Visioning
Summary
Visioning is a community engagement process that helps people to articulate or define the future they want for their communities. Visioning is often completed in conjunction with a master planning initiative and often looks decades ahead.
Tool Description
Community visioning is defined very differently by each community or organization undertaking it. Components of a vision often include goals for population growth and development; targeted land uses in different parts of a community; ways to attract diversity; differentiation of wanted and unwanted growth and development; and new ideas for community services, institutions, or identity.
Projects vary significantly, but a typical process would include public announcements to initiate the idea, a committee to design and run the visioning process, a series of meetings or surveys to gain feedback from the community, drafting of a vision statement or plan, review of the plan by the community, and finally multiple stages of revision, further review, and discussions about how to proceed.
Stages may be facilitated by professional consultants, and the process may include other events such as community festivals or creative arts-based and participatory tools.
“The Oregon Model” for visioning was developed by Steven Ames, one of the top planners and consultants in the community visioning field. He builds a visioning process around key questions/steps:
- Where are we now? (assessment, values)
- Where are we going? (trends analysis)
- Where do we want to be? (visioning)
- How do we get there? (action planning)
- Are we getting there? (measuring progress - post-visioning and implementation)
Summary of Costs
$100-999
Associated Costs
- Consulting
- Facilitation
- Project Management
Strengths
- Visioning processes allow communities to think farther ahead than most planning statutes require.
- Visioning brings the community together for discussion and consideration of strengths and needs.
- Visioning processes can be easily adapted to different timelines, project types, budgets, and creative engagement methods.
- Visioning allows people to "think big" and step out of the the trap of focusing on small details and stagnant politics.
Limitations
- There may be no clear outcome, specific means of implementation and/or little thought surrounding the definition of a vision.
- It can be difficult to achieve consensus on a vision.
- The product may not represent the community’s values if the process is not carefully planned and executed and includes broad participation.
- A well-run visioning process usually requires significant time, resources, and professional expertise.
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Submitted By:
svannostrand
Last Updated: August 16, 2012, 12:15 pm
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