by leaders and then communicated to subordinates. Staff and employees were involved in determining the vision for a company or enterprise but the company owner or manager had the main responsibility. This process differs markedly from the participatory procedures used in communities where residents are asked to find a collective vision that they can support and pursue (Shipley & Michela, 2006).

While community strategic visioning programs became common, as with other planning activities, they did not always lead to substantial programmatic outcomes for a variety of reasons. The visions may be too broad without sufficient clarity to be meaningful. In other cases, they may hinge on projects of interest mainly to a few key leaders. Turnover in local personnel can sometimes lead to loss of interest in working on projects required to accomplish the desired outcomes. In still other cases, specific projects in the action plan do not turn out to be viable, causing participants to lose interest in the endeavor.

One can argue that the process which a community goes through in determining a vision and/or deciding on an action plan is the most important part of the planning exercise. It builds social capital, identifies development opportunities for a community, and encourages residents to think seriously about the future of their area and become involved in the process. This capacity building aspect may enable a community to address other issues more effectively in the future.

The Take Charge model laid the groundwork that many programs used. The model was implemented by numerous local agencies and was adopted by the Cooperative Extension System across the US as a way to work with public officials and community leaders. Take Charge focused on three main questions: Where are we now? Where do we want to be? and How will we get there? Essentially, the program used a problem-solving approach asking residents to identify deficiencies and then incorporate remedies in the action plan phase. However, creating an agreed-upon vision of the future for the community was crucial in this strategic planning effort. The effort generated a manual with materials that users could readily incorporate into their work with community leaders.

Many states had experimented with the Take Charge model and adapted it to local conditions. Some of these efforts across the US were examined in the mid-90s to assess their outcomes. The programs reviewed were seen as making positive contributions to the community change process and helped local leaders find directions for their communities (Walzer, 1996). Several key issues affecting outcomes were identified in this study based on surveys of program providers and community participants in 10 states. Especially important are the pre-conditions that are necessary within the community for successful outcomes. Communities with high social capital are more likely to achieve successful outcomes (Woods, 1996). Also considered important are a careful assessment of local conditions and the potential options for community engagement, community ownership, reliable data on which to evaluate outcomes, and exposure to new information that challenges traditional ways of thinking by participants.

Visioning program participants surveyed in the 1996 study reported continued support for efforts launched in the visioning programs as critical to success (Green & Deller, 1995). This support can involve training for local leaders but also include building local networks within the community to help bring about changes identified in the programs. This is where the resources of agencies sponsoring the visioning programs become especially important. Agencies with access to a broad range of educational and training programs have a distinct advantage in helping communities achieve the goals set in visioning efforts.

Finally, especially in rural communities, visioning programs faced several challenges such as resistance to change, breaking down traditional approaches to problem-solving, cultivating spontaneous talent in the community, fear of failure, and understanding or working with new decision-making structures that are replacing traditional hierarchies (Kline, 1996).

In 2001, a team of university personnel and practitioners (Green et al., 2001) updated the Take Charge procedures placing more emphasis on documenting outcomes and follow-up materials for providers to use in delivering the program. The revisions also incorporated an asset-based approach with strategies that build more on skills, talents, and capacity within the community. The resulting product, Vision to Action: Take Charge Too, not only updated the initial program, it also broadened the topics addressed such as land use and work force issues as well as learning from examples of successful endeavors. The main questions became: What do we want to preserve? What do we want to change? and What do we want to create? In essence, the program had shifted to a more action-oriented focus to increase its overall effectiveness.

One of the attractive features of the strategic visioning exercises is their adaptability in addressing the unique characteristics of communities that participate in the exercises. Recent efforts have analyzed the language used in community narratives involved in designing a community vision (Steffensmeier, 2010). This approach incorporates principles used in Appreciative Inquiry but adds a detailed analytical approach to understanding how participants express their feelings about future options available to the community to gain insight into the change process.

Overview of Book

The following chapters were compiled to review the types of community visioning programs currently in use across the US, determine their effectiveness, and explore innovative modifications or variations that have been introduced. The authors were selected based on their experiences with delivering and/or studying the programs but also because they, in many ways, are pushing the frontiers in bringing about community change. The discussion begins with a broad analysis of the basic components in visioning processes, followed by a survey of programs currently in use, then moves to discussions of ways to measure outcomes from the processes, and finally examines approaches or techniques introduced in recent years.

The main reason for launching a local visioning program is to adjust the directions in which a community is heading. Bringing about change requires a major commitment on the part of not only local leaders but also decision-makers and residents throughout the community. Research on the importance and effectiveness of citizen advisory boards, for instance, suggests that they have a positive effect even though some municipal officials did not feel they had the skills needed to facilitate organized discussions with these groups (Rebori, 2011; Mann & Barnes, 2010). This finding reinforces a potential for external agencies to assist in setting an agenda and identifying ways to bring about change. There is ample evidence that communit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Preface
• 1 Community Visioning Initiatives
• 2 Essential Ingredients in Successful Visioning
• 3 Structures, Approaches, Stakeholders, And Program Outcomes
• 4 Ready to Vision?: Evidence from Social Capital Assessments in Four Minnesota Towns
• 5 A Framework for Teaching and Implementing Community Visioning
• 6 The Importance of Intangible Outcomes
• 7 Building Solidarity and Agency Through a Participatory Visioning Process
• 8 Appreciative Inquiry as a Visioning Process
• 9 Strategic Doing for Community Development
• 10 Breakthrough Solutions: A New Paradigm for Strategic Visioning?
• Index